This is not a “duel,” which suggests both sides are equally culpable, but the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s ideological war on Harvard and higher education. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/u...

We need to flood them with letters now. Write today!

another case of faculty defending the university when the university won’t defend itself.

New at PB: @kirstenweld.bsky.social on why, 50 years after Franco's death, Latin America will never forget the Spanish Civil War.

How did the @nytimes.com editors let this sentence appear? "Critics have likened Mr. Trump’s approach to extortion, while others have chalked it up as a cost of doing business with this administration." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

Santiago Uribe, brother of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, was yesterday handed a 28-year prison sentence for forming a death squad at his ranch in the 1990s. I wrote about the case in 2018. nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/colombi...

When the world is on fire… review a novel about the world being on fire?

This is spot-on. The UVA "deal" might be the worst/most dangerous (so far). With the help of UVA's leadership, Trump coerced a leading U.S. university to foreswear all efforts (including 100% lawful measures) to achieve diversity. A betrayal of our values. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Very simple lesson here: Faculty governance will defend academic values, like academic freedom, even when it is unpopular. Political appointees who serve as Regents will blow with the ideological winds, which in Texas are anti-speech.

In this new @usnews.com article, five law profs (including me) with vastly different views on most issues explain why colleges should reject Trump's "Compact" with higher ed, for both constitutional and policy reasons: www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...

WE WON!!! The US District Court for the Northern District of California has issued a preliminary injunction in AAUP et al v. Trump et al (the wall to wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of Title VI to reshape the University of California system. Read the order here:

BREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!! We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org

The intro to Judge Rita Lin's 76-page opinion holding that the Trump admin's pressure campaign against the University of California system is coercive and retaliatory in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The NYT has used some version of this sentence in multiple stories about the Columbia settlement but it is highly misleading. Yes, the Columbia settlement included that pledge, but it also included multiple terms that “dictate academic matters.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

The #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout: Humanities majors killed on the job market 1) Mamdani- Africana Studies 2) Spanberger -French 3) Sherill - Global History

Important new report out from AAUP & MESA, “The data…offers a detailed account of how landmark civil rights legislation – and particularly Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – has become a primary tool to restrict speech on campus.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“The data, compiled by the Middle East Studies Association and the American Association of University Professors and relying on publicly available records, offers a detailed account of how landmark civil rights legislation…has become a primary tool to restrict speech on campus.”

Harvard AAUP's Ryan Enos explains the importance of colleges working together to combat Trump’s attempts to shake down universities. #defendhighered @ryanenos.bsky.social

W/ @genevievelakier.bsky.social, the @aaup.org today released a letter to the Offices of the General Counsel at US colleges & universities. We detail why the Compact violates the Constitution & urge that no one signs it. www.aaup.org/sites/defaul...

🚨🚨🚨 And THREE stood up! Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact. When we join together and fight back, WE WIN! No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent. LET’S GO! #DefendHigherEd @aaup-penn.bsky.social

Harvard's AAUP chapter got profiled in the latest issue of Academe magazine! We've had a truly wild year in the eye of the higher-ed hurricane, and you can read a little about it here: www.aaup.org/academe/issu... @aaup.org @academemagazine.bsky.social

PENN IS OUT! That means both institutions that signed prior agreements with the administration have said no. We're at 3 rejections. I told y'all once the second one hit yesterday, the clock started for the rest. www.thedp.com/article/2025...

Their new plan to punish universities: force the IRS criminal division to find cause to strip them of their tax-exempt status. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Brown rejected the compact! www.brown.edu/sites/defaul...

We now enter the most dangerous phase, but also the one with the greatest opportunity. The U.S. has thousands of colleges, some run by red state governments, so it's too much to hope that NONE sign up for this federal takeover. But it matters WHO signs up. The administration is taking a risk.

@mit.edu has done an incredibly important service to the nation by being willing to be the first school to reject the administration's "compact." President Kornbluth focuses—and she's right—on the principle that "scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone."

MIT's response to the Trump admin's proposed "compact" is excellent and should be a model for other universities. orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

sign and share and join AAUP actionnetwork.org/petitions/tr...

Game theory, democratic theory, feminist theory, the civil rights movement, and more all agree on this: unite for independence or lose. Great piece by Henry Farrell

I wrote about an under-appreciated aspect of AAUP v. Rubio. It is the first case of the Trump Era to explicitly identify and reject the primary and most pernicious form of speech suppression employed by this Administration: Chill. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/aaup...

“Figuring out what to do isn’t something any of us needs to do alone.” My dear colleague Bernhard Nickel on the importance of solidarity and bravery (and AAUP!) in these grim times: www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

The last word on the poisoned chalice that is “the compact.” balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

Ok I'm back and buckle up. This is going to be a 🧵. First I want to make sure people understand the most important thing about the proposed "compact" (perhaps better described as a poisoned chalice): The enforcement mechanism.

“This is extortion, plain and simple. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of higher education.. requires that every university reject it…The only solution is solidarity and collective action against this effort at federal control over higher education.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

"The federal government should not, under any circumstances, dictate who goes to college, what can be researched, or learned, and what can or can’t be the subject of critical academic inquiry." - AFT President @rweingarten.bsky.social & @aaup.org President @proftwolf.bsky.social

Excellent that Judge Young's ruling has spurred journalists to dig into the trial transcripts. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

The admin’s efforts to get universities to agree to a list of demands in exchange for preferential access to federal funding isn’t just “troubling” as Ted Mitchell, prez of the @aceducation.bsky.social says in this article; it looks blatantly unconstitutional.🧵 www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

Ok so this is bad but for complicated reasons. Substantively, much of it is terrible explicitly: the anti-trans stuff, the requirement to use force on student protesters, cap on foreign students, content-based "screening" of foreign students, surveillance of foreign students. But some of (cont🧵)

University presidents it’s time for a united front. I mean, it’s past time. What are you going to do.

WE WON: "This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall w/in..this district court squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in US..have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.”"

Our little AAUP chapter went 2/2 vs. Trump! Noem and Rubio…misused the sweeping powers of their offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their 1st Am protected political speech. They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizens…

Judge SLAMS the masking of federal agents in ruling finding Trump admin violated pro-Palestine protesters' rights: "To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

In this remarkable opinion, Judge Young concludes it violates the First Amendment for government to deport people because it dislikes their speech, and hopes to chill others from engaging in similar speech.

A good thread on the AAUP v. Rubio opinion and what it means, starring Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the nation's top diplomat, whom the judge resoundingly rebuked.

NEW: A federal judge excoriated Trump in a blistering decision calling the president's efforts to deport pro-Palestinian academics illegal.

Trump-backed targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists for deportation is unlawful, US judge rules reut.rs/42ikvOq