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 others to take similar action. I’m sure there are many more out there (please email me links at jenniferhruth@gmail.com).

I begin with my own university, Portland State, because this effort brought all the campus unions together, including the students’, for one statement.

STATEMENT (Finalized on 3/5/2025)

The Associated Students of Portland State University, the Graduate Employees Union at PSU, PSUFA AFT local 3571, PSU-AAUP, and SEIU Local 503 Chapter 89 reject the premise of the federally directed investigation into antisemitism at PSU. This investigation emerges not from a specific complaint from a PSU community member, but instead from the Trump administration’s desire to intimidate higher education writ large into compliance with the administration’s highly partisan goals and agenda by threatening select institutions with having their federal funding revoked. To achieve this end, the Trump administration has decided to weaponize a highly controversial and contested definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of state policy with discrimination in order to suppress free speech, political dissent, and the academic freedom that is essential to a rigorous college education. 

We reject, and call on PSU leadership to reject, this and all other efforts by the Trump administration to characterize student, staff, and faculty protest against war and genocide as antisemitic or supportive of terrorism. Protests against state violence which has been identified by the international community as long-form crimes against humanity is not anti-semitism, nor is support for Palestinian peoples facing genocide.

 We also reject harassment of any kind, particularly of our Jewish and Palestinian students, co-workers, and colleagues. We call on PSU leadership to protect students, staff, and faculty in response to this baseless investigation. We have a duty of care to all of the students who come to PSU and trust us with their education. It would be a failure of this duty to allow our students to be targeted by this spurious investigation. The stakes of this investigation for campus workers are high and the administration has an obligation to protect the campus community against baseless political investigations that seek to chill academic speech and freedom of expression.

Signatories

• The Graduate Employees Union at PSU (AFT/AAUP # 6666)
• SEIU Local 503, Chapter 89 (PSU)
• PSUFA AFT local 3571 
• Associated Students Of Portland State University
• PSU – AAUP

 

Next, please see University of Michigan’s “An Open Letter to President Alivisatos and Provost Baicker on the Trump Administration’s Threat to Academic Freedom” which calls on its administrations not to comply. The University of Minnesota’s letter to President Cunningham asks its administration to:

• Unequivocally state your staunch support for the rights of non-citizen community members and specifically those who face threats of arrest or deportation due to their political views.
• Affirm that the University will not cooperate with ICE raids and deportation efforts absent a judicial warrant, and will provide resources and information to support at-risk non-citizen community members.
• Order University employees to stop filming and photographing campus protests and in other ways creating documents that may be used to target vulnerable members of our community. Within the limits of the MN Government Data Practices Act, delete existing records of disciplinary procedures or documentation of campus protests and demonstrations since 2023 that may be used to target vulnerable community members.
• Announce a process through which students fearing ICE detention will receive the kind of protection and aid Mahmoud Kahlil begged for from his own institution.
• Affirm that the university will not persecute community members who express criticism of the state of Israel, its actions, or Zionism.
• Immediately appoint an Interim Vice Provost of International Affairs who can advocate at university and federal levels for students subject to federal immigration enforcement or travel bans.
• Adopt Jewish Voices for Peace’s Ten-Point Platform and Rapid Response Toolkit for Responding to Trump’s Executive Orders Attacking on Palestine Protesters, International Visa Holders, and Undocumented Students, Faculty, and Staff.

The University of Chicago AAUP chapter’s “Open Letter to the University of Chicago administrations,” makes a number of forceful points, such as:

• The university has chosen to admit students and hire instructors and researchers on their academic merit whom the federal government may now seek to target for retribution, criminalization, or deportation, based on ideological criteria of no appropriate concern to the university. Although we recognize that the university must comply with all court orders, the university has no obligation to provide information or other assistance to immigration authorities that is not mandated by subpoena or judicial order. We ask that the university publicly confirm that it will not cooperate with immigration authorities or with requests for information about students, faculty, and staff that are not strictly required by law.

and:

• The university has chosen to establish programs of scientific research based on their scholarly promise, and must continue to support such programs even if the federal government cuts their funding for politically-motivated reasons. We ask that the university publicly commit to providing stopgap funding for federally-funded grants that may be blocked, frozen, cut, or canceled by the Trump administration, especially in instances where faculty, staff, contractors, and/or students will not be paid.

I want to also highlight the joint statement issued by AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter, AAUP-MIT, University of Chicago AAUP, AAUP Cornell University Chapter, Ohio State AAUP, Wesleyan AAUP, AAUP University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Chapter, Northern Michigan University AAUP/AFT 6761 Eastern Michigan University-AAUP. This last statement speaks specifically to the crisis at Columbia:

We write to condemn in the strongest possible terms two recent and related federal attacks on Columbia University: the impoundment of some $400 million in research funds, and the targeting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement of Columbia students and alumni involved in pro-Palestine protests—in particular, the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, who is a lawful permanent resident of the United States.

To search for adequate precedent for these brazenly illegal and partisan actions requires looking to the worst days of the Red Scare or the Alien and Sedition Acts. Nothing in the Constitution permits a president to target his political opponents by defying laws passed by Congress or by detaining and threatening to deport people for their viewpoints. Yet the illegality of these moves is almost beside the point; their architects quite candidly describe them as part of a wider crusade against higher education, an attempt to impose top-down control on what Americans teach, study, and learn.

Columbia has borne the brunt of this onslaught over the past week. Yet we know that our own universities are next in the crosshairs. We do not need the crisis to reach our doors before we will rise to defend the academic autonomy of our research and teaching activities, the free speech rights and safety of our community members, and the essential scientific and humanistic contributions of universities to our society. We, the undersigned chapters of the American Association of University Professors, stand in full solidarity with our colleagues at Columbia.

While this is not a letter from an AAUP chapter, it is a strong letter from a collective that came together at Amherst University last week under the leadership of Adam Sitze. It is collecting signatures through change.org. Please read and sign if so moved. It reminds us that:

A university faithful to this mission must by definition include the freedom to dissent, for following the truth wherever it may lead may sometimes lead to stinging criticisms. ‘By design and by effect,” as the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report observed, the university is ‘the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.

Finally, please see this excellent piece in Ms. “Amid Right-Wing Attacks on Education, the American Association of University Professors Organizes for Academic Freedom.” Thank you to everyone out there working hard to come together to defend our universities.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?