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…
BY ANNA MCCARTHY Academic life has never been more precarious. The Trump administration’s attack on research, on free speech, and on student activism—an attack on the core ideals of the university—builds on decades of economic and political assault on the higher education workforce. Weakening faculty governance has long been the goal of boards of trustees.…
BY FACULTY LETTER ORGANIZERS The open letter discussed below originated after a group of faculty began to share notes about how their universities were handling the challenges presented by the Trump administration and about the apparent lack of communication or coalition building across institutions. In response to escalating federal attacks on higher education, a national…
BY HANK REICHMAN Given the daily fire hose of mostly unconstitutional (if not simply illegal) assaults by the Trump regime on the rights of immigrants, on “DEI,” on trans people, on the legal profession, on the judiciary, on social security and the Veterans’ Administration, and, of course, of most direct concern to readers of this…