BY HANK REICHMAN If there’s a better examplar of the higher education administrative establishment’s failures than E. Gordon Gee, I can’t think of one. Gee, who has held more university presidencies than any other American, has cut an extraordinary path of scandal and negligence pretty much everywhere he’s been. Yet he continues not only to…
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 AARON NISENSON The Trump administration has successfully buried a key component of the Columbia settlement agreement. The focus on monetary damages paid by the university and restrictions on campus protests and diversity policies obscures the Trump administration’s imposition of the right to interfere directly in university admissions, hiring, and promotion decisions. The Trump administration…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Every AAUP member should be concerned about the new accreditation group recently birthed in Florida. This week Louisiana became the seventh state to say it was joining. While only for now targeting states in the South the group’s business plan shows its strategy is to take on as clients public schools in…
BY BRITT S. PARIS, LINDSAY WEINBERG, AND EMMA MAY Tomorrow, July 23, the Trump administration plans to release an “AI action plan” that reflects the White House’s priorities for expanding the artificial intelligence industry. It builds on one of the first directives from the second Trump administration, Executive Order (EO) 14179, “Removing Barriers to American…
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 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 JOHN K. WILSON The Northwestern AAUP chapter persuaded the faculty assembly to overwhelmingly vote in favor of its resolution at the April 21 meeting calling upon Northwestern’s leaders to fight for academic freedom, retract the administration’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism that punishes criticism of Israel, defend the…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY On April 8, our school had a gun incident that involved a student making threats against the campus. But this story isn’t about that scary situation. It’s about my school administration’s epic communications failure about the incident. Incidents like this show why principles of academic freedom and shared governance matter. It took…
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…