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Aaron Hillegass attended New College of Florida as an undergraduate, had a successful career as a software engineer, and returned to the school this January to teach in its new data science program. But there was one problem for him: Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On Saturday, he resigned, releasing a dramatic public statement that compared DeSantis with the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
These stunts are designed to drive left-wing media narratives (“Professor Resigns in Protest of DeSantis’s Fascism”) and to boost the profiles of their attention-seeking authors. The playbook is well-worn, and yet Hillegass, a data scientist, made a simple mistake. In his rhetoric about “burn[ing] the college’s buildings to the ground,” he revealed the ugly truth about modern “anti-fascism”: it believes that violence against the right targets is perfectly legitimate.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: In a letter to American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the education committee, accused American Association of University Professors president and AFT vice president Todd Wolfson of promoting “organizational antisemitism” within the AAUP.
Cassidy cited an August Inside Higher Ed interview with Wolfson in which the union leader stood against sending weapons to Israel, accused the Trump administration of weaponizing antisemitism for political gains and advocated for the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, a definition of antisemitism that does not include anti-Zionism.
Surina Venkat
The Hill
Excerpt: The nation’s top schools have ramped up their spending on lobbying the federal government this year amid President Trump’s crackdown on higher education, disclosures filed last week show.
Twenty-four top universities and one of the nation’s largest college systems have already spent around $24 million lobbying Washington this year, more than double what they spent during the same time period last year, according to federal disclosures.
Len Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Last week, I wrote about the most recent dust-up between the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), two organizations that understand their shared commitment to academic freedom in somewhat different ways. The inciting incident was a post on X in which the AAUP’s official account responded to charges of liberal bias in academe by insisting that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.”
