POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following extraordinary statement was published today in the New York Review of Books and is reposted here with their permission. The statement’s signatories include virtually every leading First Amendment scholar in the country, conservative and liberal. Among the signatories are Eugene Volokh and Michael McConnell, arguably the two most prominent…
BY JENNIFER RUTH AAUP and other campus unions are mobilizing to defend their institutions against the Trump administration’s outright assault on higher education and insist that their university administrations do the same. I am posting some of the letters to university administrations that I’m aware of so that they might provide inspiration and models for…
BY EMMAIA GELMAN Yesterday, campus communities watched in horror as news unfolded that Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University who bravely acted as negotiator between the Palestine solidarity encampment and Columbia administrators, had been snatched from university housing by ICE agents on orders from the White House. It is the cataclysm that has…
BY MARJORIE HEINS Harvard University’s announcement last month that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism was a sufficiently serious blow to academic freedom at that hallowed institution that it motivated me, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, to submit a letter to Harvard, the alumni magazine. As Hank Reichman’s “Anticipatory…
BY JENNIFER RUTH When Jan Haaken and I decided to make The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?, we couldn’t know how events here—much less in Gaza and the West Bank—would unfold. We had been talking about a film about the suppression of academic freedom in Texas and pivoted when some of the…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Yesterday, the Department of Education announced investigations into Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, explaining that “widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported” at these five institutions. Given the confusion that reigns in and over higher education today, it’s worth trying…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The AAUP has issued a new statement, “Against Anticipatory Obedience,” that warns colleges to avoid “acting to comply in advance” before repression is actually required by the Trump administration. The danger of anticipatory obedience applies not just to colleges censoring speech, but also to national organizations seeking to influence Trump’s actions.…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN On January 6, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), members voted 428 to 88 in support of a “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza.” The resolution noted that Israel has killed hundreds of teachers and professors and has destroyed eighty percent of Gaza’s schools, all its university campuses,…
BY KATHERINE FRANKE The following is the text of a statement issued on January 10, 2025 by Katherine Franke, formerly the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University. It is posted here with her permission For the last year and a half, as students at Columbia University and across the globe have protested…
BY ROBIN D. G. KELLEY This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here. On Monday morning, October 21, 2024,…