Highlights 13: Modes of Opposition II

Hyde Park, London on March 22, 2024  

Don’t Name Names: Institutions Should Not Provide Student And Faculty Info to Enable Deportations 

 'In response to news reports that the Office for Civil Rights in the US Department of Education has requested the names and nationalities of students and faculty who may have been involved in alleged Title VI violations, the AAUP has written to college and university general counsels to clarify that they are under no legal compulsion to comply with such a request, and to strongly urge them not to comply, given the serious risks and harms of doing so.

'Title VI does not require higher education institutions to provide the personally identifiable information of individual students or faculty members so that the administration can carry out further deportations. This information is irrelevant to legitimate agency efforts to investigate compliance with Title VI. Moreover, sharing this information may violate the First Amendment rights of students and faculty for multiple reasons. In addition to the Title VI and constitutional concerns, both FERPA and analogous state law protections also affirmatively preclude such disclosure. And finally, but no less importantly, sharing this information is inconsistent with institutional commitments to freedom of speech and academic freedom.'

Read the full letter here. 

SOURCE: American Association of University Professors (AAUP), April 2, 2025

 

WE MUST LEVERAGE THE STRENGTH OF OUR INSTITUTIONS AND STAND TOGETHER

'The pressure is mounting. The University of Pennsylvania has now been threatened with major federal budget cuts; the leader of the largest U.S. Attorney’s Office in the country has declared a ban on hires from schools with DEI in their curriculum; there has been another ICE detention of an international student; and the French government claims a scientist on his way to a conference was turned away at the U.S. border for being critical of the Trump regime’s funding cuts to science. 

'We do not pretend that there are easy answers to this crisis. We understand that many universities are already working with their state attorneys general and representatives, lobbyists, and civil rights lawyers and organizations to protect their students and campuses. But the moment is urgent. Delaying strong concerted action risks losing ground we may never recover.

'How can we most effectively leverage the collective strength of our institutions?

'We ask all sixty institutions under government threat to unite in a coordinated, proactive defense. In addition to continuing to pursue robust, good-faith Title VI investigations of antisemitism on campus with due process afforded to all parties, we propose that the sixty universities and colleges—and others willing to join this effort—assemble a nimble task force to unite on effective, coordinated action that can adapt as the situation on the ground changes. 

'Listed below are some collective actions such a task force might pursue: 

• Refuse to comply with illegal governmental overreach that undermines a university’s academic decision-making and self-governance. 
• Defend freedom of inquiry by faculty and researchers from government censorship.
• Provide full legal representation for all illegally detained or targeted international students.
• Refuse to share student records or immigration information—to the extent that is legally permissible—with federal authorities seeking to suppress legal dissent. 
• Engage local, regional, national and international media to expose these abuses of power. 
• Lobby state legislators to enact protective laws safeguarding university autonomy and international members of our communities. 
• Lobby our federal representatives to assert their constitutional powers to check transgressions by the executive branch. 
• Engage alumni of the university to defend the institution that supported their life opportunities. 
• Build alliances across red, blue, and purple states, across local and national unions, employers and other institutions that benefit from what universities contribute to society.
• Publicly affirm that universities will not tolerate intimidation of students—domestic or international, Jewish, Palestinian or otherwise—exercising their free speech rights. 
• Begin a campaign of joint op-eds signed by college presidents and chancellors to reaffirm our institutional commitments and defend our peers when they come under attack. 

 

'Failing to act now will establish a dangerous precedent of capitulation. If universities do not stand together now, they will stand alone—and one by one, they will fall.'

 

SOURCE: University of Massachusetts, Amherst Faculty, March 20, 2025

 

RESOLUTION TO BE SUBMITTED TO THE ACADEMIC SENATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

'Resolution 

'Whereas the University of California and other American universities face an unprecedented and coordinated assault pressuring them to compromise academic freedom and constitutionally protected free speech in exchange for federally funded research and its associated financial benefits;

'Whereas scholars and students have reportedly been deprived of liberty without due process of law;

'Whereas international students and scholars, regardless of immigration status, are essential to the University of California’s status as one of the world's premier public university systems and a global leader in arts, humanities, and research across science, technology, medicine, and the social sciences;

'Be it resolved that the Academic Senate of the University of California unequivocally condemns these attacks on academia and free speech, reaffirms its commitment to protecting these fundamental values, and urges the President of the University and the Chancellors of all ten campuses to affirm their commitment to these principles publicly. Furthermore, we call on them to resist and legally challenge any federal mandates that violate the First Amendment, Academic freedom, or other state and federal laws.

 

SOURCE: email list circulation 

 

DON’T LIKE WHAT TRUMP IS DOING? YOU HAVE MORE POWER THAN YOU THINK.

'I didn’t need a pastor to tell me that businesses that made diversity commitments during the troubled summer of 2020 didn’t really care about my Black life, but churches must show what the Christian faith has to say about what’s going on the outside, in the world of flesh and blood. Actions like boycotts are a form of pastoral ministry for those who feel ignored or forgotten. They show that churches care about whole persons and the communities in which we live.

'“It is one thing to make Target respect us,” the Rev. Charlie Dates, the pastor of Salem Baptist Church and Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, told me. “It is another thing altogether to respect ourselves.”

'Part of self-respect is remembering one’s own agency. In that sense, it does not matter whether Target accedes to the demands to stay true to its D.E.I. commitments in the short term. It matters that we remember the power of collective action, the sense of self that arises when we act on principle.

'We aren’t powerless. No other organization gathers as many Black people weekly as the Black church. Since the boycott began, Target’s share price has declined by 18 percent. The boycott is certainly not the only reason for that or even a major one, given how unsettled the economy is. But it does feel that we are being heard.

...

'So much of our economy is built on exploitation that it can be difficult to know where to begin. (And we still have to shop somewhere.) That can lead to a certain moral despair where we separate our economics from our ethics.

'The clergy members leading this movement want to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way. The inability to do everything does not mean that we should do nothing. The way companies treat their workers and their customers reveals their values. When they tell you who they are, we must believe them and act accordingly.'

 

SOURCE: Esau McCaulley, New York Times, March 23, 2025

  

DO THE VERY LOUD DEFENSE OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS

 

'Martínez: If Yale had told you maybe off the record that they were going to try and work behind the scenes maybe to protect academic freedom, but that it would be much more difficult to do without the federal funds. How would you have responded to that?

'Stanley: I would respond by saying that's the wrong tack. You need a very loud defense of democratic institutions. That response would not take seriously the point that this is a war.

'If universities think they can work behind the scenes and make friends, they're simply confused about the nature of the conflict. Yale University, like other leading universities, needs to take the lead, take a leadership role with and collectively work with other universities loudly to protect democracy.

'Martínez: But what war can be won without funding?

'Stanley: You might lose anyway. But you can't win a war unless you recognize it's a war. This way they're going to pick us off one by one. And history is watching here. Our institutions will be written about. They're being attacked for this entirely fake reason that's furthermore fomenting antisemitism in the United States. It's going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people.

'So, if universities want to fight anti-Semitism, they need to stand up and say, "No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews."' 

SOURCE: A. Martínez and Jason Stanley, NPR, April 1, 2025

 

REMINDING MAGA THAT’S ITS REAL BASE IS PUBLIC SERVICES

 

 

SOURCE: Steven Bernard and Guy Chazan, Financial Times, March 27, 2025 

 

DO THE LONG GAME, DEMOCRATS!

'Democrats flooded the Valimont and Weil campaigns with millions of dollars in donations for races they couldn’t win. According to the federal finance reports, the campaigns bought donor lists, cultivated thousands of small donors, and spent millions to make more millions. The money came pouring in.

'Valimont, a community organizer and gun control activist, raised three times more than Patronis to lose the race to replace Matt Gaetz in Congressional District 1. Weil, a high school math teacher, raised ten times more than Fine to lose the District 6 seat that had been held by Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser.

'The fundraising haul and dismal polling for Fine ahead of the vote was enough to scare Trump into pulling his nomination of New York Representative Elise Stefanik for US ambassador to the United Nations. “We have a slim margin,” Trump said last week. “We don’t want to take any chances. We don’t want to experiment.” But in Florida, it was all a mirage. Democrats were never going to win these districts. The congressional maps were drawn to give Republicans a reliable voter registration advantage. Trump remains popular in the state, and these seats have been dependably red for decades. 

'Both Patronis and Fine should have won by blowouts and the Democrats’ financial surge may have reduced the margins in districts that Trump won by roughly 30 percentage points. But although cutting Trump’s margin in half may feel good to some Democrats, it doesn’t change the fact that Florida Democrats have been without a well-funded operation for nearly two decades. 

'Democrat voter registration numbers have been plummeting in the state since the pandemic. They’ve also been dropping recently in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.

'And in some ways, the infusion of out-of-state cash may have backfired for Democrats. After the scare of getting outraised, Fine donated about $600,000 to his campaign, Trump started paying attention and Elon Musk’s super PAC wrote a check.

'It’s time for Democrats to be realistic and start playing the long game, says Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant and architect of President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in Florida.

'“Control what we can control,” he said. “Spending eight or ten million on voter registration across five or six congressional districts would probably make a pretty big difference in Florida.”'

SOURCE: Mary Ellen Klas,  Bloomberg, April 2, 2025

 

 COLUMBIA’S CAPITULATION, AND WESLEYAN’S PUSHBACK

'"It’s a Vichy moment in American history," Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, told me in a wide-ranging interview. "Like I have a restaurant and if I collaborate with the Nazis and don’t let any Jews eat here, then the guys who wash dishes will still have jobs. As you know, that slope is very slippery. Appeasement doesn’t end well."

'Only the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, writing in The Atlantic, has joined Roth in criticizing the assault on academic freedom and Columbia’s response to it, though in somewhat more guarded language. "Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights," Eisgruber wrote. But he added that "legitimate concerns" about antisemitism might warrant investigation.

'Roth told me that he has tried to organize other university presidents to stand together against Trump’s strategy of picking off universities one at a time, but has had no takers. Here is a link to the Zoom of our entire interview.

'The real question is, why is Roth so lonely?

'ROTH’S VICHY ANALOGY IS EXACT. In 1940, the French hoped to preserve part of "free France" by making a separate peace with the Nazis and setting up a puppet regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain based in Vichy, while the Germans occupied and ruled northern France. The arrangement lasted only until the Gestapo decided otherwise in 1942 and "free France" fell increasingly under direct Nazi rule.

'Preserving a Columbia that is partly free is the same sort of fantasy. The rest of Columbia is free only until Trump decides to escalate his demands and seize more territory.

'With the Columbia precedent, Trump will feel free to roll over other universities that have violated this or that made-up standard. Universities are hiding in self-censorship.

'The University of Cincinnati, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Alaska system, and many more have scrubbed their websites of all DEI references. Former diversity offices have been remained offices of "Belonging" or "Collaboration," as the University of Colorado calls its former diversity program.

'Collaboration is all too apt a name.

'Students at Harvard are being urged not to display signs in solidarity with Gaza to avoid provoking our dictator. Harvard has an endowment of about $54 billion. Weirdly, Harvard picked last week to announce that the college would be tuition-free for all students with family incomes of under $200,000. That’s generous, but how about using its massive endowment as F-you money to defend academic freedom from Trump?

'The president of Johns Hopkins, which lost $800 million in USAID grants causing over 2,000 layoffs, issued only the most anodyne statement, not breathing a word of criticism about the administration’s outrageous decision. "Today is a profoundly difficult day for our colleagues and for our university, marking a significant loss of exceptional people … whose work has advanced the mission of our university," said Hopkins President Ron Daniels.

'Earlier this month, Trump suspended $175 million in federal funds to the University of Pennsylvania on the absolutely trivial ground that Penn allowed a transgender athlete to compete on the women’s swim team—in 2022. An unnamed university spokeman said that the university had received no official word, and that Penn has "always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies" and does not have its own policy "regarding student participation on athletic teams."

'Under Trump, Wesleyan’s President Roth said, "the government seems too willing to use its powers more like organized crime figures than like elected representatives in the past." Yet the stance of most university presidents in the face of Trump’s assaults is somewhere between contrite and complicit.

'Why have university presidents been so cowardly? The broad answer, I think, is that for decades universities have become more and more like corporations. They have bloated administrations, overpaid presidents who style themselves as CEOs, and profit maximization strategies that include gaming the U.S. News rankings and raising sticker prices to see how little financial aid they can grant while still maintaining their rank.

'Having a presentable number of lower-income and minority students has been part of the package. But if the government wants to change the rules, no big deal.

'Their boards of trustees are dominated by very wealthy people. The co-chair of Columbia’s board, David Greenwald, spent 20 years as a senior executive at Goldman Sachs. You can just imagine how he advised acting President Armstrong on the question of whether to confront or appease Trump.

'College presidents spend most of their waking hours raising money. Cultivating rich donors and maximizing federal funding and the allowable overhead charges is a huge part of the business model. If that’s now at risk, what might they do to kowtow to the Emperor?

'Scholarly inquiry and academic freedom kept falling further and further down the hierarchy of what mattered to college administrations. The debasement of the university and the corruption of democracy are two sides of the same greasy coin.'

SOURCE: Robert Kuttner, Amerian Prospect, March 24, 2025