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 WILLIAM D. ADAMS The following first appeared on Medium and is republished with the author’s permission. April 11, 2025 Only days after launching its attack on the Smithsonian Institution, the Trump administration and its DOGE shock troops came for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Last week, NEH grant recipients were notified that all…
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 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…
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 HANK REICHMAN As an alum of Columbia University (CC ’69) I received an email yesterday from the university’s interim president Katrina Armstrong responding to the Trump Administration’s decision to arbitrarily cancel some $400 million in federal grants “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The email…
BY DAVID M. RABBAN In the process of writing my recently published book, Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (Harvard University Press, 2024), I increasingly realized that the AAUP’s treatment of academic freedom as a professional norm provides a revealing counterpart to the judicial development of academic freedom as a First Amendment…
POSTED BY MATTHEW BOEDY Students (English majors) in my University of North Georgia Advanced Expository Writing course that focuses this semester on the link between higher education and democracy were asked to write an editorial answering this specific question: Would I participate in a student-led campus protest? The editorial below is by Nicole Clifton, who…
BY HANK REICHMAN Seven professors and a college student in Florida’s public higher education institutions filed suit yesterday to block a new state law that Governor Ron DeSantis calls the “Stop WOKE Act” and which curtails instruction about race and gender as well as much race-based expression in private business. The Florida and national branches…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Fifty years ago, on June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court issued one of the most important rulings protecting free speech on campus in the case of Healy v. James. As the conservative Supreme Court has proven this week, even a fifty-year precedent is not safe if five justices decide to…