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Boston Globe
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
It's a bit early to oppose Harvard's negotiations with Trump
'A lot of Harvard faculty believe' that negotiations are proper, Steven Pinker, psychology professor and copresident of Harvard's Council on Academic Freedom, told me. 'It's wise to try to see if there's a face-saving exit — especially assuming that the university doesn't do something crazy like allow the Trump administration to vet faculty appointments or to adjudicate viewpoint diversity or screen applicants for sympathy with American values.' That's the right approach. When the White House can make life even more difficult for Harvard and other universities — say, by trying to Advertisement But some members of the AAUP see the mere act of negotiating as an affront to the university's independence. Government professor and AAUP member Ryan Enos told me, 'It's not a negotiation when somebody is holding a gun to your head.' He added that 'in a free society, we don't negotiate for our rights.' Advertisement Enos has some misgivings about the rollout of diversity, equity, and inclusion in universities, but he believes the Trump administration is 'not asking for an honest and fair way to try to solve that problem.' He believes that the Trump administration is violating Harvard's First Amendment rights, as one of Harvard's lawsuits alleges. Similarly, Kirsten Weld, a history professor and president of Harvard's AAUP chapter, told me that the Trump administration is leveraging 'a huge amount of punitive, coercive power.' The Trump administration has overstepped on some of its demands, but on a purely practical level, Harvard is facing debilitating penalties. Billions of dollars are on the line for critical biomedical research. Foreign students that work on world-leading scientific research are no doubt eyeing research institutions abroad. 'The impact of these actions by the government, which are terrible, are terrible on biomedicine and the biomedical community at the medical school,' Jeff Flier, a medical school professor and the co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, told me. 'You know, if Harvard had no [federal] funding, the English department could continue for the next 600 years.' A Harvard Crimson Advertisement Many of the ideological gripes that Trump has with Harvard come out of the humanities — not from chemistry labs. And the truth is that the Trump attacks on Harvard, while There's heterodox thinkers in the name of 'safety.' I'd wager that some Harvard leaders are more than happy to have an excuse to do away with the most ideologically driven policies. And if Harvard has truly allowed discrimination to take place — something the Trump administration before attacking Harvard — then there are grounds for federal recourse. Negotiations are common parts of resolving legal disputes. The school shouldn't concede on issues that truly compromise its academic freedom. Some of the Trump administration's demands improperly ask Harvard to swap its own ideological litmus tests for the federal government's. Demands like auditing of the faculty and admissions process, and getting to define what ideological diversity looks like on campus are infringements on a private institution. But there are concessions that could actually strengthen Harvard's academic environment. Pinker listed a few, like upholding rules on disruptive protests, enacting measures to 'reinforce openness and mutual respect in the undergraduate culture,' and an agreement to follow the law on 'racial preferences in admissions and enrolling foreign students.' Advertisement Harvard should dismantle any remaining DEI bureaucracy and instead commit to upholding the civil rights protections that are already in place. It should shy away from the language of equity and instead resolve to respect each of its students equally, expecting excellence from everyone — something it Supporting negotiations with the Trump administration doesn't mean you want to instate a quota for the children of Mar-a-Lago members. Carine Hajjar is a Globe Opinion writer. She can be reached at
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trial to consider Trump's ‘ideological-deportation policy' targeting pro-Palestinian students
A lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's effort to deport foreign students over pro-Palestinian views goes to trial in a Massachusetts federal court on Monday, where the government for the first time will need to defend its extraordinary position that it can deport noncitizens over their political speech. The case was brought by the national American Association of University Professors (AAUP); its Harvard, Rutgers and New York University chapters; and the Middle East Studies Association (Mesa) following the arrest and detention of several noncitizen students and scholars who have spoken out on Palestinian rights. The government has claimed the authority to deport noncitizens who have committed no crimes but whose presence it deems poses a threat to US foreign policy. The case is the first of half-dozen legal challenges to the Trump administration's sweeping crackdown on universities to make it to trial, with civil rights and education advocates asking the judge to declare the 'ideological-deportation policy' unconstitutional and unlawful. Those arrested as part of the government's promised campaign against pro-Palestinian foreign students have all been released from immigration detention, with the last of them – Mahmoud Khalil – freed on 20 June. But they all continue to fight against efforts to deport them. Other students left the US or went into hiding to avoid arrest. The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration's policy has created a climate of fear on university campuses, forcing 'many noncitizen students and faculty into silence'. 'Noncitizen members of the AAUP have been chilled by these ideological deportations and forced to self-censor in a variety of different ways, and citizen members have been harmed as a result, because they have been deprived of the insights and engagement of their noncitizen students and colleagues,' said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which is representing the plaintiffs. The complaint includes testimony from several AAUP and Mesa members who say they have scrubbed their social media profiles of posts about Israel and Palestine, even when that is their area of expertise; declined to teach courses, assign readings or publish work related to Palestine; and turned down or withdrawn from opportunities to speak at academic conferences and other events. Some said they stopped traveling internationally, attending protests and signing their names to public statements. One of the witnesses, Nadje Al-Ali, a German anthropologist and former director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University, said she had been working on an academic article making a 'feminist critique of Hamas' but dropped it after Khalil's arrest 'because expressing any nuanced view related to Israel and Palestine feels too dangerous to her', according to a pretrial brief submitted to the court. Al-Ali also turned down a fellowship at the German Orient-Institute in Lebanon 'due to the risk of being denied reentry based on her association with pro-Palestinian speech'. After the arrest of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed she co-authored about Gaza, Megan Hyska, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University originally from Canada, decided not to publish an op-ed she had written about organising resistance to the Trump administration's policies 'because she feared that it would raise her profile and put her at risk of arrest, detention and deportation', according to the brief. Although she had previously served in leadership roles in the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, Hyska declined to pursue further positions for the same reason. Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor at Columbia University, said that the detention of Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, both graduate students at the school, also harmed US citizens such as her because 'the loss of their specific voices significantly impaired conversations about Palestine on campus', according to the brief. El-Haj, who is a co-director of Columbia's Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), said that she canceled planned events at the center out of fears they would become 'the target of immigration raids or bring participants in CPS events to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement's] attention'. Both noncitizen and citizen scholars are expected to testify at the trial. The judge in the case, William G Young, explicitly warned the government against any attempt at 'retribution', and cautioned that any effort at witness intimidation would amount to 'obstruction of justice'. Young, a Reagan appointee, recently ruled in a separate case that the Trump administration's termination of more than $1bn in research grants was 'void and illegal', and represented unlawful 'racial discrimination and discrimination against America's LGBTQ community'. The US Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment, but in a court filing denied there was a policy at all and challenged the court's jurisdiction over the matter. '[N]o such policy exists,' the government's attorneys wrote. The AAUP's case, they added, 'rests on a basic misunderstanding of the first amendment, which under binding supreme court precedent applies differently in the immigration context than it otherwise does domestically'. Lawyers for the plaintiffs maintain that the targeting of noncitizens over pro-Palestinian speech amounts to viewpoint-based discrimination and violates the first amendment, which they argue protects speech by noncitizens as well. 'This case raises the question of what the first amendment means today in the United States,' said Elora Mukherjiee, a lawyer and the director of Columbia Law School's Immigrants' Rights Clinic. 'Can the Trump administration carry out large-scale arrests, detentions and deportations of non-citizens, students and faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other protected first amendment activities?' Another lawsuit brought by the AAUP against the Trump administration's cutting of $400m worth of federal funding to Columbia University was dismissed last month in a New York federal court, with the judge in that case ruling that the AAUP had 'no standing' to bring the case. (The government tried to argue the AAUP has no standing in this case either, but Young disagreed.) So far, Harvard University is the only school to sue the Trump administration over actions it has taken against higher education. But with most universities wary of getting in Trump's crosshairs, academic associations have stepped up, with the AAUP filing four lawsuits so far. 'Universities may be silencing themselves out of fears of retaliation and those fears are not unfounded,' said Krishnan. 'This is not to say that universities are justified in not standing up for their students and faculty. I think it's incredibly important that our democratic institutions stand up to authoritarianism right now.'
Boston Globe
06-07-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Harvard professor union will ‘strongly' oppose any deal between school and Trump, members say
Now, with the university in secretive negotiations as it seeks to stave off Already, the group is pursuing multiple legal challenges to the Trump administration. Members have held rallies, signed petitions, and published op-eds decrying Trump's attacks on institutional independence. 'I expect that the AAUP and the faculty will react very strongly against any sort of deal, precisely because the independence of the university is vital to everything we do,' said classics professor Richard Thomas, an at-large member of Harvard's AAUP chapter. Union members say they're concerned about the university's approach to its talks with Trump. Though the president has said Harvard has Advertisement Harvard officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Harvard's faculty cannot support any deal made without their input, the university's AAUP president Kirsten Weld told the Globe. She argues that Harvard administrators never should have entered Trump's negotiations in the first place, because no private university should take orders from the government or make sacrifices to appease it. 'The red line of academic freedom — the university has already crossed that by allowing what is happening now to happen," said Weld, a history professor. 'The federal government has put a gun to the head of the university and is demanding an ever shifting set of changes, some of which are baldly illegal.' Harvard professors don't have the right to collective bargaining because a Professors would 'strongly' protest deal In April, universities nationwide celebrated Harvard President Alan Garber for refusing to agree to an Advertisement But Garber may have to make some concessions in order to get a deal with Trump, who has called for drastic reforms. Over the past several months, his administration has slashed around $2.8 billion in federal funding from Harvard, and prevented international students from traveling to the United States to study at the school. Vincent Brown, an at-large member of Harvard's AAUP chapter, said that if a deal is announced, members will likely call an emergency meeting to discuss potential next steps. The AAUP chapter would take a vote on any sort of collective action in response to a Trump deal, Brown said. A walkout is not off the table, but it's too soon to predict how professors will want to respond, he said. The timing of the negotiations and subsequent deal, which come when most professors are on summer break, is making organizing challenging, members told the Globe. 'Everybody is very keen to maintain our ability to teach our students, conduct our research, and run our university without government interference,' Brown said. No matter what kind of deal emerges, Harvard's AAUP chapter can count on the unwavering support of the national AAUP, president Todd Wolfson told the Globe. 'I one hundred percent support faculty taking collective action to respond to what they think are fundamental threats to Harvard, to their own work, or to higher education at large — period, end of sentence," Wolfson said last week. Crimson Courage, a Harvard alumni group advocating for institutional independence in the face of Trump's threats, also said they support faculty opposition to a deal with the White House. 'We have the backs of the professors because they should be able to conduct research without having any restrictions on their topics,' said Evelyn Kim, a Harvard alumna who studied sociology. Advertisement Professors not involved in negotiations Harvard AAUP members said they've had to receive news of closed-door negotiations in Washington, D.C. through reporting in national media outlets, as opposed to receiving updates from university officials. Top Harvard officials are setting an alarming precent by not including faculty and students in negotiations over how the university operates, Wolfson said. 'One would assume they're in advanced negotiations with the Trump administration, and the fact they have not talked to their faculty about it is alarming,' Wolfson said. Most Harvard professors oppose negotiating with Trump on university policies, Brown said, citing a 'The most important thing that we can say is that 70-plus percent of the faculty do not want to strike a deal that they don't think the Trump administration will respect anyway,' Brown said. 'So we're going to start from that position of plurality and then figure out what we're going to do.' Claire Thornton can be reached at
Miami Herald
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Behind the turmoil of federal attacks on colleges, some states are going after tenure
HONOLULU - The "gravy train." That's what a Hawai'i state senator called the practice of awarding tenure to university research faculty when she proposed legislation stripping this long-standing form of job protection from them. The bill got little notice at the time. Now, obscured by the turmoil of the many other challenges to higher education since the start of Donald Trump's second presidential term, tenure has come under siege in states across the country. Never in the 110-year history of tenure in the United States have there been so many attempts to gut or reconfigure it, said Julie Reuben, a professor of the history of American education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At least 11 states, including seven since the start of this year, have imposed new levels of review for tenured faculty, made it easier to fire them or proposed banning tenure altogether. Almost all have Republican-controlled legislatures or have seen lawmakers question what is being taught on campuses. This comes at the same time as, but has gotten less attention than, the Trump administration's higher education funding cuts and investigations into colleges and universities. "It's the flip side of the same assault," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, which represents 400,000 faculty and other university and college employees. "Some of the assault is coming from taking away grants, and some of the assault is coming by taking away tenure." Unlike nontenured faculty, who can be dismissed or not reappointed, tenured faculty have more protections - including from being demoted or fired for what they think or say. Without tenure, "If you pursue the truth in ways that are uncomfortable for donors, for students, for trustees, for the state legislature, then you'll lose your job," said Mark Criley, senior program officer for academic freedom, tenure and governance at the faculty union the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. Even before the second Trump administration and this wave of tenure challenges, 45 percent of faculty members said they had refrained from expressing an opinion they feared could attract negative attention, according to a survey conducted for the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges and Universities by the University of Chicago research organization NORC, and released in January. About a third of faculty nationwide have tenure or are on the tenure track, according to AAUP. Most backers of curtailing tenure say they're not doing it for ideological reasons. They say they're trying to lower costs for taxpayers and consumers by removing faculty whose productivity is low. The goal is "getting rid of professors who are not pulling their weight," said Nebraska state Sen. Loren Lippincott, a Republican and sponsor of a proposal to abolish tenure altogether for new hires at public colleges and universities in that state and replace it with annual performance reviews. He hears stories "of professors that have tenure bragging about how little they work, how little they put in or how few hours they show up to teach classes," Lippincott said at a public hearing about the bill. Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. In other states, however, curbs on tenure have been linked directly or indirectly to faculty political views. An Ohio bill passed in late March will subject tenured faculty to annual evaluations - including student responses to the question "Does the faculty member create a classroom atmosphere free of political, racial, gender and religious bias?" - and allow them to be fired for poor reviews. It was part of a controversial larger higher education bill whose mission is "to enhance diversity of thought, which I don't believe we have at most of our universities today," said Republican state Sen. Jerry Cirino, its Senate sponsor. Over the governor's veto, the Republican-dominated Kentucky General Assembly in March passed a bill requiring that faculty be reviewed at least once every four years and allowing the firing of any professor who fails to meet performance and productivity requirements, even if they're tenured. Sponsors said the measure will uphold performance standards, but Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, contended in his veto message that it "threatens academic freedom" in "a time of increased federal encroachment" into how colleges and universities are run. After faculty at the University of Texas at Austin signed a resolution in 2022 affirming their right to teach such subjects as race and gender theory, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to end tenure altogether for newly hired faculty and strip it from existing faculty who teach critical race theory. A legislative proposal in Texas the following year failed to eliminate tenure, but broadened the grounds on which it could be revoked, mandated regular performance reviews of tenured faculty under a process it left up to governing boards to determine, and made it easier for those governing boards to fire tenured faculty. In Indiana, a measure added to a 232-page budget bill two days before the legislative session ended in April, imposed "productivity reviews" on tenured faculty at that state's public universities, measuring the number of classes taught, the amount of research conducted and other tasks. Faculty members who are judged to have fallen short of standards can be fired. This follows a law passed last year in Indiana requiring reviews of tenured faculty and denying tenure or promotion to faculty members who are "unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity." The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to block enforcement of this law, saying it violates faculty members' rights to free speech and due process. The suit was dismissed for jurisdictional reasons but has been re-filed and a ruling is pending. Related: Fewer students and fewer dollars mean states face closing public universities and colleges Arkansas legislators passed a law in March allowing university administrators to call for an immediate review of tenured faculty at any time and to fire them or remove their tenure status. North Dakota's governor signed a bill in April requiring post-tenure reviews at least every five years. Utah lawmakers last year imposed annual performance reviews of tenured faculty that include student evaluations. And a proposal this year to get rid of tenure in Kansas narrowly failed. There have been earlier attempts to weaken or ban tenure in Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia, according to research conducted at the University of North Texas. Tenure was established in the United States in 1915 just after the founding of the AAUP. Once awarded tenure, the association pronounced, a faculty member should be terminated only for cause or because of a financial emergency, a decision it said should be made by a committee consisting of fellow faculty and the institution's governing board. The move was largely a response to firings around that time of university and college faculty for teaching the theory of evolution, said Reuben, the Harvard historian. "Faculty had to be able to have the freedom to ask questions, and they could not be tied down to any sort of intellectual test imposed by church dogma or political parties," Reuben said. Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more Momentum for removing this protection comes against a backdrop of falling trust in colleges and universities and of the people who work at them. Only about a third of Americans have "a great deal" or "a lot" of confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent in 2015, a Gallup poll found last year. College professors now rank below doctors, teachers, retail workers and construction workers among people Americans believe "contribute to the general good of society," a 2021 survey by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences found; only 40 percent of respondents, in that poll, said professors contribute "a lot" to the greater good. Only a little more than a third of Republicans believe university professors act in the best interests of the public, according to another survey, by the Survey Center on American Life. "This level of attack couldn't gain the kind of momentum it has without the declining public support for higher education," Reuben said. "It couldn't have happened to this magnitude before, because there was a general sense that higher education was good for society." In Hawai'i, it was a fiscally conservative Democrat, state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, who pushed, beginning in 2022, for tenure to be banned for University of Hawai'i faculty who do research and other jobs besides teaching, such as providing student support. Although she did not respond to repeated requests for comment, Kim has written that the effort was a way to make sure taxpayer and student tuition money given to the university was being "prudently spent." After hundreds of faculty protested, she agreed to a compromise under which the university has set up a task force to study its tenure procedures. Related: A battle at one university is a case study in why higher education is so slow to change "To me, it's about the Senate wanting control over the university," said Christian Fern, executive director of the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly, or UHPA, the faculty union. "Being able to teach without political retribution - which rings really loudly right now - do you want to have a faculty member able to teach what they learned in their research, even if it's politically incorrect?" Fern asked. "I think yes." Karla Hayashi, president of the board of the UHPA and a former lecturer and English composition professor who now runs a tutoring center at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, said she expects more attempts to weaken tenure. Hayashi sees them as an extension of political pressure that starts at the federal level. "If I take away your tenure, then you're dependent on doing what I want you to do to earn your living," she said. Contrary to arguments from critics, tenure "is not a job for life," Criley, of the AAUP, said. "It's a guarantee that you'll only be dismissed for cause when a case can be made that you're not fit for your professional duties - that you're negligent, incompetent or guilty of some sort of misconduct that violates professional ethics." Related: A case study of what's ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns Not all faculty agree that tenure is fine the way it is. "If your main goal is job security, I don't think you're going to be that adventuresome of a professor," said Jim Wetherbe, a professor in the business department at Texas Tech University and a longtime critic of tenure, who has turned it down every time it has been offered to him. Academic freedom at public universities is already protected by the First Amendment, Wetherbe has argued. But Weingarten, the AFT head, said the immediate worry is that what faculty can say or teach will be narrowed. "The right wing keeps talking about free speech, free speech, free speech, and an attack on tenure is an attack on free speech," she said. "It's basically an attempt to create compliance." Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@ on Signal. This story about tenure was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast. The post Behind the turmoil of federal attacks on colleges, some states are going after tenure appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump administration notches first big win in assault on higher education
The Trump administration scored its most significant legal victory in its sweeping effort to reshape American higher education when a federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by faculty groups over the government's cuts to Columbia University's federal funding. The lawsuit concerned the Trump administration's cuts of $400m worth of federal funding to Columbia on the grounds it tolerated antisemitism during pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Columbia largely accepted the government's terms for restoring funding – in an agreement widely panned as a capitulation of its own academic freedom – several days before the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) sued the Trump administration over the cuts. The judge in the case, Mary Kay Vyskocil of the southern district of New York, ruled that the faculty unions had no 'standing' to bring the suit and had not clearly indicated how the administration had broken the law. Related: Trump officials cutting $1bn in NIH grants is 'void and illegal', judge rules 'It is not the role of a district court judge to direct the policies of the Executive Branch first and ask questions later,' the judge, a Trump appointee, wrote in her 30-page ruling. 'Plaintiffs have not established their standing to litigate this case, let alone any violation of any law.' She seemed to accept the government's prerogative to withhold funding and its argument that Columbia had enabled antisemitism to fester on campus. She also noted that Columbia had remained 'conspicuously absent' from the case. The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment. That funding has not yet been restored though the education secretary, Linda McMahon, recently said that Columbia had 'made great progress' and that the administration was considering a consent decree with the university. The administration has also cut billions in funding to several other universities, warning dozens more that it is investigating them over alleged antisemitism on campuses. So far, Harvard, which has lost more than $3bn in federal funding, is the only university to sue the administration in two separate lawsuits, one over funding cuts and another against the administration's ban on Harvard's ability to enroll international students. On Monday, a federal judge in Massachusetts extended a temporary block on the administration's order concerning Harvard's foreign students. The AAUP has filed three other lawsuits against the Trump administration – over its ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; the attempted deportation of pro-Palestinian students; and funding cuts at Harvard. The group has vowed to fight on. 'This is a disappointing ruling, but by no means the end of the fight,' Todd Wolfson, the AAUP president said. 'The Trump administration's threats and coercion at Columbia University are part of an authoritarian agenda that extends far beyond Columbia. Ultimately, lifesaving research, basic civil liberties and higher education in communities across the country are all on the line. Faculty, students and the American public will not stand for it. We will continue to fight back.' Protect Democracy, the group representing the AAUP and AFT, said it would appeal Monday's ruling and vowed to 'continue to fight to stop the administration from using public funding as a cudgel to consolidate power over higher education', it said in a statement. 'This is a deeply problematic decision that ignores what this is all about – a government attempt to punish a university over student protests that galvanized a national movement in opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza,' said Radhika Sainath, senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal, a group advocating for pro-Palestinian voices on US campuses which had filed a brief in support of the AAUP's lawsuit. 'The court uncritically takes the government's line for granted, that speech activity critical of Israel is inherently anti-Jewish – though Jewish students and professors make up a large percentage of those speaking up for Palestinian human rights.'
