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Cary Nelson and Joe Lockard
Quillette
Excerpt: On 10 January 2025, Katherine Franke announced her departure from the Columbia University Law School. After she issued a public statement, she had it republished on the Academe blog of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
Two of Franke’s law-school colleagues had filed a complaint after Franke gave an interview to Democracy Now on 25 January 2024, in which she claimed that IDF veterans enrolled at Columbia had a history of harassing other students but that the university was not taking this harassment seriously. The complaint stated that Franke had “harassed members of the Columbia community based on their national origin.” An independent law-firm investigation found that she had violated university anti-discrimination policy.
A Minnesota judge dismissed the federal government’s challenge to a state law in Minnesota that makes some undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition.
This is the first ruling against the Trump administration’s campaign to end in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy that the government’s lawyers have argued violates federal laws. In three of the seven lawsuits so far, the states agreed with the administration and scrapped their state laws. But Minnesota challenged the Justice Department in court and sought to dismiss the lawsuit altogether.
The Trump administration’s investigations and demands for admissions data have extended beyond undergraduate colleges and universities, The New York Times reports. Now, the Department of Justice is requesting years’ worth of information about applicants at major medical schools.
The three institutions currently under investigation—Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of California, San Diego—have been asked to turn over the reports by April 24. If they don’t, according to the Times, the DOJ says federal funding for their professional programs could be on the line.
More than 100 years ago, Stanford University terminated economics and sociology professor Edward Ross and set in motion a wild chain of events that would eventually result in the formal establishment of academic tenure in the United States.
Tenure isn’t solely a tool that protects controversial, outspoken faculty. It also protects faculty who conduct research that may lead them down risky paths, allowing them to pursue their research to its limits and previously unknown conclusions. It protects faculty whose work runs counter to the interests of the people in power. And it protects faculty who explore new pedagogical methods in the classroom as they attempt to innovate and push higher education in new directions.
