After Months of Lawsuits, Courts Stymie Some of Trump’s Higher Ed Agenda

August 12, 2025 1 min read

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In the nearly seven months since President Trump took office again, academic associations, faculty unions, researchers and other groups have used the legal system to push back on the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government.

So far, district and appeals courts have largely suggested that the executive branch’s actions are unconstitutional and ruled in favor of university advocates, handing down preliminary injunctions, restraining orders and a few final judgments that have blocked the Trump administration’s goals. But based on the few cases that have reached the Supreme Court, some higher education experts worry the tide may be turning, and the high court’s conservative majority will ultimately side with the president.

Click here for link to full article


Leave a comment


Also in National Free Speech News & Commentary

College-Age Jews Are Heading South

August 26, 2025 1 min read

Rose Horowitch 
The Atlantic 

Excerpt: Even before the Ivy League upheavals of the past two years, Jewish students had been slowly drifting away from the elite campuses of the Northeast. Now, as some seek respite from the protest movement that erupted after the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the drift has become more like—sorry—an exodus. And selective colleges outside the Northeast, sensing an intensifying disdain for Ivy League schools among Jewish teens and their parents, are tripping over one another to recruit these students.

Read More
Commentary: Trump Isn’t Fixing America’s Campuses. He’s Bleeding Them Dry.

August 25, 2025 1 min read

Frank Bruni
New York Times

Excerpt: What Trump and his allies are doing is no targeted effort to correct that. It’s a sweeping, indiscriminate, performative smackdown of elite institutions by a crew trying to solidify its power under the banner of anti-elitism. It doesn’t attempt to usher those institutions from a place of bias and extremism to one of neutrality and moderation. It answers excess with excess, orthodoxy with orthodoxy, censorship with censorship. And it disregards the damage it’s doing.

Read More
Commentary: How Chris Rufo Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Cancel Culture

August 25, 2025 1 min read

Cathy Young
The Bulwark

Excerpt: Last week's right-wing freakout over the Cracker Barrel logo redesign—apparently amounting to white-guy erasure—had more than its share of sublimely ridiculous moments. But none, perhaps, were more emblematic of the current “anti-woke” crusade than the call to action from author, activist, and Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo.

Of course, what also makes it noteworthy is that Rufo isn’t just some random social-media blowhard. In recent months, he has emerged as the unofficial ideologue of the Trumpian assault on the liberal cultural establishment.

Read More