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    academic freedom

    A Harvard faculty member protests Trump's attacks.

    Trump’s Lawless Attack on Harvard Is Like None Before

    Trump is determined to make an example of Harvard so that other universities and institutions with money and power will do his bidding.

    John Relman
    Jun 26, 2025

    This month, our firm filed a friend of the court brief in the Harvard case on behalf of 18 former government officials who were responsible for enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law the Trump administration relies on to justify termination of billions of dollars in federal funding to the university. The signatories to the brief are senior career and non-career appointees who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations from the 1970’s to January of this year.

    One of those former officials is David Tatel, a highly respected retired judge who served as director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) under President Jimmy Carter, and later as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often called the nation’s second highest court. Judge Tatel discusses his experience overseeing Title VI enforcement in the brief. It illustrates just how lawless, destructive, and dangerous President Donald Trump’s vendetta against Harvard has become—and how different it is from any Title VI enforcement action that has gone before.

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    Opinion
    donald trump
    Cambridge protesters urge Harvard not to concede to Trump demands: 'We have some demands, too. Back off.'

    Radical Curiosity Versus the State

    In this moment of disruption, to teach, to write, and to read critically are no longer normative acts expected of rigor and scholarship; they have become, in face of federal bullying, acts of defiance.

    Ibrahim N. Abusharif
    Jun 01, 2025

    Wherever we turn today, the drumbeats of a foreboding crisis in the country grow louder. It’s telling us that an authoritarian drift is pushing hard against the gates of once-inviolable institutions of democracy, like press freedom, due process, and independent higher education. They are institutions that have long fronted the American brand in the global imagination and have served as invitations to replicate a coveted liberal order whose hinges are now ready to blow.

    If the din of apocalyptic warnings is overwhelming, then disengage from all media, store canned foods, and wait for the collapse to pass. But for those unwilling to abdicate critical judgment, there are more generative responses. As worn out as it may sound, it’s useful to seek out story and metaphor again, not as escapism, but as epistemological tools to help us divine the bearing of a crisis whose logic is as erratic as its logic-masters. Dystopian fiction quietly endures as one of the few genres honest enough to envisage the coming shape of our contemporary decline and also show us subversive ways out.

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    Opinion
    academic freedom
    Pro-Palestine protest at Harvard.

    The Palestine Exception, Right-Wing Elite Capture, and New Student Visa Rules

    Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking.

    Michael R. Allen
    May 30, 2025

    People in the United States of America continue to allow the normalization of very dangerous measures solidifying authoritarian government, and the administration of President Donald Trump continues to escalate each measure. The latest measure arrived on May 27 when Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended all embassy reviews of applications for student and exchange visas from foreign nationals, stating that a new policy including social media vetting will be announced soon. Rubio also suspended scheduling any new interviews for three types of visas that enable foreign nationals to participate in U.S. institutions: F (for students at academic institutions), M (for students in vocational or non-academic schools), and J (for teaching and research exchange visitors). The new policy has not been revealed yet.

    Here is yet another case that should break the people of the U.S.—if not the feckless supposed opposition party, the Democrats—from their political paralysis. The Trump administration inherited a largely informal apparatus of campus repression relying on the defamation, arrest, and suspension of students and faculty members who opposed the U.S. role in supporting what the Israeli government now openly admits is a campaign of deliberate starvation and full land dispossession of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump’s administration seized upon the zeitgeist already brewed by university leaders and fueled by a coalition of Zionist and far-right organizations, and seized it with an aim far more expansive than simply punishing pro-Palestinian activism and speech.

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    Opinion
    donald trump

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