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Jonathan Zimmerman
Washington Monthly
Excerpt: We’ve got this, say some colleges and universities. Yes, we’re cutting deals with Donald Trump’s administration. But we are also preserving our core value: academic freedom. We’ll be OK.
That’s what Columbia University declared last month, when it agreed to pay the administration $200 million for allegedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment. And it’s what Harvard said last week, when it canceled a journal’s special issue devoted to education in Palestine. Don’t believe them. The Harvard episode is a textbook case of censorship, brought to you by those who proclaim fealty to academic freedom. And once we have turned our back on that principle, we won’t have any reason to exist.
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.
William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has told faculty that a deal with the Trump administration is not imminent and denied that the University is considering a $500 million settlement, according to three faculty members familiar with the matter.
The University is seriously considering resolving its dispute with the White House through the courts rather than a negotiated settlement, Garber said, according to the three faculty members.
By Jameel Jaffer, Alex Abdo, Katy Glenn Bass, Nadine Farid Johnson & Larry Siems
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
Excerpt: After months of negotiation, Columbia University announced on July 23 that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to resolve investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws.
We recognize that Columbia might have made some of these commitments on its own accord, without unconstitutional coercion from the Trump administration. But even if we assume, against the evidence, that Columbia would have adopted all of these commitments on its own, the settlement is a significant surrender of autonomy because the university has ceded the right to revise these commitments during the agreement’s three-year term.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The Trump administration announced last week it was freezing federal grants for another prestigious research university. But this time, it wasn’t a private institution.
It was the University of California, Los Angeles, and if the UC system doesn’t make a deal with the federal government, campuses across one of the nation’s largest public higher education systems might incur the administration’s further punishment. State leaders condemned the funding freeze, and faculty at UCLA are urging university administrators to fight. But the university has said little about how it plans to respond to the administration.
Ben Austen
New York Times
Excerpt: Since January, the Trump administration has waged war on the nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities, freezing billions of dollars in research grants to Harvard and blasting away at Columbia’s institutional autonomy.
But collateral damage from these attacks has engulfed schools of all types, including the country’s 1,100 community colleges, which educate about 6.4 million undergraduates each year — roughly 40 percent of the national total and more than twice as many as are enrolled at every highly selective college and university in the country combined.
