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      Americans are beginning to fear dissent. That’s exactly what Trump wants | Robert Reich

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      I was talking recently to a friend who’s a professor at Columbia University about what’s been happening there. He had a lot to say.When he needed to run off to an appointment, I asked him if he’d text or email me the rest of his thoughts.His response worried me. “No,” he said. “I better not. They may be reviewing it.”“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.“They! The university. The government. Gotta go!” He was off.My friend has never shown signs of paranoia.I relay this to you because the Donald Trump regime is starting to have a chilling effect on what and how Americans communicate with each other. It is beginning to deter open dissent, which is exactly what the US president intends.The chill affects all five major pillars of civil society – universities, science, the media, the law and the arts.In Columbia University’s capitulation to Trump, it agreed to require demonstrators to identify themselves when asked and put its department of Middle Eastern studies under “receivership”, lest it lose $400m in government funding.The agreement is already chilling dissent there, as my conversation with my friend revealed.The Trump regime also “detained” a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder who participated in protests at the school. The administration’s agents have also entered dorms with search warrants and targeted two other students who participated in such protests.On Tuesday, an international student in a graduate program at Tufts University was taken into custody outside her off-campus apartment building by plainclothes homeland security agents, handcuffed and whisked away to a prison in Louisiana. She has a valid student visa. Her apparent offense? Putting her name to an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper that was critical of how the Tufts administration handled protests.Scores of other major universities are on Trump’s target list.Trump’s attack on science has involved threats to three of the largest funders of American science – the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.Tens of thousands of researchers are worried about how to continue their research. Many have decided to hunker down and not criticize the Trump administration for fear of losing their funding.Philippe Baptiste, the French minister for higher education, has charged that a French scientist traveling to a conference near Houston earlier this month was denied entry into the US because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he gave a negative “personal opinion” about Trump’s scientific and research policies. The US Department of Homeland Security denies this was the reason the scientist wasn’t admitted into the country.Meanwhile, America’s major media fear more lawsuits from Trump and his political allies in the wake of ABC’s surrender to Trump in December, agreeing to pay him $15m to settle a defamation suit he filed against the network.Journalists who cover the White House are reeling from Trump’s decision to bar those he deems unfriendly from major events where space is limited.The media chill is palpable. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, has openly restricted the kinds of op-eds appearing in its editorial pages.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe latest example of Trump’s use of executive orders to target powerful law firms that have challenged him came on Tuesday, against Jenner & Block.The firm employed the attorney Andrew Weissmann after he worked as a prosecutor in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump during his first term.The White House charged that the firm “participated in the weaponization of the legal system against American principles and values”, and an official specifically called out Weissmann.Last month, Trump removed the security clearances of lawyers at Covington & Burling who represented the former special counsel Jack Smith following his investigation of Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol attack.Trump has also targeted Perkins Coie, a firm linked to opposition research against Trump in 2016. His order banned Perkins Coie lawyers from federal buildings and halted its federal contracts.Another executive order took aim at Paul Weiss, who employed the lawyer Mark Pomerantz before he helped prosecute Trump over hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.Last Thursday, Trump withdrew the executive order against Paul Weiss because, he said, the firm had “acknowledged the wrongdoing” of Pomerantz and pledged $40m in free legal work to support the Trump administration.Non-profits tell the Washington Post that law firms that once might have helped them fight Trump’s orders now fear Trump will pursue them if they do.Trump is even intimidating the arts by taking over the Kennedy Center, firing board members, ousting its president and making himself chairman.The comedian Nikki Glaser, one of the few celebrities to walk the red carpet at this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prizes, now thinks twice before doing political jokes directed at Trump.“Like, you just are scared that you’re gonna get doxxed and death threats or who knows where this leads, like, detained. Honestly, that’s not even like a joke. It’s like a real fear,” she told Deadline.Every tyrant in history has sought to stifle criticism of himself and his regime.But America was founded on criticism. American democracy was built on dissent. We conducted a revolution against tyranny.This moment calls for courage and collective action rather than capitulation – resolve by universities, researchers, journalists, the legal community, and the arts to stand up to Trump.Anyone holding responsible positions in these five pillars of civil society must reject Trump’s attempts at intimidation and condemn what he is trying to do.Those who surrender to Trump’s tyranny invite more of it.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets | Kenan Malik

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      ‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood.McCarthyism, the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, “was a peculiarly American style of repression – nonviolent and consensual. Only two people were killed; only a few hundred went to jail.” Yet it constituted “one of the most severe episodes of political repression the United States ever experienced”.Sackings and legal sanctions created such fear that, in the words of the political philosopher Corey Robin, society was put “on lockdown”, with people so “petrified of being punished for their political beliefs” that “they drew in their political limbs”.It was not just communists who were silenced. “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is an inequality of wealth,” claimed the chair of one state committee on un-American activities, “there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.” This at a time when Jim Crow still held the south in its grip. The red scare paused the civil rights movement for more than a decade and drew the teeth of union radicalism.Fear has always been a means of enforcing social order, most obviously in authoritarian states, from China to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Russia, where repression becomes the foundation of political rule. In liberal democracies, order rests more on consensus than overt brutality. But here, too, fear plays its role. The worker’s fear of being sacked, the claimant’s of being sanctioned, the renter’s of being made homeless, the fear of the working-class mother facing a social worker or of the black teenager walking past a policeman – relations of power are also relations of fear, but fears usually so sublimated that we simply accept that that’s the way the system works.It is when consensus ruptures, when social conflict erupts, or when the authorities need to assert their power, that liberal democracies begin wielding fear more overtly as a political tool to quieten dissent or impose authority. Think of how the British state treated Irish people in the 1970s and 1980s, or miners during the great strike of 1984/85.Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the few academic leaders willing to speak out, decries “the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era”, describing “anticipatory obedience” as “a form of cowardice”. Cowardice, though, has become the defining trait, most university leaders “just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy”. Columbia may be the first university in Trump’s crosshairs, but it won’t be the last. Keeping silent won’t save them.In his incendiary speech in Munich in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, harangued European leaders to worry less about Russia than “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”, especially free speech. The same, it would seem, applies to America, too. Many of those who previously so vigorously upheld the importance of free speech have suddenly lost their voice or now believe that speech should be free only for those with the right kinds of views. The brazen hypocrisy of Vance, and of the fair-weather supporters of free speech, should nevertheless not lead us to ignore the fact that, from more intrusive policing of social media to greater restrictions on our ability to protest to the disciplining, even sacking, of workers holding “gender-critical views”, these are issues to which we urgently need to attend.“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control”. It is a perspective as vital now as it was then, and as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in America. More

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      The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide | Moira Donegan

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      The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face.She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. Attorneys for Ozturk did not know where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US homeland security department that has become Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, had taken the 30-year-old woman for almost 24 hours.In that time, a judge ordered Ice to keep Ozturk, who is on an F-1 academic visa, in Massachusetts. But eventually, her lawyers learned that their client had been moved, as many Ice hostages are, to a detention camp in southern Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from where she was abducted.In the video, before she is forced into the van, Ozturk looks terrified, confused. She may well have thought she was being robbed by street thugs; she did not seem to understand, at first, that she was being kidnapped by the state. She tries to plead with her attackers. “Can I just call the cops?” she asks. “We are the police,” one of the men responds. Ozturk remains imprisoned; she has been charged with no crime. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?”The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by Ice agents. She joins the ranks of include Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student and green card holder from Columbia University; Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama; Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who was born in South Korea but has long been a green card holder after immigrating to the United States with her parents at the age of seven; and Momodou Taal, a dual British and Gambian citizen who is studying for a graduate degree at Cornell University and has gone into hiding after receiving a summons from Ice to turn himself in for deportation proceedings.Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. Taal and Khalil, in different capacities, were leaders of protests for Palestinian rights at their respective universities. Chung attended one or two demonstrations at Columbia. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant the op-ed.The state department claims that some of these students have had their visas or permanent resident status rescinded – in a video of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, taken by his pregnant wife, agents proclaim that his student visa has been revoked, but when they are informed that he has a green card, they say: “We’re revoking that too.” This unilateral revocation of green card protections, without notice or due process, is illegal. But that is not the point – the Trump administration clearly thinks of immigrants as a population with no rights that they need respect.Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.Here is another truth: that the US’s treatment of these immigrants should shame us. It was once a cliche to say that the US was a nation of immigrants, that they represented the best of our country. It is not a cliche anymore. For most of my life as an American, it has been a singular source of pride and gratitude that mine was a country that so many people wanted to come to – that people traveled from all over the world to pursue their talent, their ambition and their hopefulness here, and that this was the place that nurtured and rewarded them.It may sound vulgar to speak of this lost pride after Ozturk’s kidnapping – all that sentimentality did nothing, after all, to protect her, and may in the end have always been self-serving and false. But as we grapple with what America is becoming – or revealing itself to be – under Donald Trump, I think we can mourn not only the lost delusions of the past but the lost potential of the future.Ozturk – a student of early childhood education, and someone brave enough to take a great personal risk in standing up for what she thought was right – seems like a person the US would be lucky to have. Instead we are punishing her, terrorizing her, kidnapping her and throwing her away. She deserves better, and so do all of our immigrants – hopeful, struggling people who mistook this for a place where they could thrive. Who, in the future, will continue to think of the US as a place where immigrants can make a difference, can prosper? Who will share their gifts with us now?

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      University of Michigan shutters its flagship diversity program

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      The University of Michigan has shuttered its flagship diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program and closed its corresponding office, becoming the latest university to capitulate to Donald Trump’s anti-DEI demands.The school launched the program in 2016, at the beginning of Trump’s first administration, and it became a model for other DEI initiatives across the country. In announcing the DEI strategic plan’s end, university leaders pointed to the success the program had.“First-generation undergraduate students, for example, have increased 46% and undergraduate Pell recipients have increased by more than 32%, driven in part by impactful programs such as Go Blue Guarantee and Wolverine Pathways,” the statement said. “The work to remove barriers to student success is inherently challenging, and our leadership has played a vital role in shaping inclusive excellence throughout higher education.”Since the supreme court ended affirmative action in 2023, programs geared towards diversity have been targeted by conservative groups. In an email on Thursday, the university of Michigan’s leadership referenced the enforcement of Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders, along with the threat to eliminate federal funding to colleges and universities that did not eliminate their DEI programs. According to the statement, some at the university “have voiced frustration that they did not feel included in DEI initiatives and that the programming fell short in fostering connections among diverse groups”.In addition to closing the DEI office, the University of Michigan is also terminating the office for health equity and inclusion and discontinuing their “DEI 2.0 strategic plan” despite its success. The closures comes after the school decided last year to no longer require diversity statements for faculty hiring, tenure or promotion.The university said that it will now focus on student-facing programs, including expanding financial aid, maintaining certain multicultural student spaces and supporting cultural and ethnic events on campus.“These decisions have not been made lightly,” university leadership said in a statement announcing the changes.“We recognize the changes are significant and will be challenging for many of us, especially those whose lives and careers have been enriched by and dedicated to programs that are now pivoting.”The university’s decision was met with immediate concern.“The federal government is determined to dismantle and control higher education and to make our institutions more uniform, more inequitable, and more exclusive,” Rebekah Modrak, the chair of the faculty senate, wrote in an email to colleagues about the decision, according to the Detroit Free Press. “They are using the power of the government to engineer a sweeping culture change towards white supremacy. Unfortunately, University of Michigan leaders seem determined to comply and to collaborate in our own destruction.” More

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      US immigration officials detain doctoral student at University of Alabama

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      US immigration authorities have detained a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, campus officials confirmed on Wednesday.A spokesperson for the state’s flagship university said in a brief statement that a student was arrested “off campus” by federal immigration officials, but declined to comment further, citing privacy laws.The US government’s justification for detaining the student was not immediately clear, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not respond to a request for comment late on Wednesday.News of the arrest comes amid reports of the Trump administration increasingly targeting college students for arrest and deportation across the country, including people in the US on visas and permanent residents with green cards, raising alarms on campuses and in surrounding communities.The Crimson White, a student newspaper at the University of Alabama, reported on the arrest, saying the targeted student was detained at their home early on Tuesday morning. The individual is Iranian and was in the US on a student visa and studying mechanical engineering, the newspaper said. The university’s College Democrats group said in a statement that Trump and Ice “have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community”.It was not immediately clear on Wednesday evening if the arrested student had a lawyer.Alex House, a university spokesperson, said its international student and scholar services center was available to assist students with concerns: “International students studying at the university are valued members of the campus community.”But House’s statement added that the university “has and will continue to follow all immigration laws and cooperate with federal authorities”.The Alabama arrest was confirmed the same day news broke that Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University in Boston, was detained by federal immigration agents and taken to an Ice detention center in Louisiana. Her arrest appeared to be part of the US government’s crackdown on students with ties to pro-Palestinian activism on campus last year.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Ozturk was in the US on a visa and accused her of supporting Hamas, but did not provide evidence to support its claims. Media reports noted that Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish citizen, had in March 2024 co-written an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper, alongside three other authors, supporting calls for the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOzturk’s arrest has sparked widespread outrage as video circulated showing masked officers, in plainclothes, approaching her on the street and taking her into custody. A 32-year-old software engineer whose surveillance camera recorded the arrest told the Associated Press it “looked like a kidnapping”.The Massachusetts director of Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights group, said in a statement: “We unequivocally condemn the abduction of a young Muslim hijab-wearing scholar by masked federal agents in broad daylight. This alarming act of repression is a direct assault on free speech and academic freedom.”Ozturk’s lawyer told the New York Times she was heading out to break her Ramadan fast with friends when she was detained near her apartment.Tufts’s president said the university “had no pre-knowledge of this incident and did not share any information with federal authorities prior to the event”. The university was told the student’s visa was “terminated”, the president added.Ice records suggested Ozturk was taken to Louisiana despite a judge ordering DHS to give advanced notice if officials sought to transfer her out of state.DHS has also faced scrutiny over its efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, who is a green card holder. A US judge in Manhattan on Wednesday blocked immigration officials from detaining Yunseo Chung, a Columbia undergraduate, who is also a permanent resident facing threats of deportation for involvement in Gaza solidarity protests.Maya Yang contributed reporting More

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      Columbia protester suit raises questions about free speech rights: ‘Immigration enforcement as a bludgeon’

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      In a matter of days, Yunseo Chung was sent into hiding.On 5 March, Chung – a 21-year-old student at Columbia University – attended a sit-in to protest the expulsion of several students involved in pro-Palestinian activism at the famed New York university. Four days later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents showed up at her parents’ home.When they couldn’t find her there, Ice sought help from federal prosecutors and searched her dormitory – using a warrant that cited a criminal law against “harboring noncitizens”. They revoked her green card and accused her of posing a threat to US foreign policy interests.On Monday, Chung sued Donald Trump and other high-ranking administrations to stop their targeting of her and other students. And on Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt its efforts to arrest and deport Chung, saying “nothing in the record” indicated that Chung posed a danger to the community.“After the constant dread in the back of my mind over the past few weeks, this decision feels like a million pounds off of my chest. I feel like I could fly,” she shared in a statement to the Guardian after the ruling.Her location remains undisclosed, and Chung herself has remained shielded – for her own protection – from the public. But she has nonetheless made a powerful statement, by raising a simple question: if the administration can arbitrarily and unilaterally threaten immigrants over political views they disagree with, if it can disregard the free speech rights of lawful permanent residents – what limits, if any, remain on its power?“Officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms. Chung’s speech,” her lawyers write in the suit.Unlike some of the other students the administration has targeted for pro-Palestinian activism, including recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who led protests on campus, and Cornell PhD student Momodou Taal, who delivered speeches at his university’s pro-Palestinian encampment, Chung’s involvement in the movement was low-profile. She didn’t play an organizing or leading role in any of the protest efforts; she didn’t speak to the media about her activism.“She was, rather, one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns,” her lawyers write.Chung moved to the US from South Korea when she was seven, and has lived in the country ever since. She was a valedictorian in high school; at Columbia, she had contributed to a literary magazine and an undergraduate law journal. She has maintained a 3.99 GPA and interned with a number of legal non-profits including the Innocence Project.Last spring, Chung was one of hundreds of students and other activists who set up the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the university campus, and hundreds of others visited the space to attend speeches, community events and protests. As the university began meting out disciplinary actions against protesters, hundreds of students and faculty also joined in a walkout in solidarity with student activists, demanding amnesty to student protesters.View image in fullscreenIn May last year, Chung and other students faced disciplinary proceedings for posting flyers on school campus – but the university ultimately found that Chung had not violated policies, according to the lawsuit.After that, Chung continued her studies, and it wasn’t until earlier this month that she came onto immigration officials’ radar.Earlier this year, Barnard College, a sister school to Columbia, announced the expulsions of several protesters – amid a renewed, nationwide crackdown on student protesters that came following pressures from the Trump administration to tamp down pro-Palestinian activism on campus.Chung attended a sit-in demonstration calling on Barnard to reverse the expulsions. Chung became trapped between a crowd of students and New York police department officers investigating a bomb threat, according to the suit. She, and others, were charged by the NYPD for “obstruction of governmental administration”.Days later, immigration officials obtained a warrant to track down and arrest Chung. In a statement on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security characterized the sit-in she attended as a “pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College”.In a press conference after a hearing on Chung’s case Tuesday, Ramzi Kassem, one of her lawyers, said that Chung “remained a resident of the Southern District of New York” and had been “keeping up with her coursework” even amid Ice’s efforts to track her down and arrest her.In a lawsuit filed Monday, Chung’s lawyers wrote that the prospect of arrest and detention has “chilled her speech” – and note that the administration’s pursuit of non-citizen students had overall dampened free expression.“Ms. Chung is now concerned about speaking up about the ongoing ordeal of Palestinians in Gaza as well as what is happening on her own campus: the targeting of her fellow students,” the suit alleges.Scores of other students could also be silenced with similar threats, the suit argues. Faculty at Columbia and universities across the US have reported that international students and green card holders have been worried about attending classes, and are reconsidering plans to visit family, study abroad or travel for research.The administration has also placed immense pressure on universities to cooperate with its crackdown on protesters. Last week, the university agreed to overhaul its protest policies and hire an internal security force of 36 “special officers” who will be empowered to remove people from campus after the administration revoked $400m in funding for the university, which many faculty have taken as a dangerous capitulation that will endanger academic freedom.And the threat of deportation against her is a powerful one, the suit continues. If she is sent to South Korea, she would be arriving in a country she hardly knows – separated from her parents and community, and a sister who is about the start college as well.“Yunseo no longer has to fear that Ice will spirit her away to a distant prison simply because she spoke up for Palestinian human rights,” said Kassem in a statement to the Guardian. “The court’s temporary restraining order is both sensible and fair, to preserve the status quo as we litigate the serious constitutional issues at stake not just for Yunseo, but for our society as a whole.” More

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      USC enacts hiring freeze and makes cuts over Trump threats to funding

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      The University of Southern California announced an immediate hiring freeze for all staff positions, “with very few critical exceptions” in a letter to faculty and staff on Tuesday.The letter, from USC’s president, Carol Folt, and provost, Andrew Guzman, said the hiring freeze was one of nine steps to cut the school’s operating budget amid deep uncertainty about federal funding – given sweeping cuts to scientific research, the reorganization of student loans, and an education department investigation accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish students during protests over Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.“Like other major research institutions, USC relies on significant amounts of federal funding to carry out our mission,” the university administrators wrote. “In fiscal year 2024, for example, we received approximately $1.35 billion in federal funding, including roughly $650 million in student financial aid and $569 million for federally funded research. The health system also receives Medicare, Medicaid, and Medi-Cal payments – a significant portion of its revenues – and the futures of those funds are similarly uncertain.”The other measures include: permanent budget reductions for administrative units and schools, a review of procurement contracts, a review of capital projects “to determine which may be deferred or paused”, a curtailment of faculty hiring, new restriction on discretionary spending and expenses for travel and conferences, an effort to streamline operations, a halt on merit-based pay increases, and an end to extended winter recess introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic.Two weeks ago, USC was one of 60 schools notified by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights of “potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus”.The newly announced budget cuts follow a university statement in November of last year that informed staff that “rising costs require … budgetary adjustments”. In 2024, that statement said: “USC’s audited financial statement shows a deficit of $158 million.”“Over the past six years, our deficit has ranged from $586 million during legal cost repayments and COVID, to a modest positive level of $36 million in 2023,” USC administrators wrote in November.“Similar deficits are being reported at many peer institutions due to rising costs that outpace revenues across all of higher education,” they added. More

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      We call on Columbia to stand up to authoritarianism | Open letter

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      To the Columbia University administration,As journalists who were trained by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and who are steeped in America’s long traditions of free speech and academic freedom, we write to you to express our horror at the events of the past week.The Trump administration has sent immigration enforcers into university-owned student housing and university public spaces at Columbia, has arrested and sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil – not for having committed any documented crimes, but for the thoughts that he has expressed; and has forced another student, Ranjani Srivasan, to flee to Canada after her visa was revoked, also apparently for thought crimes.It has sought to financially cripple the university by withholding $400m in federal funds. And it has demanded the university shut down or restructure departments it deems to be politically problematic, and that it alter its criteria for who to admit to incoming student cohorts.We come from diverse political backgrounds and worldviews; some of us were deeply alienated by last year’s campus protests around the war in Gaza, others of us were sympathetic to the students. Regardless of our political views, however, we firmly believe that the federal government should have no role in policing Columbia’s academic structures, in shaping course requirements and personnel choices made by the university, in dictating admissions strategies, and in terrorizing students for expressing political views that the first amendment clearly protects.Yet, astoundingly, all of these changes are now being accepted by Columbia University in the vain hope of deterring a predatory government from cutting off federal funds and decimating the university’s science research facilities. The university higher-ups have sold out students and faculty alike in their efforts to access federal dollars.We recognize that the fault here lies primarily with the Trump administration, which is stampeding away from democratic norms and, by the day, reinventing the US as an autocracy in the image of Orbán’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. We recognize, too, that universities such as Columbia are caught between a rock and hard place, damned if they cooperate with the Maga agenda and damned if they don’t.In such a dismal situation, courageously standing up for moral principles and academic codes would have been the honorable – and ultimately more effective – path to take. As Churchill famously said after England and France’s capitulation to Nazi demands at the Munich conference in which Czechoslovakia was dismembered: “You had a choice between dishonor and war; you chose dishonor and you shall have war.”Trump’s administration preys on weakness, and it is employing an extraordinarily effective divide and conquer strategy. We are seeing this in its assault on individual law firms, such as Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which this week cried uncle and arranged a meeting with Trump, in which it agreed to do $40m of pro bono work for clients and issues of his choice in exchange for not having their security clearances revoked.That will, of course, only empower Trump and the justice department to ask more of the capitulating attorneys and also to go after additional law firms, seeking the same result – indeed, on Friday night, Trump released a memo directing the Department of Justice to do just that. We are seeing it with major media outlets – take, for example, ABC’s extraordinary decision to donate millions of dollars to the Trump presidential library to make an inconvenient Trump lawsuit disappear; or CBS’s decision to give the Trump team access to the transcripts of its pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. Again, that will only empower Trump to demand further concessions from those companies in how they report on his Administration as well as to seek to kneecap the independence of other media outlets.And, of course, we are seeing it in the escalating war against academia. Columbia’s capitulation won’t end the nightmare that American research universities are facing, rather it will make it worse. For if an institution of the stature, and with the vast endowment resources, of an Ivy League school such as Columbia can be publicly humiliated and made to grovel for Federal crumbs, then every other academic institution in the country is rendered weaker and more open to political attack.Given this reality, we urge Columbia’s administrators to rethink their strategy in dealing with Trump’s authoritarian administration. We urge university administrators around the country to respond collectively rather than allowing themselves to be picked off one by one. And we urge Columbia alumni, of all political persuasions, to join with us in recognizing the enormous stakes in play here, and in demanding that this wonderful academic institution stand up for the values and the beliefs that have held steady since its founding more than 270 years ago. We urge alumni to call their political representatives to protest the assault on academic freedom, to contact Columbia University’s leadership to express their displeasure, and, if necessary, to withhold their donations to Columbia until such time as the university stiffens its spine in its dealings with the Trump administration.This is, we believe, one of the greatest crises facing academia in US history, and also one of the greatest assaults on free speech. How universities such as Columbia respond will determine whether universities remain independent or whether, ultimately, they end up simply serving as extensions of an increasingly authoritarian state.Sasha Abramsky
      Jason Ziedenberg
      Marissa Ventura
      Marion Davis
      Martha Irvine
      Anna Allen
      Gil Griffin
      Megan Williams
      Tony Fong, Science editor
      Victoria Pesce Elliott
      Holly Bass
      Stuart Davis
      Chuck Tanowitz
      Jennifer Cohen Oko
      Carolyn Juris
      Victoria Colliver
      John Nichols
      Chris Lombardi
      Alice Sparberg Alexiou
      Elizabeth Kadetsky
      Dina Hampton
      Aaron Naparstek
      Kevin Heldman
      Jerome Weeks
      Betsy Rosen
      Lizzy Stark
      Jay Ross
      Professor Sam Freedman
      Timothy Cahill More