UMiami AAUP

The Department of Education has hung a massive banner honoring a racist college dropout who built a lucrative career out of targeting professors for harassment

Palantir unwelcome party Tuesday 3/3

On major questions of university governance, a 99.3% majority vote of the faculty means nothing to the people who are actually in charge. This is a fact all of us need to take much more seriously.

The legal, media, and academic institutions capitulating to an authoritarian ordering payments for favorable treatment are damning themselves to irrelevance. They are destroying their institutions. They will be — and should be — shunned for failing in their most basic purposes for existing.

More cowardly bending of the knee from another US institution who should be showing that they would win in court against a government seemingly made up of the worst “lawyers” in the country.

“Is it possible that some institutions have avoided the ire of the federal government by preemptively undermining academic freedom? Perhaps. But if so, these practices are already doing the work that the compact would have done. They are not protecting scholarship but sacrificing it.”

More College Leaders Speak Out Against Trump’s Compact Experts say the mixed messaging reflects confusion over the Trump administration’s muddled rollout of the agreement and a desire to keep all options open.

“Awesome display of conviction MSU. “If I wasn’t explicitly invited, I wouldn’t explicitly decline to participate.” www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

University of Miami folks: if you want to encourage the president and provost not to have the university sign on to the extortion scheme known as the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, please sign this open letter (anonymously if you prefer).

Surprise, surprise…
🙄

"Vanderbilt is failing in its moral responsibility to push back against rising authoritarianism and political coercion."

My effort to convince Vanderbilt (and all universities) to take a stand for the rule of law, the Constitution, and our democracy.

www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

Syracuse University declines signing Trump's higher education compact Chancellor Kent Syverud left the door open to signing it if changes were made.

Syracuse University says no to Trump’s “compact.”
share.google/vLwXXDhhfPwx...

UMiami-AAUP Statement on the "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education"

We invite all University of Miami faculty, students, staff, and alumni, to join our letter. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

www.aaup.org/sites/defaul...
“The compact is a step in the wrong direction,” the statement reads. “The dictates set by it are harmful for higher education and our entire nation, no matter your politics.”

W/ @genevievelakier.bsky.social, the @aaup.org today released a letter to the Offices of the General Counsel at US colleges & universities. We detail why the Compact violates the Constitution & urge that no one signs it.
www.aaup.org/sites/defaul...

Q: but what if a full Epstein investigation also takes down Bill Clinton?????

A:

Academic Freedom Cannot Exist Under Political Coercion: President Trump’s Compact Threatens Higher Education Universities across the country must stand firm in defending their student body. Political coercion has no place in higher education.

www.amnestyusa.org/press-releas... “It is gravely concerning that the Trump admin is demanding universities surrender their right to freedom of thought, expression & discourse. This compact threatens to dismantle the foundations of higher education and unravel the social fabric of university life.”

Academic Freedom Cannot Exist Under Political Coercion: President Trump’s Compact Threatens Higher Education Universities across the country must stand firm in defending their student body. Political coercion has no place in higher education.

www.amnestyusa.org/press-releas...

Academic Freedom Cannot Exist Under Political Coercion: President Trump’s Compact Threatens Higher Education Universities across the country must stand firm in defending their student body. Political coercion has no place in higher education.

www.amnestyusa.org/press-releas...

We recognize in the case of Rutgers historian Mark Bray a threat to us all We, the undersigned historians at Columbia University and Barnard College, write to express our profound dismay at the events involving historian Professor Mark Bray, a scholar of anti-fascist politic...

Columbia University historians: The death threats incited by Turning Point USA are not just an attack on anti-fascist scholar Professor Mark Bray and his family but also on academic freedom in general, and, as such, it has implications for all faculty.
www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2025...

“We defeated the compact at Penn, we defeated it at Brown, MIT, and USC. Now they’ve extended it to every university in the country; that’s because they’re losing” —Todd Wolfson proftwolf.bsky.social

We reject the compact.

Large crowd gathered in protest

Big crowd with signs reading “Don’t Fold” “Don’t Surrender”

BOOM!

After over a thousand students, faculty, & workers gathered on campus to demand a rejection of Trump’s bribe,

UVA SAYS NO LOYALTY OATH!

✊🏼✊🏿✊🏻✊🏾

M.I.T. ☑️
BROWN ☑️
PENN ☑️
USC☑️
UVA ☑️

This is People Power in Action.

#DefendHigherEd

Columbia must now show courage and empathy Dear Columbia leaders,

"Are we cowardly Lions who cower in front of a false prophet or in the face of a blustering, empty wizard in Washington who is trying to destroy our autonomous universities?"

www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2025...

Over 100 Brown U students & 20 faculty members gathered outside
the campus today to demand that the university reject Trump’s loyalty oath compact. Professors & students taped their mouths shut to symbolize the compact’s threat to free speech, #academicfreedom & diversity of thought.
#DefendHigherEd

Quote in graphic from "Degrowth and decolonization in academia" by Racimo et al. "Despite their enmeshing in systems that generate oppression and scarcity, academic institutions have also been—and in some cases still are—critical sites of transformation. They are environments that can nourish counter-hegemonic ways of thinking and acting, which challenge the status quo. Therefore, universities can also play pivotal roles in the construction of ecologically sustainable, socially just, and decolonial worlds (Bhambra et al., 2018; Stephens, 2024)."

Radical hope.

Find a Chapter A list of AAUP chapters, both unionized and nonunionized. (You can also see a list of just union chapters.)

So, at the very least, we all need to be joining or starting an AAUP chapter:

www.aaup.org/chapters/fin...

More than half of Dartmouth faculty members sign petition against Trump compact The petition states that signing the compact would “undermine” the College’s “academic freedom.”

569 Dartmouth faculty members have signed a petition urging College President Sian Leah Beilock not to sign the Trump administration’s “Compact”

Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity Demands for “viewpoint diversity,” a pillar of the Right’s strategy to remake higher education, collide with the pursuit of truth.

www.aaup.org/seven-theses... "...if viewpoint diversity means committing oneself to a robust debate about truth and values, then the movement should be open to responding to and refuting the following theses challenging its premises and fundamental arguments."

Absolutely love to see it. Where you at alumni?
bsky.app/profile/karl...

Trump is calling the destruction of academic freedom his "Great Reform Agenda in Higher Ed." One political party breaking and then remaking higher ed. along its preferred ideological lines is not "reform," it's authoritarianism. Say No to the Compact.

Join Together and Reject Trump's Loyalty Oath for Higher Ed-Penn, USC, Vanderbilt, University of Virginia, University of Arizona, UT-Austin, MIT, Brown & Dartmouth.
@aaup.org @aaup-penn.bsky.social @utaustinaaup.bsky.social @aaupbrownchapter.bsky.social