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Juan Perez Jr.
Politico
Excerpt: President Donald Trump’s campaign against two of the planet’s best-known universities is laying bare just how unprepared academia was to confront a hostile White House.
Even as Ivy League schools, research institutions, and college trade associations try to resist Trump’s attacks in court, campus leaders are starting to accept they face only difficult choices: negotiate with the government, mount a painful legal and political fight — or simply try to stay out of sight.
Jonah Valdez
The Intercept
Excerpt: In March, a group of scholars filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the government from detaining and deporting students and professors for speaking out about Palestine.
Now, as the case heads to trial in Massachusetts federal court in July, those professors and students worry they may be targeted by immigration officials for speaking out in the courtroom on the witness stand.
Tom Perkins
The Guardian
Excerpt: The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned.
The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.
Sarah Viren
New York Times
Excerpt: In January 2024, Maura Finkelstein finished teaching her first classes of the semester, unaware they would be her last as a professor. This was on a Wednesday at Muhlenberg College, a campus stippled with red doors meant to represent both hospitality and the college’s Lutheran roots.
It made sense. For months, students, alumni and strangers had been complaining about Finkelstein. They started a Change.org petition the previous fall, demanding that she be fired for “dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric” and “blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.” As evidence, the petition, and its 8,000 signers, had offered up screenshots of Finkelstein’s posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read “Anti-Zionist Vibes Only.”
Thomas Chatterton Williams
The Atlantic
Excerpt: President Donald Trump’s assault on what he broadly calls DEI has been slapdash and sadistic. That doesn’t mean the system under attack should be maintained. Racial preferencing in university admissions as well as in employment and government contracting—more commonly understood as affirmative action—might once have been necessary, but long ago became glaringly unfair in practice.
Affirmative action in college admissions continues—despite being banned by the Supreme Court in 2023—through the use of personal essays, interviews, and other proxy mechanisms. It continues in businesses’ hirings and promotions. It’s possible to believe two truths simultaneously: Judging individuals by race instead of merit has to end, in no small part because it hurts the very people it is supposed to uplift; and Trump’s approach to ending it is harmful.
Exponent Summer Staff
The Exponent
Excerpt: About 3:15 p.m. Friday, Purdue sent an email to The Purdue Exponent stating the university will no longer facilitate distribution of the papers on campus.
According to the email sent by Purdue’s Office of Legal Counsel, the university cited the end of a licensing contract from 2014, albeit the university and The Exponent operated under that agreement for 11 years since its expiration. The university also cited its policy on institutional neutrality, which had been updated in June 2024. The Exponent will still continue to publish and print its newspaper.
