POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week the American Constitution Society hosted a video conversation on academic freedom with Andrew Manuel Crespo, the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard University. Professor Crespo is an AAUP member who is serving as general counsel…
BY MICHAEL FERGUSON Following is the editor’s introduction to the spring 2025 issue of Academe, “Trump 2.0,” out this week. The full issue and table of contents can be found here. Patricia McGuire, in her contribution to the online edition of this issue, succinctly describes the stakes of the second Trump administration’s intertwined attacks on higher education…
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…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement is republished here with permission of its organizers. The statement with a regularly updated list of signatories may also be found here. As Jewish faculty and staff at Northwestern University, we write today to defend the values of academic freedom, pluralism and independence that animate Northwestern and undergird…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following resolutions from the Academic Council of the University of California Academic Senate and from the University of Massachusetts Amherst Academic Senate were published this week. Their calls for unity and action should be widely circulated and embraced. Academic Council Statement: The Defense of the University April 8, 2025 Higher…
BY DENISE L. DAVIS As we at Brown University wait for the other shoe to drop, we are mobilizing in support of the university’s principles, as expressed by President Christina H. Paxson, and urging the university administration to take an uncompromising stance when it comes to preserving free inquiry, ensuring the safety of non-US citizens…
BY AMIR HUSSAIN The Trump administration is trafficking in a grand narrative about American intellectuals: Universities are hiding “foreign aliens,” and outside agitators are disrupting campus operations in support of terrorist organizations. Scholars and students are being labeled as leftist protesters or, more brazenly, as so-called Hamas supporters and are being persecuted, detained, deported, and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Kenneth Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, which works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. Before that he directed the Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation and before that he was for 25 years director of the American Jewish…
BY HANK REICHMAN The headlines tell the tale: “Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.;” “More than 1,900 scientists write letter in ‘SOS’ over Trump’s attacks on science.” But it’s less a new story than a continuation of an old one, for the Trump regime’s war on science dates back at least…