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Trump’s DoJ sues California over college tuition benefits for undocumented students

by Evelyn Reynolds 21 November 2025, 20:16

The justice department sued California on Thursday for allowing undocumented college students to pay in-state tuition for public universities, alleging the policy harms US citizens.The lawsuit, filed in the US district court for the eastern district of California, marks the third time this week that the Trump administration has sued California. In addition to challenging the state’s in-state tuition policy, the lawsuit argues that California unlawfully extends eligibility for scholarships and subsidized loans to undocumented students.Among the defendants are the state, top California officials, and the state’s two public university systems: the University of California and California State University.“Federal law prohibits aliens illegally present in the United States from receiving in-state tuition benefits that are denied to out-of-state US citizens,” reads the complaint. “There are no exceptions.”California law does allow some students to qualify for in-state tuition rates, which are lower than out-of-state tuition, even if they technically qualify as non-residents. This includes students who have had “three full-time years or the equivalent at any combination” of California high school, California adult high school, or California community college.The California Dream Act, two bills passed in 2011, permits undocumented students to apply for, and obtain, state-based financial assistance, according to San Francisco State University. Undocumented students cannot receive federal financial aid for college.The justice department’s civil complaint alleges that California policy on undocumented student tuition is “unconstitutional” and wants a judge to “declare it illegal and permanently enjoin its enforcement”.“California is illegally discriminating against American students and families by offering exclusive tuition benefits for non-citizens,” said Pamela Bondi, the US attorney general. “This marks our third lawsuit against California in one week – we will continue bringing litigation against California until the state ceases its flagrant disregard for federal law.”The Trump administration has filed similar lawsuits against policies in other states, including Illinois, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Kentucky and Texas. Half the country now has similar laws to California’s.In June, after the administration sued, Texas ended its decades-old law. And Florida last year scrapped its law that allowed in-state tuition for high school graduates who weren’t in the country legally.Supporters of the state tuition breaks argue that they don’t violate federal law if they provide the same rates to US citizens in the same circumstances – meaning they are residents of the state and graduates of one of its high schools. The California Dream Act also allows such students to apply for state-funded financial aid.Many of the students were brought to the US by their parents when they were children, and supporters of the laws say they are as much a part of their communities as US citizens.The complaint cites an executive order signed in February that directs federal departments and agencies to block undocumented people from receiving public benefits. Another executive order signed in April directs officials to stop enforcing laws and practices that favor undocumented people over US citizens. The lawsuit argues that the Republican president’s orders enforce federal immigration laws.The University of California defended its decades-old in-state tuition policy.“While we will, of course, comply with the law as determined by the courts, we believe our policies and practices are consistent with current legal standards,” it said in a statement.The lawsuit comes weeks after the California supreme xourt let stand a lower-court ruling that the University of California’s policy barring students without legal status in the US from campus jobs is discriminatory and must be reconsidered.University system officials had warned that the decision would put them in a precarious position as they negotiate with the Trump administration after the withdrawal of federal research funds.The UC is dealing with federal grant suspensions and a White House demand that it pay a $1bn fine over allegations, including antisemitism and the illegal consideration of race in admitting students to its Los Angeles campus.The California State University system is the nation’s largest and among its most diverse, with more than 460,000 students. More than a quarter of undergraduates are first-generation college students, according to the university system.The University of California serves about 300,000 students. More

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by Evelyn Reynolds 18 November 2025, 13:26
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The night before Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972, a senior professor from the university where he had been employed as a lowly teaching assistant wandered into his family home, looking for spoils. The rest of the family had already left – for the UK, the US and Tanzania – but 26-year-old Mamdani had decided to remain until the final day of the three-month period that Idi Amin, the Ugandan president, had designated for all Asians to leave the country. Passing over the furniture and other remnants of decades of family life, the professor hit upon a carton of Johnnie Walker Red, which Mamdani invited him to take home.The next day, reunited with his parents at a transit camp in London, Mamdani learned that the bottles had in fact held nothing but cooking oil, and he amused himself imagining the professor serving them at a party to celebrate the forced departure of tens of thousands of south Asians. It was only later that the “loneliness, anxiety [and] depression” of expulsion set in. Mamdani would go on to join the vibrant intellectual community in Dar es Salaam, where his superfluity of study groups was populated by a who’s who of pan-African scholars and politicians; his parents settled in Wembley, in north-west London, where for several years their “favorite pastime” was greeting the weekly flight from Uganda to Gatwick airport in hopes of meeting a former acquaintance.“Every place we lived in after the expulsion, we lived as if we were guests, our houses or rooms stamped with the feeling of being transients,” Mamdani writes in his book Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, published this October. “With the loss of Uganda, we lost a sense of belonging, and of rootedness.”The question of who belongs in a political community has animated Mamdani’s scholarship ever since. Now a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Mamdani has gained recent notoriety (alongside his wife, film director Mira Nair) as the father of Zohran Mamdani, the New York City political phenomenon and mayor-elect. But his long career and extensive bibliography attest to a lifetime interrogating the colonial categories that continue to define and divide postcolonial politics: race, tribe, Indigeneity; citizen, settler, subject.View image in fullscreenIn Slow Poison, Mamdani turns his attention back to the nation that he has always considered his home, even when it wouldn’t have him. The book combines memoir, history and political theory to reassess two men who have defined Uganda since it achieved independence from the UK in 1962: Amin and Yoweri Museveni. It also grapples with big questions with contemporary relevance: who chooses our global villains, and why? How do notions of Indigeneity operate in a world where people always have migrated – and always will? Who gets to decide which people belong, and deserve rights, in a given country?Amin is primarily known to westerners as a brutal dictator and rumored cannibal, but he enjoyed significant popular support in Uganda from the time he took power in a 1971 coup until he was overthrown in 1979. Mamdani attributes this in part to his expropriation and expulsion of the country’s 80,000 Asian people – most of them the descendants of Indian immigrants who arrived during British colonial rule – in an act of racial nationalism that helped unite Uganda’s disparate ethnic groups and tribes in a shared Black identity.Museveni, a onetime Marxist and devotee of Frantz Fanon who frequented the same intellectual circles as Mamdani in Dar es Salaam, took power in 1986 and has yet to relinquish it. His increasingly authoritarian regime has been characterized by extreme corruption, regional conflicts and human rights violations, Mamdani argues, but “whereas the British propaganda machine turned Amin into a monster and Asians his global victims, Museveni became a Washington poster boy”.The disparate treatment is a result of the two men’s stances toward the west, Mamdani argues. Amin seized power with the backing of the UK and Israel – the UK maintained a strong interest in its former colony, while Israel sought an ally that would allow it to build a military base to the south of Egypt – but turned on them soon after taking power. This about-face saw Amin align himself with Muammar Gaddafi to support Palestinian rights and the boycott of apartheid South Africa, and thumb his nose at the west. By contrast, Museveni acceded to the neoliberal demands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and signed on to the US’s “war on terror”, providing it crucial regional support in east Africa.View image in fullscreenBut Mamdani’s larger concern is with Museveni’s “continuous fragmentation of the subject population” of Uganda into ever smaller tribal divisions, with people designated “Indigenous” or “non-native” within ever smaller parcels of land. The 1993 Uganda Constitutional Commission defined “Indigenous” groups as those that could trace their presence in Uganda to three or four generations back and could also “indicate ancestral burial grounds and land within Uganda”; Museveni’s program of subdivision saw more and more Ugandans recast as “settlers” if they lived outside their assigned district – a designation that deprived them of the right to own land or hold high political office.Whereas Amin had united Uganda’s ethnic and linguistic groups into one racial category, Museveni has used those differences to fragment the populace and keep any threat to his power at bay. This process is the “slow poison” that Mamdani asserts is killing Uganda’s body politic.There is a clear connection between Mamdani’s appeal for a politics that respects cultural difference while preserving universal equal rights, and the campaign run by his son, who prevailed despite his steadfast refusal to support Israel’s political system, which denies equal rights to millions of Palestinians who are subject to its rule.“The challenge is how to reconcile cultural identity with political belonging, and a common past with a shared future,” Mamdani writes. “Not all who share a common past necessarily share a common future: some may migrate and become part of a diaspora. At the same time, people with different pasts can commit themselves to building a common future in the same place. This is why those who wish to build a future under a single political roof – no matter how different their pasts – belong to the same political community and thus deserve the same political rights.”A week after Zohran’s triumph in the New York City mayoral election signaled a new generation of Americans’ embrace of such universalist values, the elder Mamdani spoke with the Guardian about his history, his politics and his hopes for the future.The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.In your new book, you are asking people to reconsider Amin and the way that he has been portrayed as a kind of Hitler-esque figure. Why was it important to you to return to this history now?The western media in particular has been central to describing Amin as “the cannibal Amin”, etc – and without going to the other extreme of providing an apology [for Amin’s regime], as the Wall Street Journal thinks, I thought it was important to situate Amin in a context and to get a sense of him. Amin is trained as a child soldier by the British. He becomes a specialist in counter-terrorism, which is really a polite term for state terrorism.The worst of Amin’s killings, which are in the hundreds, and you might even say in the thousands, take place in the first year after he takes power. Those killings are informed, guided by the British and the Israelis. The British advise Amin to assassinate [then president Milton] Obote on arrival. The Israelis disagree. They say: “No, [if] you do that you will leave the military power structure intact, and there will be a reckoning down the road.” So Amin follows the Israeli advice and he carries out massacres in barracks. That’s Amin at his most brutal. [Note: estimates of Amin’s death toll range from 12,000 to 500,000; in Slow Poison, Mamdani argues that western sources inflated Amin’s brutality for political reasons.]View image in fullscreenAt the same time, Amin is disturbed at the general lawlessness spreading throughout the country, and appoints a commission of inquiry into disappearances. It’s the first truth commission that I know in the contemporary era. The commission recommends that the police take charge of civil order, and that army control of key institutions be negated.So that’s Amin: a complicated character. The shift between these two phases is informed by Amin’s understanding. After his first visits to Israel and London, it dawns on him that neither the British nor the Israelis take him seriously. They both think that he should be grateful and act as a stooge. That’s his big turning point. The British try to overthrow him. The Israelis try. The important point is that Amin becomes very popular in the country and the attempts to overthrow him from the outside do not work.Why is it important to scrutinize Israel’s role in this history?Israel’s role in Uganda in particular was critical. Israel cultivated Amin right from the beginning. Israel thought he would be their man. They built houses for him. They anointed him in Hebrew. They trained the forces which were central in making the coup. They advised him to use those forces and only those forces. They advised him on how to deal with the Obute military opposition.And then, of course, they were completely surprised when he [switched allegiances]. This is a very central role. This is not singling out Israel. If one didn’t talk of Israel, you would have no explanation of what happened.You describe Uganda under Museveni as a junior version of Israel. Can you explain what you mean?What I mean by junior version of Israel is a state which carries out, in particular, military missions in the region, in one country after another at the urging of or with the approval of the US, and in return gets a clean pass on everything else, and is guaranteed impunity. That’s Israel on a larger scale, and that’s Museveni on a regional scale.Many of us are accustomed to thinking of “Indigenous rights” as an important counterweight to the legacy of colonialism, but you have long questioned the meaningfulness of the distinction between “Indigenous” and non. Why is it important to you to interrogate the concept of Indigeneity as you think about who belongs in a political community?I first encountered this question in a book I wrote several decades ago called Citizen and Subject. I was puzzled by the political architecture that Britain created in its colonies to govern. The census tagged every person living in a colony as belonging either to a race or to a tribe, and I was curious: what’s the distinction? I realized that a race was anybody who had come from outside, who was not Indigenous, and a tribe was anybody who was Indigenous. So I asked myself: “What difference does it make?” Well, it made a difference in how they were governed under the law. All races, whether they came from Europe or from south Asia, anywhere, were governed under the same law, civil law. To be governed under the same law meant that you were supposed to have a common future.Tribes were not governed under the same law. First of all, there was the fiction that each tribe had a homeland. I call this a fiction because it’s not true. Before colonialism, not only Africans, but humans have been migrants. You cannot peg humans to a particular piece of territory over centuries and millennia. You can’t. They’ve moved. This fiction that every tribe had a homeland was extended so that every homeland had a customary authority. Cultural authorities were turned into political authorities. And then the British created something called customary law, which could be enforced by customary authorities with British power standing behind them. This made for a separate future for the tribes, unlike the races. I understood this to be the political, legal essence of what we normally call “divide and rule”.When I went to South Africa in 91, I was writing a book on Africa. Every chapter was written, except one chapter on south Africa, because south Africa was supposed to be the exception. Apartheid was supposed to be the exception. And after just a very little time in South Africa, I realized that I’d been totally mistaken. I’d been misled. South Africa was not an exception. I knew this beast. I had grown up under it in Uganda, although you may call it an informal version of apartheid. It was the same thing where the state used law to divide the population into different groups and privileged one section of the population at the expense of the other. I began to come to a conclusion that every modern colony was an apartheid state.The book deals with your personal history and how your identity cuts across the lines that have been drawn to divide groups for various reasons, whether as an Asian within Uganda or a Muslim from Gujarat in India. The policing of those lines was brought home in a particularly personal way this summer, when the New York Times ran an article seeking to scandalize the fact that your son had attempted to reflect his identity as African and Ugandan on his college application.I was pretty shocked to see that the Times had contacted you to ascertain whether you had any ancestry from Black Africans. It seemed to invoke the “one drop” rule of Blackness, which is very American, as well as Amin’s view that Asians are not really Ugandan. What did you make of that controversy? How do you see the policing of identity categories in the US compared to Uganda and other post-colonial states?In 2013 we formed an organization in Kampala called the Asian African Association. We said in our opening declaration Asian Africans are people whose past is Asian, but whose future is African. They are Africans of Asian descent. We said that in the past we had always lived as visitors, or even worse, as refugees, which meant that we had neither rights nor responsibilities. We were permanently on vacation or permanently entrepreneurs.The formation of this organization was part of a much larger quest which runs through African nationalist struggles, which was: who belongs? Who is part of the nation and who is not? The whole South African conception which ends with the notion of a non-racial South Africa – obliterating the boundary between Indigenous and non-Indigenous – is a fruit of that struggle, and it’s a legacy that we embraced.Now the New York Times – it was scandalous to me that they were resurrecting this dividing line between the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, and that that line could only be crossed through miscegenation, blood mixing. It was shocking. I didn’t have to have any African ancestry, and yet, I thought of myself as a man from Africa. I was an African.I remember Thabo Mbeki’s speech in parliament defining who is an African. And I remember Afrikaner politicians standing up, one after another, each one saying, “I’m an African.” “I’m an African.” That was the fruit of the anti-apartheid struggle. The Times was so narrowly preoccupied with marginalizing one candidate that it seemed to have forgotten everything else.You wrote in the book that despite having been raised in a pretty segregated society in Kampala that your political awakening occurred in the US. What was it that you saw in the US that changed how you understood where you had come from?The big highlight was the civil rights movement and my going to the south, to the march on Montgomery. Then the anti-Vietnam war movement, and indirectly, through my girlfriends, the feminist movement. It was not an individual experience. There was a cultural revolution happening in the US. There was a wholly different mindset which was being born. Everybody I knew, more or less, shared this anti-racist orientation.When I went to Dar es Salaam, I was involved in an intellectual environment which gave me reasons for understanding this transformation and informed me of the larger anti-colonial movement, beginning with the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam Revolution, the Cuban Revolution.Today in New York – the New York experience keeps changing, and now with the election of my son as mayor, it’s changing even more. The sense of possibilities is broadening. I was quite surprised to see Zohran embrace where he came from openly and directly. “I’m a Muslim. I was born in Africa. I’m of south Asian descent,” and so on and so forth. New York continues to be a lived experience.At the same time we are seeing calls on the national level for mass deportation and efforts to carry out the expulsion of disfavored groups from the US. Do you see parallels with the expulsion of Uganda’s Asians?All the threads which led to the Asian expulsion in 1972 and, before that, the expulsion of the Luo [people], are present in the US now: birthright citizenship, Indigeneity. There are resonances, even similarities, but they’re not the same.The big difference, I think, is that there is a counterthrust here, and it’s just beginning. I think this election in New York City is a possible beginning. I don’t want to be too optimistic, but it’s a possible beginning because it’s had resonances, not just throughout the country, but even outside the country.View image in fullscreenCan you say a little bit more about that? My perception of Zohran’s campaign was that he spoke about universal values even as he celebrated in a very specific way his own identity and the identities of his supporters. It was a very different kind of politics than what we get from the Democratic party these days, which often seems to shy away from openly embracing immigrants or Muslims.I understand the contemporary situation in the US as being a product of decades-long encounters, which we call cultural wars, that were played out in the academy, in the intelligentsia. The key cultural war was around the notion of affirmative action. Should affirmative action be a temporary phase, or should it be a permanent phase? If it becomes a permanent phase, does not the quest of justice turn into revenge? Are you not holding children responsible for the deeds of their ancestors? If the children are going to be beneficiaries of the deeds of their ancestors, do they carry a measure of responsibility? I don’t think there is any clear-sightedness on whether affirmative action in the US should be permanent or not, but it’s a big issue, and it’s now coming to the fore.One of the ideas in the book that I was drawn to was the idea of federation – a system that “bases the notion of political belonging on where one lives rather than where one comes from”.My first encounter with the notion of federation was in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln and the amendments which changed the notion of citizenship. Before the civil war, you were a citizen of the state in which you were born. After the Civil war, you could be born in Alabama and move to California, and you would have the same rights as somebody born in California. This federal arrangement – a common citizenship, but not a centralized order – is under threat now. Both parts of it are under threat. Common citizenship is under threat and a federated [non-centralized] order is under threat, with Trump occupying cities with the national guard.In the African context, federation was always seen as a colonial maneuver. Federation was a name for emasculating the newly born independent governments and for empowering erstwhile privileged groups. But now federation is increasingly being embraced as part of an agenda against authoritarian regimes, dictatorial regimes, regimes like Musaveni’s.One theme of the book is how neoliberalism challenged and damaged Uganda’s university. How would you compare what happened there with the turmoil at Columbia in recent years? What do you make of the school’s capitulation to the Trump administration?There’s a definite connection. On the surface – not just superficially, but immediately – it is seen as an ideological confrontation, not as a confrontation about the structure of the university. But the background to 7 October 2023 and Minouche [Shafik’s] administration at Columbia was the [Lee] Bollinger era [from 2002 to 2023]. Bollinger brought about structural changes at Columbia. By the end of it, we got a bloated bureaucracy at the heart of which was the financial bureaucracy. That bureaucracy understood Colombia as a business enterprise with pluses and minuses, gains and losses. It was not really interested in Colombia as an academic institution.Minouche was brought here from the World Bank to [lead] that bureaucracy. She had no understanding of American academia. She had no experience in a large university. Poor Minouche comes and finds herself facing an encampment for which she was completely ill prepared.At the time we were blaming Minouche as the central character in what happened here. I now think that her lack of experience, her ignorance, was taken advantage of by others. She was more or less locked up in her office, and she resigned as an honorable way out, in a sense.She’s like an Idi Amin character; I’m trying to understand her. I’m not apologizing for her. If you print this, the Wall Street Journal will come back.Are you planning to return to campus to teach, given the systems that have been put in place to police the academic content of scholarship at Columbia?I’m definitely planning to come back and teach. I want to be involved in the kind of future we craft. I’m not willing to give up now.You were asked by Museveni to take an active role in his government on multiple occasions and declined. I was looking at the hardcover of Slow Poison last night and realized that you had added a final paragraph that wasn’t in the galley that addresses some of the complications that arise when intellectuals interact with power – the potential for corruption, the desire for “clean hands”. You end on an ambiguous note: “For now at least, we explore for an answer in the realm of practice.”Your son is going to be in power in New York City. Are you interested in playing a role in or influencing his administration?We have been very close as a family: Mira, Zohran and I. This book would have been like one of my other books, which is me standing at a distance and narrating what happened to others, not to me, but both Zohran and Mira kept telling me: “You have to insert yourself as a character in this. You were alive. You were involved. Take responsibility, but tell us. Tell us the part of the story which nobody else will be able to tell us.” So different versions of the book insert me more and more and compel me to understand the difference between the claim to objectivity and an understanding of positionality – that you are a limited witness who is looking at events from a particular vantage point, and that vantage point is both your strength and colors you.That ambiguity is an admission that I haven’t found an answer to the question. I don’t believe one should just stay away from power, but I don’t think we should embrace it. Power is a fatal thing for intellectuals. It corrupts intellectuals. I’ve seen many, many, many a friend get corrupted in the process.As to how I will relate to Zohran’s administration: I think initially at least both Mira and I will have the relationship we did during the campaign, which is to stay at an arm’s length but always be available. Always be available for discussion, for sharing our point of view, but not mistaking ourselves for being him. More
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Judge bars Trump administration from cutting funding to University of California
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2025, 13:16
The Trump administration cannot fine the University of California or summarily cut the school system’s federal funding over claims it allows antisemitism or other forms of discrimination, a federal judge ruled late on Friday in a sharply worded decision.US district judge Rita Lin in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction barring the administration from cancelling funding to the university based on alleged discrimination without giving notice to affected faculty and conducting a hearing, among other requirements.The administration over the summer demanded the University of California, Los Angeles, pay $1.2bn to restore frozen research funding and ensure eligibility for future funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus. UCLA was the first public university to be targeted by the administration over allegations of civil rights violations.It has also frozen or paused federal funding over similar claims against private colleges, including Columbia University.In her ruling, Lin said labor unions and other groups representing UC faculty, students and employees had provided “overwhelming evidence” that the Trump administration was “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke’, ‘left’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities”.“Agency officials, as well as the president and vice-president, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of pre-eminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune,” Lin wrote.She added: “It is undisputed that this precise playbook is now being executed at the University of California.”At UC, which is facing a series of civil rights investigations, she found the administration had engaged in “coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the first amendment and 10th amendment”.Messages sent to the White House and the US Department of Justice after hours on Friday were not immediately returned. Lin’s order will remain in effect indefinitely.The president of the University of California, James B Milliken, has said the size of the UCLA fine would devastate the UC system, whose campuses are viewed as some of the top public colleges in the nation.UC is in settlement talks with the administration and is not a party to the lawsuit before Lin, who was nominated to the bench by Joe Biden, a Democrat. In a statement, the university system said it “remains committed to protecting the mission, governance and academic freedom of the university”.The administration has demanded UCLA comply with its views on gender identity and establish a process to make sure foreign students are not admitted if they are likely to engage in anti-American, anti-western or antisemitic “disruptions or harassment”, among other requirements outlined in a settlement proposal made public in October.The administration has previously struck deals with Brown University for $50m and Columbia University for $221m.Lin cited declarations by UC faculty and staff that the administration’s moves were prompting them to stop teaching or researching topics they were “afraid were too ‘left’ or ‘woke’”.Her injunction also blocks the administration from “conditioning the grant or continuance of federal funding on the UC’s agreement to any measures that would violate the rights of plaintiffs’ members under the first amendment”.She cited efforts to force the UC schools to screen international students based on “’anti-western” or “‘anti-American’” views, restrict research and teaching, or adopt specific definitions of “male” and “female” as examples of such measures.Donald Trump has decried elite colleges as overrun by liberalism and antisemitism.His administration has launched investigations of dozens of universities, claiming they have failed to end the use of racial preferences in violation of civil rights law. The Republican administration says diversity, equity and inclusion efforts discriminate against white and Asian American students. More
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US judge bars Trump from cutting off University of California funds
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2025, 03:43
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from withholding federal funding and threatening hefty fines against the University of California amid the administration’s attempts to coerce elite US universities into adopting and promoting conservative ideals.US district judge Rita Lin of San Francisco issued the preliminary injunction late Friday, saying the government was not allowed to demand payments from the California school system over the administration’s claims that it violates civil rights by allowing antisemitism and practising affirmative action.In her ruling, Lin said that the plaintiffs – who include UC faculty, researchers and students – have submitted “overwhelming evidence” illustrating the Trump administration’s “concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities”.Lin ruled that the government had a “playbook of initiating civil rights investigations” at universities in order to cut federal funding, “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune”.In July, the Trump administration froze $584m in federal funding for the University of California, Los Angeles, while accusing the university of discrimination and violating civil rights over its handling of the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on campus. The administration claimed UCLA was “acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students”.In October, the administration proposed a deal to nine prominent universities in the US that promised funding in exchange for schools imposing policies and changes that included banning race or sex as considerations in admissions and hiring and removing departments that “purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas”.While the University of California school system was not offered the deal, the University of Southern California – a private institution – was.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, responded to the offer with a warning that any California universities that signed Trump’s proposed settlement would lose their state funding.Democracy Forward, a progressive legal advocacy group, called the Trump administration’s efforts to influence policy at universities “strong-arm tactics”.“This is not just a harmful attempt to stifle speech, it is a betrayal of the constitution and a dangerous step toward autocracy,” the group said in a statement. More
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Students and faculty at over 100 US universities protest against Trump’s attacks
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 November 2025, 19:05
Students, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests that organizers hope will culminate in large-scale students’ and workers’ strikes next May Day and a nationwide general strike in May 2028.The day of action was organized under the banner of Students Rise Up, a network of students including both local groups and national organizations such as Sunrise Movement and Campus Climate Network. Students were joined by faculty and educational workers’ unions like the American Association of University Professors and Higher Education Labor United.Protesters called on university administrators and elected officials to denounce the president’s months-long effort to force US universities to abide by its ideological priorities and urged them to reject Trump’s “compact”, which would give universities preferential access to federal funding in exchange for a commitment to advance the administration’s conservative agenda. Only one university, New College of Florida – a public school that state legislators have turned into a bastion of conservatism – has so far accepted it.“Universities should be a place of learning, not propaganda machines,” Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, said ahead of the protests. “That’s why students, workers and alumni around the country are taking action.”As the day unfolded, hundreds of students across the country walked out of classes, unfurled banners and rallied on campuses, often joined by faculty and other staff. In addition to denouncing the compact, they called for a more affordable education and for the protection of all students – from transgender to international ones.At the University of Kansas, about 70 students demanded administrations divest from weapons manufacturers and Israel, refuse to collaborate with ICE, safeguard gender-affirming housing and meet faculty’s demands for fair contracts. At Duke University, in North Carolina, professors held signs demanding the university stand with immigrants, pay its workers a $25 hourly wage, and protect trans and international students. At Brown University in Rhode Island – one of the first institutions to reach a settlement with the Trump administration earlier this year – passersby were invited to endorse a banner listing a series of demands by dipping their hands in paint and leaving their print, while a group of faculty members nearby lectured about the history of autocracy.View image in fullscreen“Trump came to our community thinking we could be bullied out of our freedom,” said Simon Aron, a sophomore and co-president of Brown Rise Up. “He was wrong.”In New York City, students and faculty from multiple campuses gathered by the midtown headquarters of the investment firm Apollo Global Management to protest against its CEO, Marc Rowan, a billionaire Trump donor and key architect of the compact whom they say “has no business making policy for higher education”.They cited Rowan’s involvement with the online University of Phoenix, which they described as “the largest single producer of student debt in the country” and his role in paving the way for the ongoing abuse of civil rights legislation to target universities over students and faculty’s criticism of Israel.A spokesperson for Apollo did not respond to a request for comment but the firm reportedly instructed staff to stay home on Friday in anticipation of the protest. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Rowan defended the compact, writing that American higher education was “broken” and that “course correction must come from the outside”.Amy Offner, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Guardian that the campaign against Rowan is part of a broader effort to protect US higher education from the influence of ultra-wealthy individuals. “Billionaires should not control what can be taught and studied in the United States,” she said.The protests marked the first time that students, faculty and staff have staged such a large-scale response. “There is only one way forward in saving higher education and democracy writ large and that is students, faculty, staff united,” Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, said on a call with protest organizers last week. “We have to become a new political force.” More
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Move over, gender studies: the conservative tide coming for US universities
by Evelyn Reynolds 31 October 2025, 10:00
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A small conservative revolution has swept the humanities at some US colleges and universities. Its vanguard are new programs, called centers or institutes, that have begun cropping up at schools in recent years. Often funded by outside donors or earmarks from state governments, the programs tend to bear names featuring words such as “civic”, “freedom” or “classical”.These centers do credible teaching and research, and are usually not explicitly political. But their goal, to counter what conservatives see as hegemonically leftwing teaching, arguably is.Their rise has created a peculiar irony: just as the economic utility of the humanities is being questioned, and academic departments are gutted on budgetary or ideological grounds, some schools have found money for heady, old-fashioned curricula emphasizing the “great books” of western civilization and the literature of what used to be called the western canon.While students arriving at some universities this fall may have thought Ancient Greek to be dead and French lit struggling for survival, students at these new centers are discussing the philosophical ideas of the ancient world, Christian thought, the Enlightenment and the founding of the American republic, and reading the literature of William Shakespeare and John Milton.Students at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, for example, can choose this semester from courses such as “What Is the Common Good?”, “Just War”, “Great Books of the Ancient World”, “Liberty and Order” and “The Rule of Law”.View image in fullscreenAs the Trump administration attempts to bend major universities to its will, and many Republican politicians accuse higher education of being a hotbed of leftwing ideological indoctrination, schools are feeling pressure to demonstrate that their faculty and curricula are hospitable to conservatives.William Inboden, a conservative academic and the executive vice-president of the University of Texas at Austin, argued in a recent essay that the American people have lost trust in US higher education, in part because of “a sense that American universities as institutions have deviated from, or even turned against, the fundamental values of the nation and what was once quaintly known as ‘the American way of life’”.University administrators and state governments have embraced these centers as an end-run strategy, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin who until recently taught in the US. Academic departments tend to resist outside reforms, Faggioli said, and freestanding “centers” are a way for university administrations to add conservative-coded spaces to their schools while avoiding messy confrontations with existing departments.Some of the best known of these programs are Stanford’s Civics Initiative, conceived in 2017 and expanded in 2021, and the University of Texas’s School of Civic Leadership and Civitas Institute, founded in 2023. The University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom dates to 2008, but recently hired several new faculty members.Earlier this year, the government of Utah went even further – not only establishing by state law a Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State University, but giving that center statutory control over the university’s entire general education curriculum. Students there will take new required courses on the “foundational primary texts” that “continue to shape society’s self-understanding, the American experience and the modern world”.According to the legislation, they will study the most famous of the dead male Europeans – such as Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville – as well as Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe.View image in fullscreenAnd last month the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a $10.4m grant, the largest in its history, to the Tikvah Fund, a conservative Jewish organization, for a project that will include the “development of university courses … to be offered in partnership with new western civilization BA programs at various major academic centers”.For some academics whose research interests or views have not been in vogue, the changing winds may come as welcome news – at least by the relative, and still mostly bleak, standards of the academic job market.Musa al-Gharbi is the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, and a sociologist who studies politics, culture and institutions. He noted that these centers are hiring people “who do decent work, who do serious scholarship for the most part”, but in some cases “probably wouldn’t have a job in academia were it not for this”, because their work is too conservative, too interdisciplinary or too “outside the lines” to appeal to typical academic departments at mainstream universities.The Hamilton school’s faculty at the University of Florida include a scholar working on a “history of conservative critics of higher education”. The Civitas Institute’s fellows include economists, law professors and philosophers of a conservative, libertarian or pro-market bent – including John Yoo, the lawyer who, while a White House official under George W Bush, famously wrote a series of legal memos justifying the use of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists.In some cases, these new centers have been pressed on unwitting or resistant universities; some faculty at Utah State University have sharply criticized the new center there and accompanying curricular reforms as a kind of hostile takeover of the internal affairs of the university. Similarly, the University of Florida has said that it did not ask for the Hamilton school, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed.View image in fullscreenThese centers bear some resemblance to the “para-educational” institutes that began springing up at some prominent universities starting about 10 years ago: independent centers funded by conservative donors and sited near universities, but not affiliated with them, to provide extracurricular courses and events about conservative, classical or Christian ideas. They include the Morningside Institute at Columbia, the Abigail Adams Institute at Harvard and the Zephyr Institute at Stanford. This month, the Morningside Institute is holding discussions on Dante’s Inferno, St Francis of Assisi and Roger Scruton, the conservative British philosopher.Unlike those programs, these new centers are formally part of universities; like them, however, they tend to reflect an implicit view that the American humanities – allegedly consumed by ideas from critical theory, Marxism, postcolonial thought and the like – have drifted too far left, suffer from ideological conformity and promote an excessively negative view of the US’s history and place in the world.In an email, Josiah Ober, a professor of political science and classics who co-directs Stanford’s Civics Initiative, noted that state governments have directly established some of these new centers and that it would be mostly “fair to say that the motives of the legislators in question … include a concern for viewpoint diversity in university faculties perceived as being overwhelmingly more progressive than conservative”.Al-Gharbi, the sociologist, believes that ideological conformity and a lack of conservative views are a genuine problem in higher education, but that the “reception” of these centers is complicated by the fact that the right is elsewhere engaged in attacking academic programs, such as women’s, ethnic and area studies, whose ideas they find objectionable.That makes conservatives’ enthusiasm for plurality of thought feel hypocritical, he said – and also risks making these centers more isolated from their broader universities “than might be ideal for them to achieve their actual goals”. He added: “One of the dangers of these centers is that you could end up with the same kind of groupthink that they were concerned about, just going in the other direction.”Yet he and other academics also said that it would be wrong to assume that the revival of interest in the western tradition will only attract people who are politically conservative.“We have all types,” said Charles McNamara, a professor of classics at the University of Minnesota. Some “classics undergraduates wear Oxford shirts, some of them wear cutoff shorts”.View image in fullscreenSimilarly, Dhananjay Jagannathan, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College, said that he knows someone “who was hired by a small, private institution for one of these rightwing-coded ‘great books’ programs, and he is a socialist, and I don’t think he hides that about himself”. Jagannathan is “cautiously optimistic” about the programs; at the end of the day, he said, “it’s good if more talented young classicists have jobs”.Zena Hitz is a tutor at St John’s College, a school in Annapolis and Santa Fe that has taught a strict “great books” curriculum since 1937, and the founder of the Catherine Project, a non-profit that organizes discussion groups on the great books for members of the public. She sees the new centers appearing at universities as embodying an unusual mixture of goals – both functioning as “a kind of beachhead within the university where conservative ideas are welcome”, she said, and representing a “strategic move” to protect old-fashioned humanities fields, especially at public universities in conservative states “that would normally just be slashing the crap out of that stuff”.Although the great books curriculum may be perceived as conservative or elitist in the current context, Hitz noted that it springs from a historical movement that possessed a “radical egalitarianism”. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, miners and other blue-collar workers raised funds for libraries where they could read and discuss works of literature and political theory.Similarly, the great books curriculum has historically enjoyed unusual bipartisan support, she said. “Conservatives like it because it’s the western canon, and it’s old, but liberals and progressives like it because the style of education is open-ended and honors the individual’s development.”A few years ago, she co-taught a course on the Bible; as is not unusual at St John’s, about a third of her students were devout Christians, many from homeschooled backgrounds, and another third were gender-nonconforming students with generally activist leftwing politics. Despite some tense moments, it was an “amazing” experience, she said.Al-Gharbi said that even if these centers actually wanted to exclusively hire conservatives, that might be difficult. “I’ve talked to some people who have set up these schools and run them,” he said, and they acknowledged that the recruiting pool for right-of-center scholars is small. Conservatives, in recent decades, have tended to self-select out of academia.“They hope that over time, the pipeline could get a bit wider,” he said, “than is the case at present.”Similarly, even the small bump in academic hiring that these centers may bring will not mean a major sea change, McNamara said, for classics and similar fields. “We have not had a good job market in the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis. And if there happen to be two extra jobs at an institute that’s appeared at one state university somewhere, I don’t think that really quite qualifies as a particularly robust job market.”Quoting Aristotle, he added: “One swallow does not make a summer.” More
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The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 October 2025, 12:00
Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More
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US universities must reject Trump’s ‘compact’. It is full of traps | Jan-Werner Müller
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 October 2025, 10:00
Sticks are bad, but sometimes corruption through carrots is worse. The Trump administration – after having brutally cut federal funding earlier this year – is now trying to make nine universities an offer that they seemingly cannot refuse. In exchange for preferential treatment in funding and bonuses like “invitations to White House events” – apparently the same logic as a fancy credit card that promises you backstage access at concerts – the universities are expected to sign a “compact” with the government. All nine institutions must reject this proposal: it is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom; it is a test case for whether Trumpists can get away with demanding loyalty oaths; it exceeds the president’s powers to begin with; and it is bound to achieve the opposite of its stated goal of “academic excellence in higher education” (as opposed to what kind of excellence in education, one is tempted to ask).Some features of the compact might look reasonable at first sight. No one is against addressing ever-rising tuition fees (never mind that the Republican party at the same time is capping federal loan programs and shoveling money to high-cost private lenders). And some might welcome the Stephen Miller-lite version of xenophobia: capping the number of foreign students at 15% and forcing foreigners to take American “civics” (it is unclear who would decide the content of lessons “about how great our country is”).But the document also functions as a kind of rap sheet for institutions portrayed as single-mindedly focused on discriminating against white males. Formulations such as “signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence” would make one believe that, as of now, universities encourage terrorist agitators to run rampant on campus; the demand to “transform or abolish institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” suggests that, as of now, anyone saying the wrong thing about abortion is beaten up by progressive vigilantes (never mind the question what it means to treat an idea as such “violently”).It is no small irony that one of the strategists of the assault on higher education, May Mailman, charges universities with having committed to a “culture of victimhood” in an interview with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; obviously, it is the Trumpist grievance-industrial complex which mass-produces resentment among supposed “real Americans” held down by nefarious liberal elites. For all the talk of fostering open debate, the goal appears to be the creation of safe spaces for the fragile egos of Maga students suffering from universities’ supposed culture of “negativity”.The clearest attack on academic freedom consists in the demand to ensure “a broad spectrum of viewpoints … within every field, department, school, and teaching unit”. Faculty, students “and staff at all levels” will first have to be tested for ideology; once “empirical assessments” have been completed, the diversity of viewpoints judged appropriate will have to be engineered, presumably by a bureaucracy that can also guarantee consistent viewpoints over time (for what if our new conservative colleague starts to hold different views?). In theory, the result would not just be affirmative action for the right, but forcing the economics department to employ Marxists.To be sure, some Trumpists themselves insist that the government should not be in the business of micromanaging the distribution of political attitudes. But the rejection is not a principled one centered on a proper understanding of academic freedom. It is simply the fear of setting a precedent with what they openly call “policing” and one fine day having the Democrats flood universities with leftists.As with other aspects of Donald Trump’s emerging mafia state, there is no guarantee that those bending the knee will not be bullied again. The government can always come back to universities and accuse them of having violated the agreement (still too many courses in victimhood studies; still too much “violence” – as defined by bureaucrats – vis-a-vis someone’s cherished ideas). The government will also encourage donors to claim back their cash. Since the compact’s criteria are exceedingly vague, those who take the offer will probably overdo compliance.At the risk of sounding like one of those dreadful self-styled victims: universities are fragile institutions. Many American ones are excellent precisely because people trust each other and cooperate successfully without over-regulation (some Europeans can tell you what it means to be subject to constant assessments – and how a Soviet-style bureaucracy constantly distracts from research and teaching). Of course there is always plenty of academic infighting, but what the Trumpists are doing is consciously trying to create divisions by setting potential Trump administration collaborators against those determined to resist it. As has become apparent with other autocrats’ assaults on universities, even if institutions escape (sometimes literally, as they have to relocate to other countries) the worst, much damage has been done. This is why the nine universities should not only reject the compact, but also publicly explain what is wrong with it (otherwise they will be immediately charged with wanting to protect their tuition-racket, helping foreigners and “importing radicalism” to undermine American greatness).Precisely because they have been losing court cases over free speech and visas for foreign students, Trumpists now seek to entrap universities in a deal that effectively removes the protections of federal law and gives the administration arbitrary power over them. The carrots serve to lure institutions of higher learning into a dark alley where, rather than just waiting with a big stick, the government can put a gun to their heads at any time.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More
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‘Unprecedented in history’: global academic freedom group warns of dismantling in US
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 October 2025, 04:01
A global academic freedom group has warned that the Trump administration’s assault on universities is turning the US into a “model for how to dismantle” academic freedom.“We are witnessing an unprecedented situation – really as far as I can tell in history – where a global leader of education and research is voluntarily dismantling that which gave it an advantage,” said Robert Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR).In its annual Free to Think report, the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project at (SAR), an international network devoted to the promotion of academic freedom worldwide, counted some 40 attacks against academic freedom in the US in the first half of 2025, ranging from the government’s revocation of research funds to the detention and attempted deportation of foreign scholars over their political views, as well as a “torrent” of executive, legislative and other actions targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and other programs.The report noted that the data points to a continued erosion of academic freedom in the US after it counted 80 instances of pressure against universities in the prior year. While most of those came from state governments and local actors, the “nature of these attacks shifted after January 2025” to pressure from the federal government following the re-election of Donald Trump, and his administration’s efforts to control university admissions, hiring, research, teaching and disciplinary processes, the report noted.The SAR report analyzed 395 attacks on higher education leaders, faculty, staff and students in 49 countries between mid-2024 and mid-2025, including targeted killings, disappearances, arrests and prosecutions, as well as firings, travel restrictions and administrative measures. In addition to the US, the report highlights “concerning developments” in 15 other countries – including Bangladesh, where student-led anti-government protests were met with a brutal crackdown that led to the deaths of up to 1,400 people, and Serbia, where authorities threatened to defund public universities and withheld the salaries of faculty who supported a student-led movement against government corruption.Globally, the picture for academic freedom painted in the report is grim.“The space for academic freedom has shrunk at an accelerating pace over the past decade,” the report concludes. “Even in societies that have long had strong and stable democratic institutions, elected officials with autocratic impulses are using both the levers of democracy and extralegal administrative measures to undermine democratic institutions, including universities.”In the US, the war in Gaza, and widespread campus opposition to it, has offered a pretext for the targeting of universities, students and faculty whose values and views don’t align with the government’s agenda. Before 2023, SAR tallied an average of 15 to 20 attacks on academic freedom, many driven by elected officials at the state and local levels.“The pressure on the higher education space has been going on for decades,” said Quinn, noting that before the targeting of pro-Palestinian views and diversity initiatives, universities and scholars faced attacks over critical race theory and gender studies. “That being said, there’s no question that the administration is using as a bold pretext the allegations of antisemitism centered around the Palestinian issue to justify in many cases extralegal activity to crack down on the space for independent thought.”Trump’s return to power marked a “turning point”, the report notes, including more than 30 pieces of legislation related to higher education introduced during the first 75 days of his administration, executive orders eliminating diversity and gender equity programming, antisemitism investigations of more than 60 universities that flouted established processes, the freezing of billions in federal research funds and new caps on student loans and restrictions on Pell grants’ eligibility.The report also underscored the negative impact on global education of the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of international students’ visas and new restrictions for foreign applicants, as well as cuts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that devastated higher education and research initiatives from Africa to Afghanistan. More

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