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Brooke Lober, Eli Meyerhoff, and Emily Schneider
Academe Blog
Excerpt: The climate on American university campuses is dangerous. Administrators ban protests for Palestinian rights. Immigration and Customs Enforcement snatches students off the streets. The Trump administration revokes hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research. And all this is done in the name of protecting Jewish students against a so-called culture of antisemitism.
Last April, Claire Shipman, the current acting president of Columbia University, told a congressional committee the university had a “specific problem . . . rampant antisemitism.” If that claim were true, it would constitute a crisis. But it’s not true. Instead, Trump and the Right are weaponizing false claims of antisemitism to attack pro-Palestinian protesters, and they’re using this lie as a smokescreen for destroying higher education and other public goods.
David French
New York Times
Excerpt: Like many of its conservative alumni, I have a complicated relationship with Harvard. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, where I went to public school. I attended college at a small Christian university in Nashville. I never had a thought that I could attend Harvard Law School. But friends urged me to try. When I got in, it was so shocking that it felt miraculous. I knew it would change my life — and it did. It gave me some of my closest friends, it gave me career opportunities I couldn’t previously fathom, and it kindled in me a love for constitutional law. At the same time, the school had profound problems.
The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. In the 30 years since my graduation, the school has continued to change lives, and it has maintained one of the least tolerant cultures in American higher education.
Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: If colleges and universities want to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), they’ll have to certify that they don’t operate any diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility programs that violate federal antidiscrimination laws, under a new NIH policy announced Monday.
The change appears to codify parts of President Donald Trump’s executive orders that banned funding for DEI programs and builds on the strategy to leverage colleges’ research funding to compel certain behaviors. But the new policy goes even further than the president’s directives, barring colleges from boycotting Israel or Israeli businesses if they want to receive NIH grants.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: After a weeks-long standoff with the federal government over alleged antisemitism on campus, Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Monday over the $2.2 billion federal funding freeze enacted after the private institution rejected a far-reaching slate of reforms last week.
President Alan Garber announced the move in a statement to the university community Monday, noting that while some officials in the Trump administration have claimed the demand letter was sent by accident, the federal government has acted in ways that suggest it was purposeful.
Bianca Quilantan and Madina Touré
Politico
Excerpt: Leaders who once helmed the nation’s most prestigious universities are homing in on a message for their successors: resist, defend and litigate.
That formula, they argue, is the only way to survive an administration eager to extract fundamental concessions from schools that go far beyond addressing stated concerns about antisemitism. In the three months since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has demanded that some of these private institutions end diversity programming, change admissions requirements, toughen student discipline policies and audit some academic programs.
The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: Columbia University’s decision Friday to bend to the Trump Administration’s governance demands has shocked the academy far and wide, and it is an unprecedented sanction. But perhaps it will also shock our academic elites into recognizing that they have courted this political backlash by too often abandoning their central mission of free inquiry.
