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 HILTON OBENZINGER Dear Claire Shipman, President, Columbia University. I received your letter and other notices about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump administration, and I’m disappointed and angry. I know you have a tough job, but perhaps unwittingly you harmed me. By agreeing to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, you have turned…
BY THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CHAPTER OF THE AAUP The Agreement between the federal government and Columbia University announced on July 24, 2025, has been presented as a settlement of Title VI violations, specifically the university’s alleged failure to curtail bias and harassment directed toward Jewish faculty, staff, and students. However, as has been pointed out by…
BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ The recent announcement of the founding of the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE) reveals another “axis of power” in the multiwebbed right-wing war on the US university. Though the new body entails only the seven southern public university systems of Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas A & M,…
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 JENNIFER RUTH After the often absurd congressional hearings on alleged antisemitism (nine of them in eighteen months), after the withdrawal of federal funding for projects entirely unrelated to antisemitism, after the almost complete destruction of the Department of Education and its ability to run Title VI investigations on antisemitism, people with otherwise very different…
BY AN ANONYMOUS IRANIAN STUDENT On June 4, 2025, the Trump administration issued a proclamation that restricts or denies entry to the United States of foreign nationals from a list of specific countries, including Iran. In the weeks since then, the AAUP has received numerous emails from current and prospective students affected by the travel…
BY JENNIFER LUNDQUIST AND THE STAND TOGETHER FOR HIGHER ED LEADERSHIP TEAM I, along with the undersigned leaders of Stand Together for Higher Ed, a national faculty-led movement to defend US higher education, are deeply concerned by reports that Harvard University is engaged in negotiations with the Trump administration to settle ongoing legal disputes. While…
BY GLENN COLBY Today the AAUP released a report on data collected from the 2024 AAUP Community College Shared Governance Survey, conducted in partnership with the Center for the Study of Community Colleges. This first-of-its-kind survey of community college shared governance provides information about what practices prevail nationally across twenty-six areas of institutional decision-making and how they…