Haley Street, Santa Barbara on April 5, 2014   

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION BEGINS INTERVIEWING UC FACULTY AS PART OF ANTISEMITISM PROBE

‘Federal officials have begun contacting University of California faculty members for an antisemitism probe after the school complied with a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking the personal information of around 900 faculty members, two UC employees with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO.

 

‘The employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, said federal officials have begun reaching out and speaking with faculty members last week, raising concern from faculty that the federal government is trying to pit them against each other as President Donald Trump continues to cut funding from top universities around the country.

 

‘The university sent information the administration requested for all faculty who signed open letters about the school’s response following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission following a subpoena from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to a letter sent March 27 by Charles Robinson, the UC’s chief legal officer. That information includes the employee’s position, date of hire, personal phone number and email address and whether the person is a current or former employee.

 

…

 

‘The first [letter], signed by more than 380 faculty members at UC Berkeley and sent shortly after the attack, expressed “deepest sympathies to Israelis and to Jews worldwide in this hour of terror and brutal devastation” as well as “deep sympathy and concern for the people of Gaza as they face a major military onslaught whose impact will indeed be brutal.”

 

‘The second letter, sent last May, called for university leadership to do more to protect Jewish students and faculty and had more than 500 signatures.

Robinson told faculty in the March 27 letter that the EEOC may “reach out to you as part of its investigation regarding your own experiences at the University,” but said they did not have to speak to the agency officials or tell the university if they are cooperating.

 

SOURCE: Eric He, Politico, April 10, 2025. 

 

EXPLOSION OF VISA TERMINATIONS

 

‘On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had revoked 300 or more student visas, claiming these students were “lunatics.” Rubio claims students sought entrance into the U.S. “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.”’

 

‘Over the past few weeks, more colleges and universities have shared that their students have lost their F-1 or J-1 student visas—some related to their activism and participation in student-led protests against the war in Gaza, others for minor crimes. Most college officials say they’re unsure of why foreign-born students had their legal residency status terminated or have yet to receive formal notification of the changes. A majority have yet to receive any communications from immigration authorities.’

SOURCE: Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed April 8, 2025 and ongoing 

THE ECONOMIST OPPOSES TRUMP ON UNIVERSITIES 

 

‘This is an economic revolution and we will win.” Donald Trump’s line on tariffs sounds like something from Robespierre or Engels. And as any revolutionary knows, to sweep away the old order it is not enough just to raise import duties. You also have to seize and refashion the institutions that control the culture. In America that means wresting control of Ivy League universities which play an outsize role in forming the elite (including Mr Trump’s cabinet). The maga plan to remake the Ivies could have terrible consequences for higher education, for innovation, for economic growth and even for what sort of country America is. And it is only just beginning.

 

‘The target has been exquisitely chosen. Over the past decade elite universities have lost the bipartisan support they used to enjoy . . . But the most substantive change has been within the Republican Party. Conservatives considered elite universities to be hostile territory even before William F. Buckley published “God and Man at Yale” in 1951. Yet they also respected the basic compact that exists between universities and the federal government: that taxpayers fund scientific research and provide grants for students from poor families, and in return, universities do world-changing research.

'Some of the researchers may have views that irk the White House of the day. Many are foreigners. But their work ends up benefiting America. That is why, in 1962, the government funded a particle accelerator, even though some people who would use it had long hair and hated American foreign policy. And why, later that decade, researchers at American universities invented the internet, with military funding.

'This deal has been the source of military as well as economic power. It has contributed to almost every technological leap that has boosted output, from the internet to mrna vaccines and glp-1 agonists to artificial intelligence. It has made America a magnet for talented, ambitious people from around the world. It is this compact—not bringing car factories back to the rust belt—that is the key to America’s prosperity. And now the Trump administration wants to tear it up.

…

‘What [Trump] wants in return varies. Sometimes it is to eradicate the woke-mind virus. Sometimes it is to eradicate antisemitism. It always involves a double standard on free speech, according to which you can complain about cancel culture and then cheer on the deportation of a foreign student for publishing an op-ed in a college newspaper. This suggests that, as with any revolution, it is about who has power and control.

 

‘So far, universities have tried to lie flat and hope Mr Trump leaves them alone, just like many of the big law firms that the president has targeted. The Ivy presidents meet every month or so, but have yet to come up with a common approach. Meanwhile, Harvard is changing the leadership of its Middle East studies department and Columbia is on its third president in a year. This strategy is unlikely to work. The maga vanguard cannot believe how quickly the Ivies have capitulated. The Ivies also underestimate the fervour of the revolutionaries they are up against. Some of them don’t just want to tax Harvard—they want to burn it down.'

 

SOURCE: “The Campus Counterrevolution,” The Economist April 10, 2025

 

TRUMP CHAOS IS ALIENATING REPUBLICANS

 

‘The speed and scale of the American public’s souring on Trump’s economic agenda are stunning. Last week, just before the tariff chaos, 63 per cent of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago.

 

‘All-time records were also shattered for the share of people who expect the economy to further deteriorate over the next year. Just 25 per cent of US adults said they expect their finances to look better in five years than today — lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession.

 

‘Notably, these sharp deteriorations are being felt across the aisle. Even before “liberation day”, a third of Republicans disapproved of Trump’s actions on the economy, a remarkable feat given levels of partisan polarisation in America. A lot of people who thought they were an “us” have discovered they are a “them”.’

...

 

‘[T]he narrow subset of voters who identify as Maga Republicans continue to approve of the president at astronomically high levels, even after the tangible turmoil of the past 10 weeks.

 

‘But the larger group of other voters who backed Trump last November is rapidly souring on his economic policies and overall record. (Interestingly, the same does not yet appear to be true of Trump’s performatively hostile immigration policy, where arrests and deportations have done little to turn off those who backed the president in November.)

 

 

‘Trump, his vice-president JD Vance, Elon Musk and the other senior figures around him operate largely in their own closed media ecosystem, populated by vocal members of the deeply ideological Maga community. As such they tend to be detached from both wider public opinion and dissenting voices.

 

‘This may give the president and his team the sense that their actions have been much better received than they have. But the data suggests that while the Maga echo chamber may be impervious, it is far from all-pervasive.’

…

 

‘There are two clear lessons from Trump’s second term thus far. The first is that he’s not ushering in a new era of American prosperity. The second is that as more people realise this, the political situation could start to change quite quickly.’

SOURCE: Burn-Murdoch, John. “Trump Chaos Is Alienating Republicans.” FT, April 4, 2025 

 

THE ONGOING FAILURE OF LIBERAL ELITES

 

‘My view of US history is not just janus-faced, but developmental. To locate Trump we need to offer a historical account of how we got here, an account that is path-dependent and means that Trump is not just a shock but indicative of a deeper and longer-term trend. You don’t have to start your story-telling “at the beginning”. We all think and speak in “medias res”. But if you don’t see that the coalition that supported US globalism in its liberal variant has collapsed and that that didn’t start in 2024 or in 2016, you are missing the point.

 

‘Of course, [Joseph] Nye’s argument is also historical. Indeed, as a policy intellectual, he is truly a figure of the American century. But the mode of his historical narration and the way he situates the current Trump moment is different. It might be described as episodic or seasonal. In rather strong terms one might call it cyclical rather than developmental.

 

‘Characteristic moments where the episodic and seasonal view of history in Nye’s article reveals itself, include the following:

 

• American soft power has good moments and bad - as opposed to a series of interconnected and mutually conditioning phases in a path-dependent development towards illegitimacy.
• After Trump 1.0 came Biden and global confidence rebounded - de facto Trump is the exception and Biden-style globalism the norm.
• Whatever the antics of the White House, there are checks and balances - glossing over the possibility that those might be systematically and progressively subverted not just by MAGA but by trends in US politics more generally, including on the liberal side. Nye acknowledges that all is not well with US democracy, but immediately passes on to the question of “solutions”.
• American civil society is the ultimately decisive force and it is attractive and positive - as opposed to riven by profound tensions and contradictions of which the ugly state of US democracy is a fair reflection.
• Musk is simply a “billionaire” - as opposed to the most extreme instance of a new type of oligarchy that disrupts familiar patterns of elite lobbying and political economy.

 

‘This kind of episodic view of history relieves its exponents of the need to actually consider current historical trends and what they signify. You can simply shrug and remark that American soft power has ups and downs and it is currently going through a bleak phase.

 

‘In the seasonal variant, the episodic view of history promises that winter will be followed by spring. The GOP sweep in 2024 will be followed by a Democratic Party comeback in the midterms in 2026.

 

‘Thinking about Nye’s piece I realize that since the start of the year I have encountered this mode of historical thinking two times “in the flesh” in interaction with Democratic Party elites and also in reading interviews with prominent figures like Jake Sullivan.

 

‘The lite version of this quiescent logic was on display at a meeting of the American Academy with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Froman and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

 

‘Rather than facing the dramatic, irreversible and historic implications of the second Trump Presidency, my co-panelists shuffled comfortably back and forth between the present and the past, exchanging lessons learned in the Obama administration. The prevailing mood was one of accommodating oneself to the “turn-taking” in Washington - “so the wheel of history turns”.

..

 

‘[In a second event], What prevailed amongst the veterans of the Biden administration was that same mixture of regret and self-congratulation. The two were resolved in the celebration of “legacy”, “lesson learning” and locker room backslapping. There was no sign, at all, of a clear-eyed assessment of the historic defeat in 2024. Instead, my American co-panelists peddled lessons for their European audience, as if nothing had happened in November 2024. Indeed, they professed themselves particularly proud of documents (“work products”) published in the lame duck period following their defeat. Like Sullivan, the Bidenaughts seemed oblivious to the significance of their own failure.

...

‘If Trump 2.0 takes the politics of the imaginary to a new level, is this a rupture with the supposedly more grounded Biden administration? Or, in light of the exit interviews with team-Biden, do we have to face the fact that both sides are trapped in their own mythologies? In which case, what we living in now is not so much a descent into madness, as a new season of West Wing, this time “West Wing for deplorables”.'

 

SOURCE: Adam Tooze, Chartbook 359, March 9, 2025

 

FASCISM SCHOLAR JASON STANLEY KNOWS IT WHEN HE SEES IT, LEAVES AMERICA

 

‘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, “Why This Yale Professor Is Fleeing America.” NPR, April 1, 2025.

 CAMPUS POLICE ARE USING ISRAELI SPY TECH TO CRACK DOWN ON STUDENT PROTEST

 

‘Police militarization has been further accelerated by more than two decades of “training expeditions” in which thousands of U.S. police have traveled to learn from Israeli police and military who enforce an occupation of Palestinians with the aid of high-tech surveillance technology. Such trips are also an opportunity for Israeli-based companies to sell their surveillance products. These include the ironically named Nice Systems, which provides camera networks; SuperCom, which deals in electronic monitoring; and Cellebrite, which specializes in phone-hacking technology and has sold its products to agencies in at least 20 states. This influence is detailed by author Antony Loewenstein in his influential text The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. He writes that Israel engages in the surveillance of all Palestinians en masse, “regardless of age, location, or intent.”

 

‘A report from Deadly Exchange, a campaign launched by Jewish Voice for Peace, details how such exchanges “expose US law enforcement to the comprehensive monitoring and infiltration tactics and technologies in the Israeli arsenal, modeling the apparatus of a sweeping surveillance state.”

 

‘Some universities in the U.S. are also complicit in these trainings, such as the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program based at Georgia State University, where Israeli police are invited to train U.S. law enforcement from major U.S. cities. Activists have called for ending the GILEE program, sponsored in part by the Atlanta Police Foundation, the nonprofit behind the large police training facilitysouth of the city known as “Cop City.”

In 2019, Wayne State University’s chief of police traveled to Israel “to share law enforcement strategies” as part of a “delegation” of other police officers visiting from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. He noted the importance of the university police’s jurisdiction, “not only [on] campus, but also [in] the greater Midtown Detroit area — all neighbors and members of our community.”

‘As police try to legitimize their growing repression, communities continue to resist. In 2020, Tufts University students voted in a referendum to prohibit campus police from attending future retreats in Israel. Amnesty Internationalnoted that funds spent “to train our domestic police in Israel should concern all of us,” explaining that many domestic police abuses documented parallel “violations by Israeli military, security and police officials.”

 

‘Spying From the Ivory Tower

 

‘During the wave of pro-Palestine encampments that swept the country last spring, campus police took the opportunity to amplify traditional strong-arm behaviors (which included numerous violent assaults against professors and students alike) with newly acquired surveillance technology. This dangerous combination led to more than 3,200 arrests nationwide.

 

‘Universities supported these efforts by quickly suspending First Amendment rights to peaceable assembly, with some even enforcing archaic anti-mask laws against student protesters (originally enacted in response to the Ku Klux Klan) to aid police use of facial recognition software.

 

‘The student newspaper Columbia Spectator exposed in September how the administration at Columbia University and Barnard College spied on student activists before and after the encampments. Following a “Resistance 101” workshop held by a campus divestment group earlier in the spring, campus police started collecting information on demonstrators, gathering footage from campus surveillance cameras and tracking student IDs swiped at building entrances. They also sent private investigators to interrogate students at home, Columbia Spectator reports. The administration then began to suspend students, expel them from housing and call them before disciplinary hearings. New York City Police Department (NYPD) conducted multiple sweeps of student spaces.

 

‘In a press conference on May 1, during the height of the campus protests, New York City Mayor Eric Adams thanked Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who joined him onstage, for “monitoring the situation” when protests first began across the city. Professor Weiner, who conveniently moonlights as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, serves as the liaison between NYPD’s Tel Aviv branch (built in 2012 on the rubble of the destroyed Palestinian village Kfar Saba) and NYPD stateside. Weiner boasted that her office in New York had received “hourly updates” from the NYPD’s Tel Aviv precinct since October 7, ensuring that the militarized army terrorizing Palestinians was aligned with those harming U.S. students.

 

‘At Yale University, the 93-officer private police department kept an eye on campus protests with help from the FBI. As journalist Theia Chatelle reported in Jewish Currents, documents obtained from the settlement in a lawsuit for public records revealed that Jennifer Wagner, the head of the FBI’s New Haven office, reached out to Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell to offer assistance: “The FBI has been monitoring the widespread protests related to the Israel/Hamas conflict at several colleges and universities.” After an alleged assault in April, the FBI got a search warrant for the home of a pro-Palestine student and performed what Yale Public Safety referred to as a “dump” of information from their cell phone, a serious invasion of their personal property. The Yale Police Department “installed cameras on campus, tracked students’ social media accounts and monitored students using aerial drones,” according to Chatelle.'

 

SOURCE: Tara Goodarzi  and Brian Dolinar, “Campus Police Are Using Israeli Spy Tech to Crack Down on Student Protest.” Truthout, February 24, 2025. 

 

 

TRUMP MANIPULATES AMERICAN JEWS WHILE BANNING BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS

 

‘In the aftermath of the excessive use of force, the university created a Task Force on Antisemitism, which actually came up with a sensible definition:

 

‘Antisemitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.’

 

‘The task force added: “To be clear, we do not think that a statement should be impermissible just because it qualifies as antisemitic under this definition. Offensive statements generally are protected under the University’s rules, so the University can encourage vibrant debate. The purpose of this definition is to educate, not to ban.”

 

‘However, other universities, including Harvard, have gone further, equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Harvard has adopted the much broader International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which considers some anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli criticism to be antisemitism per se. And Trump would arrogate to himself the prerogative to define what is antisemitism and what consequences offending universities, and students, should suffer.

 

‘Meanwhile, some 2,500 Jewish university professors have signed a statement called “Not in Our Name” objecting to the weaponization of antisemitism. The statement reads in part: “We hold various views about Israel and Palestine, politics in the Middle East, and student activism on our campuses. But we are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name—and cynical claims of antisemitism—to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities. We specifically reject rhetoric that caricatures our students and colleagues as ‘antisemitic terrorists’ because they advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom.”

 

‘This week, Netanyahu is hosting a global conference on antisemitism. His featured speakers are Europe’s worst right-wing leaders, who have no love of Jews but opportunistically embrace Israel. The whole idea smelled so bad that several of Europe’s mainstream leaders pulled out. Even the ADL bailed. But this is exactly what Trump is doing at home.

 

‘One bitter irony in Trump’s love-bombing of the Jews has not gotten nearly enough attention. Trump has paired his exaggerated and hypocritical solicitude for the Jews with his escalating punishment of any institution that embraces affirmative action for Black people, otherwise known as DEI.

 

‘Think about it. Trump is singling out Jews to get special consideration and protection, while he bans and punishes any special consideration of Black people and blocks even basic civil rights enforcement. Yes, antisemitism is a blight. But honestly, if you compare the Jewish experience in America—a refugee community that thrived here as nowhere else in the world—with the Black experience—suffering the inhumanity of slavery, persecuted through the ravages of Jim Crow, and never really escaping the scourge of discrimination—which community has more of a right to say, “I don’t feel safe”? Which has more of a claim on the government for extra protection?

 

‘Ideally, civil rights and civil liberties should be protected evenhandedly. But here is Trump, using fake solicitude for Jews to bash liberal universities and abolish civil rights enforcement for Black people.

 

‘This will not end well.’

 

 SOURCE: Kuttner, Robert. The American Prospect, March 25, 2025. 

 

 

 

Syracuse University on March 31, 2016

THE WAY OF THE DOOFUS WARRIOR (THAT MUST BE DEFEATED)

'Yesterday we looked at how a doofus and blowhard, awash in derp, can nonetheless have a tactical genius that allows him to defeat all enemies again and again. I focused on an analogy I’m familiar with: increased mobility as a key to victory for Northern Civil War generals. But something funny happened in response to this post. ... A number of readers wrote in and said they agreed with the Sherman analogy but that a much tighter conceptual framework comes from a highly influential American military theorist who died almost 20 years ago, Colonel John Richard Boyd.

 

'Boyd is known for something called OODA loops. We’ll get to the specifics in a second. But he argued that all military action is defined by patterns of getting information, deciding how to act on it and then acting. Whoever completes those loops faster dominates and wins. The same also applies if you can get inside the other player’s decision loop and disrupt them.

...

'[Reader 1 wrote]: "Boyd’s concept of the OODA Loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) suggests that whoever controls the tempo controls the fight. In the case of active conflict, like a political campaign, if you can get through OODA loops faster than your opponent, you can change the context in ways that make their responses to your prior moves irrelevant and ineffective.

 [Reader 2 wrote]]: "Your description of Trump’s behavior, and my own shared observation of it, suggests that he is doing this deliberately."

 

"'Trump does seem to have realized that, paradoxically, the 24 hour news cycle and the “Internet Time” phenomena that demands instant responses to other candidate’s statements and acts, has paradoxically led to the accretion of ever greater layers of buffering and vetting to prevent a candidate from losing a news cycle, or several news cycles, to a gaffe that have both created an absolute minimum response time that can be exploited by dispensing with those protections and attenuated the effectiveness of the response when it comes because the fear of the gaffe exceeds the desire to exploit the opportunity. The result is exactly the kind of Luntzified keyword marble-mouthed double talking zinger durp that people (on both sides) have come to loathe. What Trump has realized is that he can get inside the other candidates’ OODA loops by just working without a net and firing off one tweet and one unfiltered message after another so that the other guys are responding to what he said three tweet cycles ago. But perhaps more importantly, he’s realized he can get away with what the other campaigns would deem disasterous “gaffes” by getting inside the press corps’ OODA loop, which he does by firing gaffe after gaffe after gaffe in n such machine-gun like rapid succession that the MSM never has a chance to focus on one and turn it into something like, say Romney’s “49%” or Obama’s “bitter clingers” gaffes (square quote omitted) because by the time they report it, he’s already belted out a half dozen more on that topic and fired off three other salvos on three other topics.''"

[Understanding this can help opponents keep Trump from running circles around them.]

 

SOURCE: Josh Marshall, Talking Points (August 28, 2015). 

 

GEORGETOWN LAW DEAN WILLIAM M. TREANOR TO INTERIM US ATTORNY EDWARD R. MARTIN, JR.

 

'Your letter challenges Georgetown’s ability to define our mission as an educational institution. It inquires about Georgetown Law’s curriculum and classroom teaching, asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion is part of the curriculum, and asserts that your office will not hire individuals from schools where you find the curriculum “unacceptable.” The First Amendment, however, guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it. The Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.

 

'This is a bedrock principle of constitutional law – recognized not only by the courts, but

by the administration in which you serve. The Department of Education confirmed last week that it cannot restrict First Amendment rights and that it is statutorily prohibited from “exercising control over the content of school curricula.” Your letter informs me that your office will deny our students and graduates government employment opportunities until you, as Interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, approve of our curriculum. Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.

 

'Georgetown Law has one of the preeminent faculties in the country, fostering groundbreaking scholarship, educating students in a wide variety of perspectives, and thriving on the robust exchange of ideas. Georgetown Law faculty have educated world leaders, members of Congress, and Justice Department officials, from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We pride ourselves on providing an excellent graduate and professional education, built upon the Catholic and Jesuit tradition. Georgetown-educated attorneys have, for decades, served this country capably and selflessly in offices such as yours, and we have confidence that tradition will continue. We look forward to your confirming that any Georgetown-affiliated candidates for employment with your office will receive full and fair consideration.'

 

SOURCE:  Pdf link to Treanor letter

 

NATION'S LARGEST TEACHERS' UNION SUES EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OVER DEI THREATS

 

'The nation’s largest teachers’ union is asking a federal court to halt the U.S. Department of Education’s enforcement of a directive that threatens to pull federal funding from schools that have race-based programming, arguing that it violates constitutional rights and laws that prohibit the federal government from interfering with curricula.

 

'The lawsuit, which the NEA filed along with its New Hampshire affiliate and the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday in federal court in New Hampshire, is the second to challenge the department’s Feb. 14 directive that came in the form of a “dear colleague” letter to school and college leaders. 

'The American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association sued the department over the letter on Feb. 25, similarly arguing that the memo infringes upon the Constitution’s First and Fifth amendments.

 

'“The letter is really intended to chill educators in this broad way, and it’s just not acceptable,” said Sarah Hinger, deputy director of the ACLU’s racial justice program.

 

'In addition to challenging the dear colleague letter and a follow-up “frequently asked questions” document to clarify it, the lawsuit asks a judge to find that the Education Department’s recently launched “End DEI” portal to be unlawful. The portal asks member of the public to submit reports of DEI in schools, similar to tip lines that states have set up to solicit reports of critical race theory being taught.

…

'The letter has caused confusion. Legal experts are arguing that it can’t undo existing civil rights laws, but they worry educators may comply anyway to avoid investigations from the department. The follow-up, nine-page, FAQ document seeking to further explain its limitations did not dispel concerns over its alleged constitutional infringements, according to the lawsuit from the teachers’ union and the ACLU.

 

'Instead, the letter, along with the FAQs and the “End DEI” portal, “radically resets … longstanding positions on civil rights laws that guarantee equality and inclusion,” and presumes districts are acting unlawfully, the complaint says.'

SOURCE: Brooke Schultz, Ed Week (March 5, 2025)

 

MESA BOARD STATEMENT ON THE REPRESSION OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE UNITED STATES

 

'First and foremost, the MESA Board of Directors demands that the government immediately end its repressive campaign against American colleges and universities. We call on all branches of the federal government as well as elected officials and civil servants working at all levels to reject this brazen undermining of fundamental protections enshrined in the Constitution, including due process.

 

'The MESA Board of Directors also calls on lawmakers to recognize the threat these policies represent to higher education in general, and to the specific campuses based in their constituencies in particular. Lawmakers have a critical role to play in ensuring transparency, accountability, and the constitutionality of any and all policies.

 

'The MESA Board of Directors urges university and college administrations to affirmatively defend the autonomy of higher education and the rights of all members of their campus to engage in lawful, First Amendment-protected activity. We also call on university and college administrators to protect and support vulnerable members of our campus communities. Leaders in higher education must recognize that voluntary cooperation — beyond what is legally compulsory — with repressive efforts targeting individual members of our campuses or those abrogating the autonomy of higher education will compromise the safety of campus communities and render all universities more vulnerable to governmental overreach and censorship. Anticipatory obedience is neither a defense against repression nor a viable strategy to avert risk. Rather, it is an invitation to greater repression that endangers students, faculty, and staff, and compromises the integrity of institutions of higher education in a democratic society.

 

'Lastly, we recognize that all of these events, and the climate of fear they have produced, are deeply traumatic to our members. The MESA Board of Directors is determined to face this new threat level and act as a resource in solidarity with our membership in defense of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and institutional autonomy. We will support our members in their efforts to mobilize their own campus communities.'

 

SOURCE: MESA Board Statement on the repression of academic freedom in the United States

 

 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: A TITLE VI DEMAND LETTER THAT ITSELF VIOLATES TITLE VI (AND THE CONSTITUTION)

 

By Kate Andrias, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Jamal Greene, Olatunde Johnson, Jeremy Kessler, Gillian Metzger, and David Pozen

 

'On Thursday, the president of Columbia University received a remarkable letter from the General Services Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education. The letter states that the university must meet numerous requirements by March 20, 2025, “as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” These requirements include changes to student disciplinary policies and procedures; changes to rules on university governance, campus security, and campus life; placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department “under academic receivership”; and “comprehensive” reform of admissions to various schools within the university.

As scholars of constitutional law, administrative law, and antidiscrimination law who teach at Columbia, we feel compelled to point out some of the most glaring legal problems with this letter. 

• Title VI Standards. As the basis for the funding cutoff, the letter cites the university’s failure to protect students and faculty from “antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The letter offers no explanation of the alleged violations, no mention of a completed investigation, and no account of how Columbia has been deliberately indifferent to ongoing antisemitic discrimination or harassment on its campus—perhaps because any such account would be implausible at this time. There is therefore no apparent statutory basis for a funding cutoff.
• Title VI Procedures. Prior to a funding cutoff, Title VI requires “an express finding on the record, after opportunity for hearing,” of any failure to comply with the statute, as well as “a full written report” submitted to House and Senate committees at least 30 days before the cutoff takes effect. In defiance of these requirements (among others), the agencies are purporting to immediately freeze federal funds and to impose preconditions that the university must satisfy in advance of “negotiations.” The statute does not allow this approach.
• Title VI Remedies. Even if proper notice had been given, a hearing had occurred, and a statutory violation had been found, Title VI does not permit blanket funding removals. Rather, it requires that any removal be “limited in its effect to the particular program, or part thereof, in which noncompliance has been so found.” There has been no allegation—much less a finding—of noncompliance in the many parts of Columbia from which funding has been cut, including from urgent medical and scientific research. Moreover, any permissible remedy would have to be tailored to addressing unlawful discrimination. The agencies’ demands exhibit no such tailoring and, on the contrary, effectively tell Columbia to rewrite its policies on free speech, student discipline, public safety, undergraduate admissions, and more. Indeed, the remedies demanded in the letter not only far exceed the power of the agencies under Title VI; they also raise serious constitutional concerns.
• Academic Freedom and the First Amendment. The federal government enjoys broad discretion to provide funds to private institutions, including universities. The Supreme Court has made clear, however, that the government “may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected … freedom of speech even if he has no entitlement to that benefit.” Simply put, funding conditions may not impose unconstitutional burdens on First Amendment rights. Many of the agencies’ demands risk compromising academic freedom, which the Supreme Court has recognized as “a special concern of the First Amendment.” The Court has emphasized the importance of academic freedom at universities in particular, stating that “[t]he essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident.” In light of these core First Amendment principles, Title VI has never been understood to allow agencies to insist that a university restructure academic departments or abolish internal governance bodies, for example, as a condition of receiving federal funds.
• Unconstitutional Vagueness. The Supreme Court has further emphasized that “[b]road prophylactic rules in the area of free expression are suspect” and that “[p]recision of regulation must be the touchstone in an area so closely touching our most precious freedoms.” Yet for several of the agencies’ demands implicating freedom of expression, it is unclear what the university must do to comply. For example, the letter offers no details as to what “federal law” or “policy” the university’s admissions practices contravene, and it offers no guidance as to why the university’s existing “time, place, and manner” rules are inadequate. The vagueness of the agencies’ demands compounds the threat to academic freedom and rule by law.
• Due Process. A withdrawal of federal funding without adequate procedural safeguards likely violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment as well as Title VI. The Supreme Court has stated that, in determining what constitutes adequate process, this clause requires an assessment of “the private interest that will be affected by the official action”; “the risk of an erroneous deprivation of such interest through the procedures used”; “the probable value, if any, of additional or substitute procedural safeguards”; and “the Government’s interest, including the function involved and the fiscal and administrative burdens that the additional or substitute procedural requirement would entail.” The fact that Congress established the statutory procedures described above speaks to its own assessment of these factors. In any event, immediate withdrawal of funds without reference to a completed investigation—and in the absence of an opportunity for an administrative hearing or voluntary compliance with legitimate Title VI requirements—is not consistent with the Fifth Amendment.

'This is a preliminary analysis. We do not mean to suggest that it is an exhaustive list of problems with the demand letter, nor do we mean to elevate our concerns about this matter over concerns about other recent actions taken by the executive branch. We focus on the legal infirmities of the letter’s Title-VI-related demands because they have received relatively little attention to date. While we are in no position to dictate the university’s response, we hope that this analysis helps show how these demands threaten not only Columbia’s funding for critical academic research but also fundamental legal principles and the mission of colleges and universities across the country.'

 

SOURCE: David Pozen, Balkinization March 15, 2025

 

 

FACULTY REPONSE TO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA NO LONGER REQUIRING DIVERSITY STATEMENTS FROM JOB APPLICANTS

 

'President Drake’s announcement is a slap in the face to all of the faculty, students, and staff who have dedicated themselves to making the UC an inclusive and diverse community. Getting rid of diversity statements and freezing jobs is not “adjusting” to new circumstances, it is willfully complying with Trump’s racist and xenophobic assaults on higher education. These concessions will not protect the UC from Trump’s wrath, just as it didn’t protect Columbia nor any of the other institutions who have fallen in the crosshairs of the administration’s dismantlement of the country’s democratic institutions.

 

'Drake’s statements will only lead to more fierce attacks on faculty rights—attacks that have not just been coming from Trump, but from the UC Regents and the Office of the President. At least two UC Regents have stated on record that they want unilateral power over UC hiring decisions (largely in response to the outbreak of protests this past year) and have claimed that “shared governance is not working,” without any evidence to substantiate their accusations. Not only are the Regents actively pursuing a hostile restructuring of the UC system based on their own economic interests, their seeming jubilation over the opportunity to exploit Trump’s attacks on climate change, medical research, as well as data-driven intellectual and scientific inquiry signifies that UC leaders are more compelled by greed than by the needs of California residents. 

 

'On hiring freeze:

'The hiring freeze is far less a product of recent attacks by the federal government, than one facet  of a longer process to erode faculty’s civil rights and academic freedom. The UC leaderships’ use of students tuition as a piggy bank for capital investment rather than improving their learning spaces and our working spaces is a mockery to what the UC stands for and means to California residents. 

 

'UC capacity to fight back (and response to Steven Cheung (head of Academic Senate this year) who pretty much conceded to Drake too:

 

'I disagree with my colleague and Academic Senate chair that the UC is not powerful enough to fight back against these attacks. The UC is a pillar of the U.S. higher education system and a crucial line for social and economic mobility for a huge swatch of the state of California. In Fall 2023, the UC’s undergraduate admissions was composed of nearly 200,000 students, 83% of whom were California residents. Conceding to an autocratic leader has never advanced a society’s democratic principles. What we need to see are not concessions to a president that was fundamentally rejected by Californians, but we also need leadership that address the understand these attacks as an existential to democratic institutions and those who commit their lives to making the UCs a world class institution for higher education. 

 

'What we, as faculty students and workers, are demanding is the UC leadership to have a backbone and refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s violations of our academic freedom, civil rights, and constitutional protections of our first and fourth amendment rights. We are ready to do whatever it takes to defend our democratic institutions. What we need now is for UC leadership to take the same risks we’ve seen thousands of students, faculty, staff, and workers around the country make in response to Trump’s assault on higher ed.'

 

SOURCE: CUCFA list

 

 

A MESSAGE TO MY COLLEAGUES AT ELITE UNIVERSITIES: YOU MUST CHOOSE, STOCKWELLISM OR SOLIDARITY

 

'It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way:

 

'“Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.”'

 

'I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says it will be. Without the millions and millions in federal funding that he and his colleagues luxuriate in, he would be sent plummeting into that netherworld, where high school and community college instructors reside, of “just teaching some classes”—and where, of course, many, many instructors at Columbia University also reside.

'I’m not going to knock this knucklehead for seeing his lifeworld as it is, and stating it so forthrightly to the New York Times.

'I am going to knock him for his utter lack of political sense:  

• not simply his full-frontal embrace of elitism and privilege, in the nation’s most important newspaper; 
• not simply his full-frontal embrace of elitism and privilege as a way, it seems, of trying to explain why the rest of us, inside or outside of academia, should care about protecting his elitism and privilege; 

'But also his utter failure to see that, whatever his path to glory and ascent has been in these past two decades, the only way forward, for him and his colleagues, in the coming months and years will be: 

•  to start seeing all of academe as a workplace;
•  to start seeing all of his fellow creatures in academe as co-workers, as sources of solidarity;
• and to start seeing all of the activities that go on in “just some classes” and offices and hallways and heating plants and cafeterias and so on, as not just real work with equal value to the work he does in his laboratory, but as real power.' 

SOURCE: Corey Robin, blog (March 20, 2025)