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Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: In the nearly seven months since President Trump took office again, academic associations, faculty unions, researchers and other groups have used the legal system to push back on the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government.
So far, district and appeals courts have largely suggested that the executive branch’s actions are unconstitutional and ruled in favor of university advocates, handing down preliminary injunctions, restraining orders and a few final judgments that have blocked the Trump administration’s goals. But based on the few cases that have reached the Supreme Court, some higher education experts worry the tide may be turning, and the high court’s conservative majority will ultimately side with the president.
Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman
The Hill
Excerpt: On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.
Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?” We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.
Michael C. Bender
New York Time
Excerpt: When President Trump wants to rattle academia, he turns to his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And then Mr. Miller turns to May Mailman.
Ms. Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, is the most important, least-known person behind the administration’s relentless pursuit of the nation’s premier universities. The extraordinary effort has found seemingly endless ways to pressure schools into submission, including federal funding, student visas and civil rights investigations.
Igor Mazin
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Ages ago, in the 1970s Soviet Union, a Jewish stand-up comedian, Mikhail Zhvanetski, remarked in one of his skits that if you want to argue about the taste of coconuts (not available in the Soviet Union at that time), it’s better to talk to those who’ve actually tried them. If you want to argue about antisemitism in academia, better ask those who have actually experienced it. Ask me.
The U.S. Department of Education is taking seriously a charge of “a pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty” at George Mason. This is as shocking to me (and to many of my Jewish colleagues at GMU) as hearing that I have broken two legs and never noticed it.
Keith E. Whittington
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Public and private universities are currently being scrutinized by politicians and political activists in ways that they have not been in many years. Moreover, government officials at both the state and federal level are intervening in the internal affairs of universities in ways that are nearly unprecedented.
In a new paper I take a more empirical and positive political theory approach to our current situation. There is an extensive literature on the politics of "independent" government institutions, from the judiciary to bureaucracies to central banks to international organizations. The conceptual apparatus and logic of those models can be turned toward thinking about the political conditions and political boundaries of university autonomy from government interventions.
Sebastian B. Connolly and Julia A. Karabolli
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Tucked away at the end of a corridor on the second floor of Harvard’s Divinity Hall, the offices of the Religion and Public Life program are usually quiet — a quietness that belies its position at the center of highly public controversy that, in just a few short years, has threatened to consume it entirely.
The program has been targeted in a lawsuit accusing Harvard of permitting antisemitism on campus and an early list of demands that the Trump administration considered imposing on Harvard. But RPL’s own faculty say that it is the critics of the program that are practicing intolerance as they seek to police pro-Palestine speech.
