BY AMY HAGOPIAN Public health professionals are charged with responding to humanitarian crises. When hospitals are bombed, when children are deliberately starved, when doctors are assassinated, we’re supposed to speak up. That’s the job. Last week, I was informed my American Public Health Association membership has been revoked, my annual meeting registration cancelled, and I…
BY SAHAR AZIZ For decades, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was mentioned, it was usually in reference to combatting antisemitism. Now the ADL is more accurately cited in the litany of pro-Israeli groups attempting to criminalize Muslim and Palestinian students for seeking an end to the horrific genocide in Gaza. For over a hundred years,…
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 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…
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…
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 BARRY TRACHTENBERG Columbia University’s decision to accept and even go beyond the Trump administration’s extortionist demands forces us to recognize a sobering truth that applies not only to Columbia but to far too many of the scholarly spaces within which we work: Their response is neither a surrender nor a capitulation but is a…
BY EVA CHERNIAVSKY AND AMIT R. BAISHYA We write as former members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR). Both of us resigned from CAFPRR after the refusal of the MLA Executive Council to advance Resolution 2025-1 to the organization’s delegate assembly. Responding to…
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL Recent actions by Harvard University’s administration merit the Association’s timely consideration and—absent a satisfactory response from Harvard—adoption of a censure of the university’s administration. Issuing this censure will require, however, that the Association adapt and expand its censure practices. Whereas the AAUP’s existing practices are limited to responding to harm to…
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…