West Point in the mix of academic freedom: apnews.com/article/west...

Under pressure from Texas government officials, Angelo State University in Texas is banning all discussion or mention of the existence of trans people along with banning the LGBTQ pride flag from campus and forced misgendering of trans people. conchoobserver.com/2025/09/19/a...

Hahaha Stephen Miller read Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner's book. Congratulations, guys, you told him he could ignore international law and now he's figured out he can ignore the Constitution too. What did you expect?

It would be HILARIOUS how the cancellation of SCOTUS clerkships would scramble the entire elite legal hierarchy. Worth doing for that alone.

Ominous. “Everyone agreed that the chilling effect was real and they all complained that funding from deep-pocketed liberal donors had dried up, making it almost impossible to organize a healthy opposition to Trump—especially considering…his eagerness to sic the Justice Department on his foes.”

NEW: Hours before a new entry ban is supposed to go into effect, the federal government officially acknowledges for the first time that the restrictions do NOT apply to people who currently have H-1B visas. Link: www.uscis.gov/sites/defaul...

The new reality that is emerging in Texas is that certain topics or ideas are simply off the table in the classroom. The censorship of academic speech and entire fields of knowledge in service to an ideology poses an unprecedented danger to the future of higher education. #AcademicFreedom

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Right. The pres of TXST is no dummy, he knows firing a tenured professor with no due process is against the law. Hi calculation is better to let them sue for reinstatement and win than face the political pressure from Abbott and the TX GOP. Scary times

My prediction is that the 'AI' we're talking about will settle in to become the next generation of clip art, help button, and spellcheck. Stuff that's just there, but no substitute for knowing stuff and doing it right. And you'd be better off getting a liberal arts degree than one in Spellcheck.

New publication: The story of Alberto/Albrecht Caprara and Georg Christoph von Kunitz in Istanbul in the summer of 1682, trying to convince Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha to extend the Peace of Vasvar... www.academia.edu/144017901/Th...

He couldn't save himself by firing professors. The cultural revolution marches on. You won't escape it by cowardice. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

Franklin uttered the phrase on this very date (September 17), the last day of the Constitutional Convention, in 1787

For UNH's celebration of Constitution Day, I wrote a short thing on war and peace in the Constitution. www.unh.edu/unhtoday/202...

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

Lawyers and law profs should check out this letter, in which the attorney general of South Carolina purports to waive state law to allow Clemson to fire faculty over their political views. This is the logic of the TikTok ban spreading outward--that the executive branch can just waive criminal law.

According to the article, Clemson admins and the state AG knew these firings might be illegal, and Clemson would face lawsuits. But they did it anyway. They just wanted to make sure they were *personally* protected against criminal charges. This echoes the Trump administration’s contempt for law.

It’s a good time to discuss (or revisit) academic freedom with your students. Great classroom-ready resources linked below. #TeachTheTruth #DefendHighetEd

US colleagues in #philsci #sts #histsci #histmed, please encourage your students to consider the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. Deadline for US residents is October 15th. They need to first apply for admission to the Department of HPS for MPhil or PhD (2026 entry) www.hps.cam.ac.uk/study/postgr...

unbeilevable--The president of Texas A&M fired a professor who'd done nothing wrong just because a student video of her went viral. But because he had a moment of hesitation, the Lt Gov of Texas is going after him anyway!

Tom Alter's basically been dismissed for being an intellectual, despite having tenure, and that obviously puts him and his family in a hard spot financially. If you can afford to donate, please consider doing so via this link. (More details at the link.) www.gofundme.com/f/support-fr...

“Debate” is not the point of college. I did parliamentary debate in college, and it was a great experience, but it was an extracurricular. My *classes* were about learning and exploring.

"IU could have complied with state law without overturning shared governance." “BOT-25 goes further than what the law actually demands [...]This is state legislators and IU administrators working collectively to enact fundamental changes to the way IU operates.” www.idsnews.com/article/2025...

“An attack that undermines accreditation is an attack on independence in higher education.” A new #Academe article by Antoinette Flores examines both the history of accreditation in higher ed and political interference in the accreditation system today. @antoinetteflores.bsky.social @newamerica.org

The AAUP calls on Texas A&M & Texas State to reverse the ideological firings of faculty members. We condemn the removal of the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences & the chair of the English department at Texas A&M for supporting the academic freedom of an instructor as a draconian abuse of power.

Firing a professor at a state university for political speech outside the classroom.L, on his own time, is a further escalation and blatantly unconstitutional.

Before, reductions in number of tenured and tenure-track faculty were to be achieved through “voluntary reassignment or attrition,” new policy allows university to reduce faculty numbers through “reassignment, which may involve transfer of tenure home, transfer to a different campus, or attrition."

The levels of illegality here just keep multiplying. Deliberately trying to kill survivors, if true, would be a war crime even if this were an armed conflict (it wasn't) and if these were combatants (they weren't).

In law school we read The Paquete Habana, 175 US 677 (1900), in which the Supreme Court held that even in a declared war, fishing boats couldn't lawfully be seized--let alone sunk with all hands. (And that was in the midst of an aggressive colonial war!) Compare to... this. How far we have fallen.

Another thought on this: TAMU is public. That means faculty have First Amendment rights. The fired professor could sue. The Fifth Circuit would then have a chance to overrule long-standing precedent and deny 1A rights in the classroom. One district judge in the circuit recently did just that.

Trump’s executive orders aren’t laws, but if everyone in Texas, from the whiny student to the dean to the TAMU President to the governor, acts like they are, then what’s the difference? He’s bootstrapping new (and unconstitutional) laws.

*How Commerce Became Legal* is finally out with @stanfordpress.bsky.social. Many thanks to all the friends and colleagues who helped along the way. www.sup.org/books/middle... (50% site-wide discount valid until September 8; 20% discount using code "CHETA20" after that)

Princeton Student Held by Iran-Backed Militia Is Released, Trump Says www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/w...

The University of Oregon retreats from its threat to fire 20-30 tenured and tenure-track faculty. However, there will still be layoffs, unfortunately. lookouteugene-springfield.com/story/univer...

Although the Trump admin has justified its use of force in the Caribbean by invoking Article 2 of the Constitution, it has still not offered any legal justification for the premeditated killing of apparent civilians. Nor have I seen anyone else offer a serious argument for why this isn’t murder.

What do I mean by "civilization-by-proxy" as a tool of tsarist statecraft in the Caucasus of the 1800s? Check out my latest article to find out! muse.jhu.edu/pub/28/artic...

I think it’s hard for outsiders to grasp how low staff and faculty morale get at universities where everyone’s job gets worse every year because there’s a hiring freeze and program cuts and any real money is locked up in new projects meant to help higher admin shine so they can move somewhere better

Vance is shocked that people feel any kind of solidarity with those who are killed without due process. He’s like, “but guys, we drew a line between us and them.” Really confusing stuff for him. So he just explains it away as “the left.” It’s hard out here for a fascist

新刊　オスマン帝国の戦争と戦略 Osmanlı’da Savaş ve Strateji / Kahraman Şakul. Ketebe Yayınevi, 2025. 9786255888921 osmn 論文集 www.kitapyurdu.com/kitap/osmanl...

This is a very old and very brutal idea. It's simple, obvious, and usually wrong. Ironically (or fittingly?) the classic American statement of it is a 1927 American Journal of International Law article by Elbridge Colby--great-grandfather and namesake of a prominent Trump DoD official.

The intensification of vice signaling at the highest levels of government is chilling. We are watching a concerted effort to eviscerate the very notion that there are any legal constraints at all on the use of force at home or abroad.

UATX: Competitive debates with prizes for winners? Forced all-nighters? Corporate partnerships? Skipping lunch? This isn’t the liberal arts, this is what a LinkedIn grindset hustler THINKS the liberal arts should be. Or really: not freshman orientation, but an extended Palantir job interview.

Renaming the DoD is part of Trump’s broader effort (shared with Putin) to undermine the UN Charter and all of modern international law. Other countries have departments of DEFENSE because since 1945 force has only been justifiable in self defense. But Trump and Putin like aggressive war.

Anti. Deficiency. Act.

Not just WW2, this is the story of warfare since at least the invention of the socket bayonet in the 1600s. Maybe they shouldn’t abolish professional military education.

DeShana Collett played a prominent role in opposing changes to UK’s internal governance that she & others warned would strip faculty of decision-making power. In the final meeting of the University Senate, she presided over a vote of no confidence in UK’s President. 👀

The NK/SEAL secret killings article is disturbing for all sorts of reasons but this part specifically sounds like some people in special forces are really worried Trump is about to order something especially crazy and risky. Otherwise why leak NOW?

"We're pretending it's the War Department, even though it's not, because we're planning to have it bomb a lot more foreigners and arrest a lot more Americans, but don't you dare call those things "wars," because they're not, except when the president wants them to be so he can claim war powers."