BY VEENA DUBAL
The following report by AAUP General Counsel Veena Dubal, Professor of Law at the University of California at Irvine, was delivered to the AAUP’s biennial meeting in Chicago on June 13 by AAUP Council member Samuel Bagenstos, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, and received a standing ovation.
I’m grateful to Professor Sam Bagenstos for making these remarks on my behalf today. I’m sorry that I cannot be with you in person, as the biennial coincides with two of my children’s graduations, two of their birthdays, and one of their multiple dance recitals. But I am with you all in spirit and in solidarity!
I give you this update not just as general counsel, but as someone who has spent this past year and a half working alongside AAUP members, chapters, and allies to defend higher education at a moment of extraordinary pressure.
What I want to do is give you a broad but clear account of what we have done since President Trump returned to office: how we have defended research, academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and the non-citizen faculty, students, and staff who are essential to our campuses.
As you all know, this administration has tried to use the machinery of the federal government — grantmaking, civil rights enforcement, immigration enforcement, contracting, investigations, and public threats — to reshape universities by force. It has not only cut federal funding, but tried to convert it into leverage for ideological control. It has tried to make universities choose between money and mission. And it has tried to teach administrators, faculty, researchers, students, and staff that the safest course is silence.
While most universities have cowered and complied – We have resisted. Our answer to the Trump administration’s myriad attempts to undermine higher education has been a resounding: ABSOLUTELY NOT.
We have resisted not because universities are perfect. They are not. Not because antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian discrimination, anti-immigrant hostility, or any other form of discrimination should be tolerated. They should not. The government has lawful tools to enforce civil rights, and universities have moral and legal obligations to protect their communities. But civil rights law cannot be used as a pretext for political coercion. Federal research funding cannot be used as a cudgel to dictate curriculum, hiring, admissions, discipline, governance, or research agendas. Immigration law cannot be used to punish protected speech. And fear cannot become the operating principle of higher education.
Since January 2025, our strategy has been direct and fast. We have litigated. We have issued guidances. We have worked with chapters. We have built coalitions. We have supported individual faculty under attack. We have insisted that academic freedom is not an abstraction — it is a working condition, a research condition, a student-learning condition, and a democratic condition. In 2025 alone, AAUP filed eight lawsuits challenging the Trump administration, including successful challenges involving Harvard, the University of California system, and the administration’s ideological-deportation policy. In 2026, we have filed three more.
The first front has been the defense of higher education as an autonomous public good — not as a department of the executive branch.
Within days of taking office, the administration issued executive orders aimed at eliminating DEI-related programs and attaching new ideological conditions to federal grants and contracts. One of those orders directed agencies to terminate what it called illegal preferences and DEI programs; the Fourth Circuit later described those orders as directing agencies to end DEI programs within federal grant and contract processes.
We challenged that immediately. In National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education v. Trump, AAUP joined NADOHE, Baltimore, and others to challenge executive orders targeting DEIA programs and directing federal agencies to defund such programs. That case has had procedural ups and downs, and we should be honest about that. But the point of the case was never only one order from one court. The point was to make clear that vague executive threats are not law, that faculty and academic workers experience real injury when the government chills teaching and research, and that universities should not engage in anticipatory obedience simply because the federal government issues a press release or a threat.
The second front has been research funding.
Research funding is academic freedom in material form. It is the lab that stays open. It is the graduate student who keeps working. It is the clinical study that continues. It is the archive, the fieldwork, the data set, the public health project, the humanities project, the community partnership, the medical trial, the engineering work, the social science research that lets the public understand itself.
The administration’s attack on research has tried to turn federal grants from public investments into political rewards. Our position has been simple: just because federal agencies fund research, that doesn’t mean they own universities. A grant is not a blank check for viewpoint control. Agencies must follow statutes. They must follow their own regulations. They must engage in reasoned decision-making. They must respect the First Amendment. They must respect Congress’s spending power. They cannot terminate grants because they dislike the speech, scholarship, politics, identities, or associations of the people doing the work.
We saw this first at Columbia. When the administration cut approximately $400 million in federal research funding and demanded sweeping structural changes, Columbia capitulated, and AAUP and AFT sued. That case did not produce merits relief; the litigation was ultimately dismissed, at our behest. But the legal and public point mattered: faculty and their unions did not sit quietly while the federal government used research funding to force institutional capitulation. We said then, and we should continue to say now, that the federal government may enforce civil rights laws, but it may not bypass process, impose ideological management, or punish a university community for disfavored expression.
We also saw what happens when institutions and faculty fight back. At Harvard, the national AAUP, the Harvard Faculty Chapter, and allied unions challenged the administration’s suspension and termination of federal funding. The court recognized that the plaintiffs were challenging nearly $2.2 billion in federal grants and that they alleged the funding decisions were made in response to Harvard’s refusal to accept content- and viewpoint-based demands. The court concluded that Harvard’s protected conduct was a substantial and motivating factor in the freeze orders and termination letters, and it granted a permanent injunction barring retaliation against Harvard for the exercise of First Amendment rights.
That decision matters far beyond Harvard. It says that the federal government cannot condition research funding on ideological compliance. It says academic freedom has constitutional significance. It says universities cannot be forced to surrender control over who teaches, what is taught, what is studied, or how scholarship is evaluated as the price of federal support.
We saw the same principle in the University of California litigation. AAUP and a wall-to-wall labor coalition challenged the administration’s termination and withholding of federal funds across the UC system, which, I want to emphasize, is much more than just ten universities. The UC is one of the largest public university systems in the country, the state of California’s second largest employer, the largest public hospital system in the state, and one of the primary means of economic mobility for Californians. Our lawsuit alleged that the Trump administration used economic coercion to undermine free speech and academic freedom and to force universities to eradicate DEI and disfavored political speech from campuses, among other things. In response, a federal court issued a sweeping preliminary injunction barring the administration from freezing or threatening federal funding to the University of California system. Since then, the DoJ has sued the UC twice, and our injunction and our faculty associations have given the university the tools it needs to fight back.
All of these cases are about research, but they are also about power. They are about whether research funding will be governed by peer review, congressional authorization, agency rules, and law — or by political loyalty tests.
The third front has been academic freedom itself.
Academic freedom is the condition that allows the university to do its work. Since the beginning of this administration, we have treated academic freedom not as a slogan but as a legal, institutional, and organizing framework. We have connected First Amendment doctrine to AAUP standards. We have connected academic freedom to labor power. We have connected federal attacks on “DEI,” attacks on Palestine-related speech, attacks on Jewish faculty, attacks on gender studies, attacks on climate research, attacks on public health, and attacks on immigration status as parts of a common strategy: narrow the permissible range of knowledge, then punish those who step outside it.
We have also built practical infrastructure. In conjunction with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and the Middle East Studies Association, AAUP has provided resources for people facing threats to academic freedom, including legal-support resources, digital security, travel, doxxing defense, and guidance for faculty dealing with harassment or institutional pressure. When someone is targeted, the first question is often not “What is the theory of the case?” It is: who do I call, what do I preserve, what should I not sign, what should my chapter do, and how do I keep doing my work?
The fourth front — and one of the most urgent — has been the defense of non-citizen faculty, students, and staff. The administration’s message to non-citizens has been unmistakable: your speech can put your status at risk. That message is poisonous to the university. It isolates non-citizens, and it impoverishes everyone else’s education and research.
On March 25, 2025, AAUP, three AAUP campus chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association filed suit challenging the administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizen students and faculty for pro-Palestinian advocacy. After a dramatic trial in July 2025, overseen by Reagan-appointed judge William Young, the district court held that officials pursued a policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizen students and faculty who engaged in pro-Palestinian protest, that the purpose was to chill pro-Palestinian speech and speech critical of Israel, and that the policy was impermissibly viewpoint-discriminatory in violation of the First Amendment and arbitrary and capricious under the APA. Judge Young wrote that this decision was the most important of his long career.
That ruling is a landmark one because it rejects one of the most dangerous ideas in this moment: that constitutional protections stop at the passport line. They do not. A university cannot function if some members of the community speak with rights and others speak by permission.
But we did not stop with litigation. We also acted at the campus level. We sent guidance to university general counsel offices explaining why universities should not turn over names, nationalities, or immigration-related information of students and faculty in connection with federal investigations absent clear legal justification. We emphasized FERPA, privacy, statutory limits, and the grave risks created by improper disclosure.
We also circulated practical ICE-on-campus guidance — the kinds of questions chapters should ask now, before a crisis: What is the campus policy on working with immigration authorities? Who should faculty contact if ICE appears? What spaces are limited-access? What privacy rights are being communicated to students, staff, and faculty? What is the protocol if an immigration officer seeks entry without a judicial warrant?
That work matters because defending non-citizens is not only about defending visa holders. It is about defending the integrity of the university. When non-citizen members of our community are made vulnerable, the entire campus is disciplined through fear.
I want to say something about how this work has been possible.
It has been possible because AAUP has grown to become much more than a standards-setting organization, although our standards remain foundational. It has been possible because we are also a fighting organization with a growing number of active members. We have relationships with other unions, public-interest lawyers, civil-rights organizations, immigration advocates, and faculty associations. We have people on the ground who know when a threat is real before it becomes public. We have brilliant, courageous members willing to put their names on declarations, join cases, talk to colleagues, and refuse isolation.
That is the model we need now: law plus organizing. Litigation can create breathing room. It can stop a grant termination. It can expose pretext. It can force the government to defend its actions in a forum where evidence matters. It can give administrators a reason not to capitulate. But litigation alone cannot save higher education. Courts cannot build chapters. Courts cannot restore shared governance on campus. Courts cannot make a university president brave. Courts cannot save academic freedom. Courts cannot make a faculty organized enough to resist.
That is OUR work.
So my request to you as delegates is this: take these legal victories and make them durable on your campuses. Do not let your administrations tell you that every federal threat requires immediate compliance. Ask, as you have been doing, for the legal basis. Ask whether there is a subpoena, a court order, a final agency action, or merely a letter. Ask whether faculty governance has been consulted. Ask whether the institution is protecting student and employee privacy. Ask whether it is preserving academic freedom or trading it away quietly. Ask whether it is defending research or sacrificing vulnerable fields first. Ask whether it is standing with non-citizen students, staff, and faculty before ICE appears on campus — not after.
And organize around the answers.
Because the central lesson of the last year is that the law is not self-executing. Rights do not defend themselves. Academic freedom does not defend itself and research does not defend itself. And non-citizen members of our community cannot be asked to defend themselves alone.
Since Trump took office, we have done what AAUP was built to do. We have defended the conditions of free inquiry against political interference. We have stood in solidarity with faculty, researchers, students, and staff against intimidation. We have made clear that universities are not brands, endowments, boards of trustees, or administrations: they are vibrant, dynamic communities of teaching, learning, research, labor, and dissent.
We have not won everything. We will not win every motion. And we will not stop every bad act before it causes harm. But we have changed the terrain. And we have made clear that there will be resistance and that the faculty are not bystanders in the future of higher education.
And we have shown that when the government tries to turn fear into policy, AAUP will answer with law, with organizing, with solidarity, and with the oldest commitment we have: the defense of academic freedom for the common good.
Editor’s note: Much of the legal work described in this report has been funded by generous pro bono and financial contributions from law firms and foundations. But it has also relied on resources provided by the AAUP Foundation’s Legal Defense Fund. Tax-deductible contributions to that fund allow the AAUP to continue and expand our efforts. Please consider making a donation now.
Veena Dubal is General Counsel of the AAUP and Professor of Law at the University of California at Irvine.
