BY HANK REICHMAN Today I attended one of the over 275 “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations outside of DOGE Dictator Elon Musk’s dealerships nationwide. This one was on Fourth Street in Berkeley, California, where at its height I would estimate some 800-1000 people gathered to voice our outrage at the ongoing Republican coup. It was a spirited…
BY HANK REICHMAN Given the daily fire hose of mostly unconstitutional (if not simply illegal) assaults by the Trump regime on the rights of immigrants, on “DEI,” on trans people, on the legal profession, on the judiciary, on social security and the Veterans’ Administration, and, of course, of most direct concern to readers of this…
BY REBECCA DOLHINOW AND DAVID SCHULTZ Rebecca Dolhinow of California State University, Fullerton, and David Schultz of Hamline University seek chapter proposals for an edited book anthology tentatively entitled Trumpism and the Corporate University. Trumpism and the Corporate University will be an edited volume that examines the rise of the corporate university over the last…
BY BARRY TRACHTENBERG Columbia University’s decision to accept and even go beyond the Trump administration’s extortionist demands forces us to recognize a sobering truth that applies not only to Columbia but to far too many of the scholarly spaces within which we work: Their response is neither a surrender nor a capitulation but is a…
BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ The inexplicable budget cuts my financially-solvent university enacted through its 2023–24 APR process both portended and was practice for our current moment. The “headwinds,” justifications for why the university had to cut twenty programs before new system-wide performance-based metrics formally went into effect, have unsurprisingly arrived. If anyone working inside the university…
BY HANK REICHMAN I am thrilled to announce that today, March 25, the second edition of my book, Understanding Academic Freedom, is officially published. In the first edition, published in late 2021, I sought to provide educators and others a basic introduction and guide to principles of academic freedom. But by early last year it…
Thank you, Dwayne Booth, both for making this and for giving me permission to reproduce it here. Those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Fish’s incredible art work and political cartooning might want to visit this instagram page.
Given the news today (March 21) that Columbia has caved, I am reposting this statement from the Columbia AAUP chapter, which was released on March 18. They clearly need to be in charge of Columbia not its Board of Trustees and the President who works for it. The Assault on Columbia University by Columbia University…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In a review in spring 2022, which seems a century ago, I wrote that “an irony or paradox adheres to [Ellen Schrecker’s book] The Lost Promise in that this riches-to-rags story leaves readers not dispirited but inspired.” Although Schrecker’s book traces the seemingly lost promise of the 60s’ dream of free public…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following extraordinary statement was published today in the New York Review of Books and is reposted here with their permission. The statement’s signatories include virtually every leading First Amendment scholar in the country, conservative and liberal. Among the signatories are Eugene Volokh and Michael McConnell, arguably the two most prominent…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Here in Georgia in the last few days: Lawmakers failed to pass a bill to end DEI in student activities and programs in our public university system. The bill would have codified into law policy moves already done to erase DEI in the last year by our system administration. One of our…
BY KATHLEEN M. ROMERO There is an undeniable level of prestige associated with achieving a Carnegie Classified level one research (R1) label for institutions of higher education. This status opens new doors to funding, innovation, and research opportunities, and elevates universities to an elite level. Achieving R1 status rebrands universities, offering the perception of a…
BY JENNIFER RUTH AAUP and other campus unions are mobilizing to defend their institutions against the Trump administration’s outright assault on higher education and insist that their university administrations do the same. I am posting some of the letters to university administrations that I’m aware of so that they might provide inspiration and models for…
BY SILKE-MARIA WEINECK The following is reposted with permission from the Michigan Daily. A few months ago, University [of Michigan] Provost Laurie McCauley banned diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements, the argument went, imposed inappropriate ideological litmus tests. And a few days ago, University President Santa Ono told the audience at an event hosted by the…
Today, March 13, 2025, the Middle East Studies Association released the following important statement. To go directly to the statement on the site, click here. The second Trump administration has ushered in an existential threat to academic freedom and higher education in the United States. The current campaign targeting universities is an extension of earlier…
