BY ALAN SINGER
On Thursday, April 17, I marched with New York City AAUP chapters and thousands of educators, students, workers, and allies from the arch in Washington Square Park to Foley Square in lower Manhattan in defense of higher education. We rallied to defend the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution from Trump administration directives. As university faculty, we asserted our rights and our students’ rights to speak, write, learn, teach, research, associate freely, and protest. We also condemned illegal abductions of noncitizens for expressing opinions the Trump administration disagrees with, anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies, and cuts to scientific research that leave the country unprepared for potential epidemics and the effects of climate change.
After Columbia University’s initial capitulation to Trump administration demands—issued under the pretext of combating antisemitism on campus—in an effort to lift a federal embargo on funds, it was hit with new stringent restrictions that would have robbed the university of academic autonomy. Learning from what happened in the exchange between the Trump administration and Columbia, when Harvard University was sent a five-page list of demands that would have completely transformed the school’s operations, admissions, hiring, faculty, and student life policies, it refused to comply, placing federal funding and its tax-exempt status at risk. In an open letter addressed to the Harvard community, university president Alan Garber wrote “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The national AAUP and the Harvard University chapter of the AAUP have already filed a lawsuit alleging that the Trump administration is violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
At Hofstra University, where I am a professor of secondary education, the administration submitted an amicus brief along with eighty-five other colleges and universities as part of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration in support of the national AAUP and Harvard AAUP chapter’s suit filed in the US District Court District of Massachusetts charging Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem et al. with creating a climate of fear on campuses by “targeting non-citizen students and faculty at institutions of higher education throughout the country based on their political views.” The defendants are responsible for “high-profile arrests of non-citizens based on their political views,” revoking “the visas of hundreds of international students,” and terminating “foreign students’ records in the Student Visitor and Exchange System.” These actions are “threatening the ability of schools to enroll any foreign students at all through decertification under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program.” The AAUP and its Harvard chapter are plaintiffs in the suit along with the New York University AAUP chapter, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT chapter, and the Middle East Studies Association.
When circumstances look dire, in an era when the federal government is seeking to deny fundamental constitutional rights to legal residents of the United States, it is important to remember formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s response to the Supreme Court’s 7–2 majority decision against plaintiff Dred Scott in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Speaking for the court majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that Scott was not a citizen of the United States under the Constitution and was not entitled to legal redress because “colored men of African descent are not and cannot be citizens of the United States” and Africans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Douglass delivered his speech at the annual meeting of the American Abolition Society in New York City two months later on May 14, 1857. He opened, “While four millions of our fellow countrymen are in chains—while men, women, and children are bought and sold on the auction-block with horses, sheep, and swine—while the remorseless slave-whip draws the warm blood of our common humanity—it is meet that we assemble as we have done to-day, and lift up our hearts and voices in earnest denunciation of the vile and shocking abomination.”
Douglass responded to the “eminent men, North and South, in Church and State” who “tell us that the omens are all against us. Emancipation, they tell us, is a wild, delusive idea” and “that slavery never reposed upon a firmer basis than now . . . and that we might as well give up the struggle” because “the highest authority has spoken.”
Douglass denounced the Supreme Court decision as the “judicial incarnation of wolfishness” and demanded to know where Taney got the legal authorization for the decision. “Neither in the preamble nor in the body of the Constitution is there a single mention of the term slave or slave holder, slave master or slave state.” The Preamble to the Constitution reads “We, the people”—not we, the white people—not we, the citizens, or the legal voters—not we, the privileged class, and excluding all other classes but we, the people; not we, the horses and cattle, but we the people—the men and women, the human inhabitants of the United States, do ordain and establish this Constitution.”
Douglass pointed out that nowhere did the Constitution sanction slavery, but it did ensure “that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and “the right of the people to be secure in their persons and papers, and houses.” Its preamble declares that its purpose is “to secure the blessing of liberty.”
Douglass did not lose hope in the possibility that slavery and injustice would end. “Abolitionists and colored people, should meet this decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the downfall and complete overthrow of the whole slave system.”
Of course Douglass was right. Rather than the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford having settled forever the future of slavery, four years later the nation was plunged into civil war, six years later Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and eight years later the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States.
Concluding his response to Chief Justice Taney, Douglas said, “All I ask of the American people is, that they live up to the Constitution, adopt its principles, imbibe its spirit, and enforce its provisions.”
On April 17, faculty, students and supporters participated in AAUP-sponsored actions in defense of immigrants, documented and undocumented; students with green cards and visas; freedom of speech, the press, and the right to assemble; and the ability of schools, colleges, and universities to educate a new generation of citizens for a democratic society. As Frederick Douglass demanded in 1857, we demand of the federal government, the courts, the nation’s political leadership, and the American people “that they live up to the Constitution, adopt its principles, imbibe its spirit, and enforce its provisions.”
Today’s struggle is only beginning.
Alan Singer is a historian and teacher educator at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.
