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academic freedom
Prominent Harvard Scholars Tell School President Not to Cave to Trump
"The university must not directly or indirectly cede to governmental or other outside authorities the right to install or reject leading personnel," wrote the Harvard faculty members.
Jul 31, 2025
A group of prominent faculty members at Harvard University on Thursday urged the school to stand firm against legal and financial pressures being brought by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration.
The New Republic's Greg Sargent posted a letter on Bluesky from the Harvard scholars addressed to Harvard President Alan Garber, in which they explain why striking a deal with Trump could be a major blow for both academic freedom and American democracy. The letter begins by decrying the administration's "assault on the vibrancy and inclusiveness of U.S. higher education" and then outlined values that they believe Harvard should not compromise during any negotiations with the government.
"The university must not directly or indirectly cede to governmental or other outside authorities the right to install or reject leading personnel—that is, to dictate who can be the officials who lead the university or its component schools, departments, and centers," they wrote.
The scholars also demanded that the university not allow the government to play a role in the hiring of faculty or the admission of students, and that the university keep the contents of courses in the hands of faculty members.
"Some of us believe that Harvard should not engage in any extraordinary 'negotiations' with an overstepping federal government; others believe that efforts to find a settlement are the right way forward," the scholars continued. "All of us have nevertheless agreed to sign this letter because we feel that public clarity is important about what cannot be compromised by Harvard, given its prominence in national and international academic affairs."
The letter's signatories were Harvard University political scientist Ryan Enos, Kennedy School of Government political scientist Archon Fung, Harvard University economist Oliver Hart, Harvard Business School economist Rebecca Henderson, Harvard University political scientist Steve Levitsky, Harvard University economist Eric Maskin, Kennedy School of Government economist Dani Rodrik, Harvard University sociologist Theda Skocpol, and Harvard University political scientist Stephen Walt.
In addition to those faculty members, Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet wrote her own letter to Garber in which she argued against any deal with the administration.
"Harvard has been a beacon for academic freedom, and that means that even if Harvard's administration believes that it is getting a 'good' deal, any 'deal' will be used to extort more concessions and destroy academic freedom elsewhere," she argued. "This is not how the leading U.S. university should behave."
After seeing the letter, some academics at other institutions chimed in to lend their support and appreciation to the Harvard scholars.
"When people in this group tell me about the long-term political implications of things, I listen," wrote Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari on Bluesky.
"These scholars are among the top thinkers about democracy and autocracy in the world," observed University of California, Los Angeles Law professor Rick Hasen.
Harvard has been locked in a lengthy legal battle with the Trump administration after the president cut off federal funding to the university and even threatened to revoke its accreditation status. Harvard has reportedly considered striking a deal with the administration along the lines of the one cut by Columbia University earlier this month, which may have been what prompted the university faculty members to write their letter.
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'Bowing Down to Authoritarianism,' Columbia Agrees to Pay $200 Million in Deal With Trump
"Columbia has effectively waived the white flag of surrender in its battle at the heart of the Trump administration's war on higher education and academic freedom," said Rep. Jerry Nadler.
Jul 24, 2025
Columbia University has agreed to pay a $200 million fine and make other significant concessions to the Trump administration in a deal to restore federal grants canceled earlier this year as part of the president's assault on institutions of higher education.
Under the terms of the settlement, which was released Wednesday, Columbia agreed to "conduct a thorough review" of its educational programs "in regional areas across the university, starting with the Middle East"—bowing to the Trump administration's interference in curriculum-related decisions.
Columbia also pledged to "undertake a comprehensive review of its international admissions processes" and "ensure that international student-applicants are asked questions to elicit their reasons for wishing to study in the United States" as the Trump administration—under the guise of combating antisemitism—targets international students who have taken part in Palestinian rights demonstrations.
Earlier this week, Columbia suspended or expelled dozens of students over Gaza-related protests.
Columbia University has handed over its undergraduate admissions process to Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who will now decide at their sole discretion whether the university has admitted enough white people. It's no longer an independent institution.
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— Kevin Carey (@kevincarey1.bsky.social) Jul 23, 2025 at 10:22 PM
Columbia's deal with the federal government sparked immediate, furious backlash, with critics condemning the university's leaders as "cowards" who are "bowing down to authoritarianism."
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose district includes Columbia, said he was "deeply disappointed" to learn of the university's "outrageous and embarrassing $200 million capitulation to the Trump administration's repugnant extortion campaign."
In response to the Trump administration's claim that the university was violating federal law by failing to protect its Jewish students, Nadler stressed that "no investigation was ever conducted by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights—the single body charged under federal law with investigating antisemitism on campus." (Columbia did not admit to wrongdoing as part of the agreement.)
"Rather, unlike Harvard, my alma mater has allowed a once highly respected institution to succumb to the Trump administration's coercive and exploitative tactics," Nadler said in a statement. "Columbia has effectively waived the white flag of surrender in its battle at the heart of the Trump administration's war on higher education and academic freedom."
The Columbia Daily Spectator, the university's student newspaper, reported that under its settlement with the Trump administration, the university "agreed to reveal the admissions data of both rejected and admitted students, including their race, GPA, and standardized test performance, to the federal government."
"As part of the deal, the federal government will not institute 'any civil action' against the university and will resume canceled National Institutes of Health and Health and Human Services funding, but does not restore grants from the Department of Education," the Spectator observed. "The university is required to comply with Title VI to maintain the terms of the deal."
Jacob Schriner-Briggs, visiting assistant professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, wrote on social media that the deal represents "a vicious blow to the academic freedom of university employees and students alike" and accused Columbia of "taking its lead from the government as to what questions it will ask international applicants and which 'longstanding traditions' it will ensure all of its students are 'committed to.'"
"This capitulation is indefensible," wrote Schriner-Briggs.
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When the Margins Catch Fire, We Should Ask Why
Mainstream coverage—especially in conservative media—attempts to pathologize public rage, diagnosing it as deviance or irrationality rather than consequence.
Jul 05, 2025
The press was all over the unrest in Los Angeles about a month ago. But since then, the impatient gaze of the industry turned toward Iran, beautiful budgets, trials of the century, and Elon v. Donald. Still, the cycle of urban margins catching fire needs attention—not just as spectacle, but as the result of fixed systems and broken promises.
The recurring tableau of public rage in urban America has been reduced to visual shorthand—burning cars, shattered glass, tossed stones, fleeing reporters, looting desperados, and the theater of rubber bullets, tear gas, and battle gear. The corporate media narrative rarely strays from this script, obedient to its reflexive calculus: Unrest equals lawlessness and unmoored anger.
Regardless of editorial intent, such mainstream coverage—especially in conservative media—attempts to pathologize public rage, diagnosing it as deviance or irrationality rather than consequence. In doing so, the narrative dismisses the very legitimacy of grievance among those already made to feel they do not count because they do not carry the full weight of citizenship. In supremacy logic, “noncitizen” is often polite talk for racialized otherness.
Peace without justice is an anesthetic, and anesthetics wear off.
This reduction of protest to pathology has consequences. It gives cover to expanded exercises of state power, such as, normalizing greater surveillance capacities, lowering thresholds for suspicion and probable cause, suppressing dissent and academic freedom—all upheld by populist rhetoric and sycophantic media amplification.
We’ve seen this spectacle before. In Baltimore in 2015, protests following the death of Freddie Gray were reduced to a looped image of a burning CVS pharmacy, as if fire alone explained a century or more of exclusion. The substance of the protest—calls for justice, dignity, and police accountability—was overwhelmed by sensational visuals. In Ferguson the year before, armored police vehicles rolled through suburban streets, rifles trained on unarmed civilians, creating scenes indistinguishable from war footage. The tableau was complete: disorder, danger, deviance.
In 2019, nearly 700 undocumented workers were arrested in Mississippi in a high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid conducted on the first day of school—leaving children stranded and traumatized. No white-collar managers were arrested. The arrests were real, but the performance was unmistakable.
Normally locked in the vaults of academia, scholarship occasionally does help in offering names to describe what we all know and recognize through lived experience. For example, scholarship on “advanced marginalization,” as Loïc Wacquant words it, documents the corrosive effects of persistent exclusion of marginalized communities and their political, social, and economic exclusion. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s research argues that state institutions produce and maintain zones of “organized abandonment”—communities targeted not only by economic disinvestment but by punitive state power and carceral responses: false imprisonment, law enforcement overreach, racial profiling, and harassment. When entire communities are hemmed in by political structures and policies that monitor, contain, and discipline rather than support or uplift, protest becomes not a departure from reason but its rational consequence.
The truth in our current context is simpler: ICE raids—often carried out by masked agents who withhold identification—serve not merely as immigration enforcement, but as public theater: performative acts of state power designed to instill terror that pushes minorities into greater marginalization.
More recent victims of government signaling include Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, who was forcibly detained by six masked DHS agents and transported through a multi-state labyrinth of detention centers before being released. Kilmar Ábrego García was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, despite a 2019 court order barring his removal. At Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holding graduate student and Palestinian rights activist, was arrested by ICE as he prepared to graduate. He was released last month..
I fear that these incidents are part of an unfolding pattern in which immigration enforcement becomes a form of ideological policing, where dissent, origin, appearance, or even academic expression can become grounds for removal. These actions are not just about controlling borders—they are about signaling who belongs in the nation’s narrative and who can be disappeared from it.
The carceral logic of state power is vulnerable to disrespecting constitutional protections and rights. Once these rights are on the run, there’s no corralling them back. It is logistically impossible to deport all people who are in the country illegally (as they say). As such, it seems that ICE has been transformed into a performative arm of white nationalist fantasies—a tool not only for deportation but for public signaling. Migrants from south of the border, Muslims, and international students from the Global South are subjected to raids, surveillance, and public humiliation.
These are deliberate acts of political semiotics—meant to declare who belongs and who does not, a specious restriction of what qualifies as the right kind of identity. The cumulative effect is a wounding of body and psyche—a slow, grinding reminder that certain lives exist only at the mercy of others. The nationwide protests over ICE mandates, arrests, and their social meaning are, in a way, a protest to dismantle the “mercy” arrangement.
The aftermath of unrest is often met with rhetorical sleight of hand: Chaos is condemned while its causes are conveniently ignored. Calls for peace are often made by those woefully insulated and racially protected from the very conditions that make public rage inevitable. Peace without justice is an anesthetic, and anesthetics wear off. The question is not why rage appears, but why so little has been done to acknowledge the legitimacy of frustration and address it without the militarization of American cities.
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