BY THE TEXAS CONFERENCE OF THE AAUP This week’s events are the clearest example yet: We are bargaining away Texas’s future so politicians can have material for fundraising emails and viral social media content. This week, Texas A&M University has presented the most startling example yet of the consequences of our state and federal governments’…
BY MICHAEL BANERJEE A July 26, 2025 New York Times article brought to light the federal government’s desire to have Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Harvard University’s governing board, step down as part of Harvard’s negotiations with the federal government, which the university sued in April after the government demanded that…
BY COLUMBIA ALUMNI FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM The Trump Administration’s abuses have placed Columbia University leadership in an agonizing position, pitting the welfare of Columbia’s faculty, staff, and students – and the fate of critical research projects – against considerations of institutional independence, academic freedom, constitutional democracy and rule of law. We recognize that, in reaching…
BY HILTON OBENZINGER Dear Claire Shipman, President, Columbia University. I received your letter and other notices about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump administration, and I’m disappointed and angry. I know you have a tough job, but perhaps unwittingly you harmed me. By agreeing to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, you have turned…
BY RICK WINSTON Editor’s note: Back in 2017, at the start of Trump’s first term, I put together for this blog a pair of Trump YouTube playlists (see here and here, but, alas, some links no longer work). My second list included Bob Dylan’s anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” performed here at the Obama White…
BY LEILA KAWAR At the core of the Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE) April 17 National Day of Action was the insight that addressing the ongoing crisis in higher education requires inclusive, action-based strategies. The extraordinary combination of online and on-the-ground programming that—through CAHE’s initiative—came together over eleven hours on April 17 generated…
BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU After Columbia University’s craven and apparently futile acceptance of all the conditions Donald Trump set before it to even start a conversation about getting its federal funding back, Harvard’s recent refusal to let the federal government insinuate itself into the core functions of higher education was a welcomed moment we should all…
BY WILLIAM D. ADAMS The following first appeared on Medium and is republished with the author’s permission. April 11, 2025 Only days after launching its attack on the Smithsonian Institution, the Trump administration and its DOGE shock troops came for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Last week, NEH grant recipients were notified that all…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT Trump’s executive orders have been coming fast and furious, almost one a day. On March 27, with a stroke of his Sharpie, he promised to restore “truth and sanity” to our nation’s history—an interesting combination for a regime that has made lies the basis of its authority and vindictive narcissism the…
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…