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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).
There is a growth sector in American higher education. The number of “Civics Centers” has exploded in the last decade, and especially since 2021.
What are these civics centers, and what explains their proliferation now?
Heterodox Academy (HxA), the leading non-partisan higher education reform organization in the US for faculty, staff and students, championing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement, has decided to provide some answers.
In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance.
We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects.
