DEFENDING ACADEMIC INTEGRITY ● PROTECTING FACULTY RIGHTS
We don’t just talk the talk. We walk the walk!
Colleagues,
Last week alone, the AAUP, along with allies, filed three lawsuits against the Trump administration.
● It sued the Trump administration on behalf of all AAUP members for illegally revoking $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University in an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and academic freedom. Along with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), AAUP believes that the funding cuts and other demands, which undermine critical scientific and medical and suppress speech, are an unlawful attack on higher education and must be stopped.
● Meanwhile, the Middle East Studies Association and three AAUP chapters, as well as AAUP National, filed suit to protect free speech rights across colleges and universities from the chilling effect of the Trump administration’s immigration deportation policies.
● Lastly, along with the AFT, the AAUP and a coalition of educators, school districts, and unions, filed a legal action against the Trump administration to stop the dismantling of the Department of Education and mass firings that will decimate the crucial services that benefit every person residing in the US. This lawsuit was the first filed since President Trump’s executive order attempting to shutter the department.
Funds from members enable AAUP to file these lawsuits, which are meant to protect academic freedom and defend higher education. You can help by joining AAUP National and our local chapter here at CCU. To do that, please consult our chapter’s “Join AAUP” webpage. Email me if you have questions. The fight is just starting. Be part of it!
In Solidarity – Joseph Fitsanakis, PhD, President AAUP/AFT-CCU
The AAUP Podcast is back. The AAUP’s podcast, AAUP Presents, is back with a special episode focused on AAUP’s recent statement “Against Anticipatory Obedience.” The statement offers guidelines to AAUP chapters about how to respond to attacks on higher education like those being launched by the Trump administration and its rightwing allies.
● Henry Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University–East Bay and one of the statement’s writers, walks listeners through the history of attacks on American higher education and the recommended actions in the face of such attacks.
● Part two of the podcast episode discusses the specific steps faculty can take to strengthen their university handbooks in order to safeguard academic rights and governance. The guests in part two are Mark Criley, a senior program officer in the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at the AAUP, and Monica Owens, a senior program officer and field services representative in the AAUP’s Department of Organizing.
Also listen to Academic Freedom on the Line. While you’re at it, lake a listen to this new limited podcast series hosted by the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF). CDAF serves as a resource and knowledge hub for those seeking to build a flourishing higher education system, rooted in institutional autonomy, workplace democracy, and freedom from coercion and external interference.
● The guests of the podcast are are center Director Isaac Kamola and CDAF fellows Tim Cain, Don Moynihan, and Vineeta Singh. Isaac Kamola is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College. He is also the founder of Faculty First Responders, a program that monitors rightwing attacks on academics and provides resources to help faculty members and administrators respond to manufactured outrage. Tim Cain is a professor in the University of Georgia’s Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education and associate editor for the Review of Higher Education. Don Moynihan is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and co-director of the Better Government Lab.
University of Michigan shutters DEI office. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, whose efforts to promote diversity have long been considered among the nation’s most ambitious, is closing its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as well as its Office for Health Equity and Inclusion, university leaders announced on Thursday of this week.
● Since 2016, the University of Michigan university has invested nearly $250 million into DEI initiatives, leading to a 46% increase in first-generation students and a 30% rise in Pell Grant recipients. But, in response to Donald Trump’s executive orders and potential federal funding cuts, the university has announced the closure of its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as well as the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion. Following the closure of the two offices, the university says it plans to reallocate resources to enhance financial aid, expand scholarships, and bolster mental health services, aiming to continue supporting diversity and inclusion through direct student assistance.
Why Dr. Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascism, is leaving Yale for Canada. Two months into Trump’s second term, Dr. Stanley has announced he has decided to leave Yale for the University of Toronto. He will follow two prominent colleagues, Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, both history professors, to Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
● Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University, was one of the most forceful voices in higher education opposing the first Trump administration. His book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, published in 2018, identified and analyzed 10 pillars of fascism. His most recent book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. “History suggests that when the central government targets universities in ways we are now witnessing in the United States, it is a signal of encroaching authoritarianism,” he wrote in The Chronicle. “We would do well to take such signals both literally and seriously, if we are to preserve what history teaches is a bulwark against authoritarianism—a vibrant, robust, and independent university system.”
Rightwing attack on libraries continues. If you are interested in monitoring national and local efforts by rightwing zealots to censor and defund public libraries, please consult this PowerPoint presentation put together by AAUP/AFT-CCU executive committee member ‘A.’
● The presentation provides a comprehensive overview of the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which we highlighted in our last issue. It also summarizes bill S.104, which is making the rounds in the South Carolina Senate. This bill threatens to defund every public library unless it certifies four times a year that it does “not offer any books or materials that appeal to the prurient interest of children under the age of seventeen in children, youth, or teen sections of libraries and are only made available with explicit parental consent”. It also touches on bill H.4059, which requires every school district to set up a Material Review Committee to review book challenges.
AAUP-CCU 