Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance.
And you know why?
Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.
This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence.
The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:
Yes. And at Harvard it was the faculty who sued first — the university sued ten days later.
Important piece on the history of the US government's ideological deportation policies in light of the outcome in AAUP v. Rubio, including crucial quotes from the courtroom testimony of AAUP-Harvard member Bernhard Nickel:
"The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone."
Thousands here at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, the site of deportation flights. Clergy have blocked the road at terminal 1 departures singing “before this campaign fails, we’ll all go down to jail. Everybody has a right to live.”
All the evidence one would need to impeach both Rubio and Noem was just posted to the AAUP v. Rubio docket. @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social
Newly unsealed evidence makes it even clearer that Rubio and Noem knew they were targeting students based solely on their political speech and that they knew this policy was unconstitutional. They just didn’t care. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u...
🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional!
ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.
bravo @democracyforward.org & @aft.org.
and shame on all the universities that dismantled their legally secure and morally just diversity, equity and inclusion programs becuase Trump sent them an angry letter.
democracyforward.org/news/press-r...
Federal judge William Young ripped Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio apart for their efforts to deport pro-Palestinian students/academics — accusing them of "an unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people."
"These Cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution."
I was in the courtroom for this hearing today and it was, indeed, quite something to hear a federal judge outline a Cabinet-level “conspiracy”—his term—to flout the First Amendment. All the documents in the case will be unsealed as of 1/22 when judgment gets entered. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...
The import of this ruling: Foreign citizens in the United States—including green card holders—can be arrested for political speech and imprisoned for months or even years before being given a meaningful opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of their arrest and imprisonment.
Today!
Online today @JewishCurrents: my examination of how nearly a century of cooperation between American universities and the military-industrial complex has made a mockery of the concept of academic freedom jewishcurrents.org/higher-eds-b...
ICYMI the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom has developed resources and language around academic freedom to use in your course materials. See more in this newsletter post from our director, @isaackamola.bsky.social academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/your-sylla...
It is really something to be part of a packed courtroom gallery in which every single person there bursts out crying with relief at the same instant. The daycare director and assistant director, my kids' teachers, the lawyers, all of us parents.
A surprising & positive result: the judge overturned the asylum officer's bogus finding, ruling that he does indeed have reasonable fear of persecution/torture if deported to Haiti! He's still being put into removal proceedings, but now with a reasonable-fear finding in his file, so he has a chance.
His wife and 3 kids are US citizens. Today is his final appeal, his last chance to avoid a deportation order that’ll shatter his family.
Our preschool is out here in force: parents, teachers, and administrators, a community united in its repudiation of this rank and pointless cruelty.
I'm helping pack the gallery at immigration court today because ICE thugs arrested and jailed the dad of one of my daughter’s preschool classmates. Born in Haiti, he's lived in the US for more than 20+ years, but in November ICE ambushed him when he duly appeared for a routine immigration check-in.
Abolishing ICE is the modest, quiet, peaceful option and you can’t post the others in this country
"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato."
surreal times
dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...
"I can assure you that my mother and father, both of whom endured Auschwitz, would be horrified by the silencing of dissent and its unrestrained normalization."
Incredibly disappointing to see Alan Garber granting the entire bad faith premise used by Elise Stefanik & Donald Trump to launch a full-scale assault on his university & higher education in general.
There are a million brilliant things one could read on the subject, of course. But this one functions as the textbook for my "Latin America and the United States" course at Harvard, and it's basically the civics education that few U.S. Americans ever receive.
uncpress.org/978080787265...
For anyone looking to read up on the long history of U.S. unilateralism in Latin America -- and how it is inseparable from the history of the United States itself -- one of the books I use in the classroom is Brian Loveman's NO HIGHER LAW. It's dense & encyclopedic, but exhaustive & judicious.
Printed image of a group of people, including mother & child, below, with an outsized hand above reaching out to stop a cluster of bayonets
Elizabeth Catlett & Alberto Beltrán, Untitled (Composition for a Peace Poster), c. 1950 www.artic.edu/artworks/222...
New, from me: The NYT reporter who specializes in profiles of beleaguered right-wingers on campus went to New College...and found out that things were going ok!
So let me explain some pretty massive errors of omission: 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nyt-re...
This is not a “duel,” which suggests both sides are equally culpable, but the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s ideological war on Harvard and higher education.
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/u...
