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Susan Svrluga
Washington Post
Excerpt: With billions of dollars in federal funding at risk, Harvard University officials on Monday rejected Trump administration demands to make sweeping changes to its governance, admissions and hiring practices. The administration responded Monday night by saying it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding to the Ivy League school.
Danielle Allen
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The life of the mind may be a deeply personal thing, but as embodied in colleges and universities, it is also a very public thing—and the two go hand in hand. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been working to dismantle the global order and the nation’s core institutions, including its cultural ones, to strip them of their power.
The future of the nation’s universities is very much at stake. This is not a challenge that can be met with purely defensive tactics. We must do what should have been done long ago: find our way to a new social contract between universities and the American people.
Ilya Somin
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: In a previous post, I urged universities to band together to file a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump's policy of speech-based deportation of foreign students and academics. So far, I have had little, if any, success in persuading schools to do so. Many individual academics have expressed support for the idea (originated by the faculty of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy), but no university administrations have acted on it.
Still, I am happy to see that 86 colleges and higher education associations filed an amicus brief in a case challenging the deportations filed by the the Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
Yael Halevi-Wise '97
January 11, 2024
In the interest of free and accurate speech, please note that the alternative motion proposed by Cary Nelson and Russell Berman, did indeed mention Israel and Palestine too, as you can see here:
EMERGENCY MOTION FOR MLA DELEGATE ASSEMBLY January 2024 (1/2/24)
BACKGROUND: The October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israeli towns and kibbutzim was followed by a major war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel. These events have produced a unique and extremely contentious series of North American campus debates, demonstrations, and bitter social media messages with highly stressful consequences for students of varying ethnicities and political beliefs. Controversy surrounding a congressional hearing featuring three university presidents’ campus responses spread worldwide
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/harvard-mit-penn-presidents-antisemitism.html). Students from a variety of backgrounds have testified to feeling unsafe on campus as a result of the hostile climate created
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-campuses-rattled-israel-hamas-war-60-minutes/). Some have felt the right to express their political, cultural, or religious beliefs threatened.
Disagreements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have a long history in English and foreign language departments. MLA’s Delegate Assembly itself has a long history of debating relevant motions and resolutions as well. Rather than press the DA to take sides in these debates, we are urging MLA’s Executive Council help preserve an educational environment where all feel free to voice their positions and concerns.
MOTION: The MLA DA moves that the MLA EC take immediate steps to urge university administrators to defend from threats, harassment, and violence all faculty members, students and staff, regardless of their position on the conflict in the Middle East. As part of that effort the DA asks the EC to write to all North American English and language departments to ask their aid in preserving their campuses as civil environments for academic freedom and free expression.