BY MIKE STEVE COLLINS The Trump administration is waging a highly successful war on knowledge and its pursuit and dissemination, disguised as a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); antisemitism; and lack of viewpoint diversity. This war on knowledge has dealt potentially crippling blows to Harvard University and has enabled the brushing aside of…
BY KATHY ROBERTS FORDE AND THE MEMBERS OF THE STAND TOGETHER FOR HIGHER ED LEADERSHIP TEAM* In a rare act of institutional solidarity, twenty-four universities have filed a joint amicus brief supporting Harvard in its lawsuit against the federal government’s attempt to cut research funding. The lawsuit challenges the federal government’s politically motivated suspension of…
BY SAHAR AZIZ For decades, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was mentioned, it was usually in reference to combatting antisemitism. Now the ADL is more accurately cited in the litany of pro-Israeli groups attempting to criminalize Muslim and Palestinian students for seeking an end to the horrific genocide in Gaza. For over a hundred years,…
BY ROBERT M. KAPLAN Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned the scientific community by proposing that researchers stop submitting articles to high-impact academic journals and instead publish in government-run outlets. The backlash was swift. Within a day, The Washington Post received more than four thousand comments—most of them scathing. But buried beneath the outrage lies a…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN Readers of this blog may be interested in three new intellectual freedom case repositories that are now available on the MetaCat Foundation website. Feel free to take a look at them before reading on. The first repository is the Academic Freedom Gaza Case Repository, which is connected to my book-in-progress, Gaza, Genocide,…
BY CONCERNED FACULTY AT COLUMBIA, BARNARD, AND TEACHERS COLLEGE We are publishing this letter at the request of several AAUP members from Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College. The letter was drafted on May 13, 2025, in response to recent events on their campuses. We, a group of faculty members from Columbia University, Barnard College, and…
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…
BY ANNA FEDER This blog post will also be published in the Academic Freedom on the Line newsletter, a project of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. In August of last year, I was fired from my staff position at Emerson College for screening the documentary film Israelism and for supporting the…
BY BROOKE LOBER, ELI MEYERHOFF, AND EMILY SCHNEIDER The climate on American university campuses is dangerous. Administrators ban protests for Palestinian rights. Immigration and Customs Enforcement snatches students off the streets. The Trump administration revokes hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research. And all this is done in the name of protecting Jewish…