As a proud Virginia alumna, this is a disgrace.

"Many of the students facing discipline and marginalization are themselves Jewish. They don’t need protection from their own political views – they need protection from institutions that would force them to choose between their Jewish identity and their political conscience."

One of the happiest updates I’ve written since I started following this story. 12 students back in status and maybe more to come. Across the country, students are saying their SEVIS is back. www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...

Also… when you start firing the ~volunteers~ surely you can drop the pretense that this is about efficiency. 🙄

Rubio says he is deporting students for antisemitism, but its a cover for hime to pursue attacks on higher education and immigrant students. The fact that he launders his views with actual antisemites gives the game away. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-attack...

There we go.

“Research & teaching has been chilled by Trump's attempts to coerce. If he can threaten to withhold billions unless we stop teaching about DEI, he can make the same threat on teaching science or anything else. Higher ed cannot freely exist w/threats like this.” - Kirsten Weld, president AAUP-Harvard

Also taught American politics for years and can't believe we're at the place where we're imploring Congress to care about Article I of the Constitution. Yet here we are.

If you’re a North Carolinian, you can check whether your name or the names of anyone you know is on the list of the 65K voters whose votes may be tossed. You could have an opportunity to fix it if so. thegriffinlist.com

Gonna keep saying this: In the 1840s, Southerners insisted that they could kidnap any person they alleged was a slave without any state or federal process. This turned even minimal process into resistance and raised the salience of the issue, which radicalized a bunch of people against slavery.

Endless shakedowns and ransom notes. Universities will hang together or hang separately.

@crampell.bsky.social: It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim to be combating antisemitism while coddling avowed antisemites. Multiple senior Trump aides have embraced the antisemitic “great replacement theory” and delivered Nazi salutes. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Will this make waves? Will this be addressed? Will the media, politicians, movement leaders seize on this? Because during the Trump and Biden administrations, very little energy was focused on the *mechanics* of democracy. Which is how we got here. Nothing worked an no one tried to fix it.

Why a few hundred university presidents haven’t been jointly making similar points for the past month (and of course they should have for years) is beyond me. If not now, when?

The fascists don’t just want people to be afraid of dissenting. They also want you to feel hopeless and cynical, convinced change can’t happen. They want you to just take care of your own life because the greater world is too much. They want you to feel this precisely because things *can* change.

All of higher education is in the crosshairs www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/o...

If you’re protesting this weekend, know your rights.

Why elite institutions MUST speak out.

I don't take a back seat to anyone on the subject of anti-semitism. Jews are being used here as a fig leaf to advance a broader attack on universities and higher learning. Trump wants to bring Universities to heel and obedience. Jews are just a convenient cudgel here and just as disposable.

the fact that people are being disappeared in the name of ""preventing antisemitism"" by a christian nationalist administration is making me nauseated and horrified in ways i cant even begin to explain

From @aaup.bsky.social on FB

Accusations of antisemitism are going to be the tip of the spear for much of the fascist takeover of the United States. Those who care about antisemitism must vociferously push back. They want us to be complicit so they have a justification for their actions as well as have a group to blame it on.

Colorado last year *required* jails to set up voting stations so people behind bars could vote — a first for any state ever. And how'd it go? Fantastic. In 2022, 231 people in CO jails voted. But in 2024, 2,300+ in CO jails voted. That's a nearly tenfold jump. boltsmag.org/jail-voting-...

This is a blatant violation of the 1st Amendment but a lot of cowards in academia will use this as an excuse to crack down on campus protest.

This is open to advocates of all backgrounds, not only lawyers.

None of us can be sure what will “work.” You try multiple things and find your way in. Read some histories of the Civil Rights Movement by those who participated. They were never “sure” of what would work. Some campaigns fizzled out. But persistence, creativity, determination, and focus were key.

"I just don't understand how our country is like this now, this has never been who we are." 1/x

What's at stake as Washington yanks research grant funding? Check out some Pitt-based projects in medicine, science and social work that may be in limbo www.publicsource.org/research-fun...

Where are our social work organizations??

I truly think people don’t realize how many universities and colleges — especially public ones — may shut down if restrictions on and withholding of federal funding persists for even one presidency We are facing the demolition of American higher education

Rufo laid it all out there. They essentially want to return to the days where Harvard and other elite schools were limited to wealthy white elites and everyone one else was locked out.

Attention all college/university administrators and general counsel: here, legal analysis grounding current diversity programs firmly in federal law, demonstrating the illegality of executive orders to the contrary. app.box.com/s/2me4mszr6p...

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Our report “Affirmative Action in Higher Education: The Racial Justice Landscape after the SFFA Cases” lays out the law as determined by the Supreme Court—not the misguidance of the Trump Administration. naacpldf.org/wp-content/upl…

Don’t know if anyone else read the letter and caught that it contradicts the majority opinion in SFFA, which allows discussion of racial identities in essays to be used as a factor in admissions. They’re trying to rewrite an already very conservative SCOTUS opinion www.ed.gov/media/docume...

A reminder that "Dear Colleague" letters do not carry the force of law. These are fundamental test cases for universities and other institutions to refuse to comply with the unjust demands of the current administration.

Here's @penamerica.bsky.social's statement condemning last night's "Dear Colleague" letter from the Department of Education, threatening to withhold federal funds from educational institutions that engage in DEI programming, training, or other activities. pen.org/press-releas...

“Not only are our narratives about Holocaust suffering narratives of Christian redemptive suffering, but our Holocaust memorial sites have become Christian sites of instant redemption.” @jh_swanson wrote a great piece on Vance-Musk in Dachau-Auschwitz, & the koshering function of Holocaust sites:

Professor who teaches African American studies here. If your school eliminates or bans it, I will personally host free zoom sessions, provide resources, or answer questions for students, parents/guardians, or teachers who are interested in learning or discussing African American studies.

Instead of "don't cut our funding," our message should be: hands off higher ed. You want to restrict what professors can say in the classroom? Hands off. You want to ban diversity offices? Hands off. You want to cut our research funding? Hands off. Hands. Off. Higher. Ed.

Section 504 has been essential for my kid - and so many of our kids’ friends - to receive accommodations that enable them to thrive in their school environments. It’s already hard enough to access these supports - what we need is MORE enforcement, not elimination, of these protections

Important read 👇

Anyone who has studied the fascism, violence and pogroms of the post-reconstruction era of America would know that white humiliation / Black progress has long been this country’s ticking time bomb. The historical parallels are 1920s Oklahoma, not 1930s Germany. But this history is often buried.

From Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University: slate.com/life/2025/02...

Here’s a strategy: 1) establish the frames, what problems will these changes cause, how will they impact communities; 2) inspire people to use those frames to tell their own stories of their families or communities are impacted; 3) amplify those stories.

I'll note again that it would have been pretty good if universities stood up for themselves and the value of education and research when they were under attack the last several years by these same forces, rather than folding like cheap tables.

Research universities are often the largest employers in their region. They are often the primary health care providers to communities. This funding shift will not only reduce US research leadership, it will put working people out of work and reduce healthcare access.

All this futzing with NIH research funding sure would be lousy for a region where the largest employer ranks third in NIH funding nationally. Say, what’s this?

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