BY ZOE SHERMAN I tried not to be a professional academic. But I loved being a student so much, and I felt such a strong pull toward scholarship that eventually I overcame my qualms about getting my livelihood tangled up with my intellectual passions. In the fall of 2009, at the age of thirty, with…
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 HANK REICHMAN The all-but-finalized departure of University of Michigan President Santa Ono for the same, yet even more lucrative, position at the University of Florida, where his apparent hostility to student protest (even when expressed via democratic referendum) and eagerness to abandon DEI programs made him an ideal candidate to serve Governor Ron DeSantis,…
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…
BY RICK WINSTON Editor’s note: Back in 2017, at the start of Trump’s first term, I put together for this blog a pair of Trump YouTube playlists (see here and here, but, alas, some links no longer work). My second list included Bob Dylan’s anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” performed here at the Obama White…
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 BROOKE LOBER, ELI MEYERHOFF, AND EMILY SCHNEIDER The climate on American university campuses is dangerous. Administrators ban protests for Palestinian rights. Immigration and Customs Enforcement snatches students off the streets. The Trump administration revokes hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research. And all this is done in the name of protecting Jewish…