The interim CEO of the civil rights organization said he does not know all the details of the investigation by the Department of Justice but believes it’s tied to efforts to gain information about the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations with the potential for violence.
The Right wing in Ohio as well, are trying to shoehorn conservative "thought" into public universities by mandate, rather than through academic rigor. Strang is a U of Iowa grad.
www.wosu.org/politics-gov...
#cspan #cspanwj
“There is a massive difference between faculty in their own departments determining that programs are no longer viable — which has been the usual way program closure has been initiated in the past — and such closure decisions being made solely by administrators."
dailyorange.com/2026/04/facu...
The City of Pittsburgh just passed legislation banning cooperation with ICE.
The vote was unanimous.
🎉🎉🎉
I'm not sure how you can be against removing this man from office right now. What will it take? A nuke being dropped? It's too late then. The purpose of impeachment and the 25th Amendment is to prevent that type of thing from happening, not just to react to it.
if you're not sure what to say when you call your reps, Celeste has a script!!
reps.fyi
Your professors care about you, even if the administration does not.
The sentiment yesterday at Boston University as community protested BU leaders who removed Pride Flags from faculty windows. Proud of my colleagues and students. @aaup.org #TerrierCourage
www.bostonglobe.com/video/2026/0...
This is going to surprise, well, no one who has been paying attention, but Trump's birthright citizenship legal arguments are based on the theories of a former Confederate officer, white supremacist, who went on to argue the segregationists case in Plessy v. Fergueson.
www.vox.com/politics/483...
🚨Student success, whether called DEI, supporting first-generation students, veteran services, or something else, doesn't have a messaging problem, @michaelhgavin.bsky.social said at the @nadohe.bsky.social national conference, but an "authoritarianism problem."
"BU faculty have witnessed the BU administration engaging in what we now understand to be a campaign of censorship. Flags taken down. A student referendum thwarted. Solidarity punished."
Boston University AAUP is releasing a multi-part series documenting censorship at BU. Check it out:
This. A million times this.
The Supreme Court just struck down Colorado's conversion therapy ban. They have now legalized the systematic torture of LGBTQ youth and invalidated the laws that protect them from this abuse.
www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
I suspect we will remember this case as the precedent for overturning bans on hate speech.
8-1, with even liberal justices arguing that all words are protected, even if those words are violent and threaten the lives and well-being of the listeners.
Florida's public universities will no longer allow a standalone introductory sociology course to count toward general-education requirements after state leaders on Thursday approved a sweeping, systemwide ban that reflects years of Republican criticism of the discipline
TAT: [Attacking education]
“Universities are terrified that they will be singled out if they even appear to be supportive of things that fly in the face of things [this admin has previously] forbidden," said Archie Ervin, a preeminent voice for diversity leaders in education.
@meghnadbose.bsky.social & Luke Lawson report:
The AAUP is hiring a Political Director who can build the power of our union by directing our PAC, engaging elected officials and candidates around our policy platform, and building organizational infrastructure.
Applications are due on March 31.
Details here:
300 in less than 24 hours. But we’re aiming even higher.
Sign and circulate to everyone who values Ohio State, in any capacity. We need a transparent and inclusive process. We need to turn this ship in the right direction.
actionnetwork.org/petitions/tr...
Let’s talk about the value of solidarity. Recently, senior leaders at the University of California, Los Angeles, made overtures to work with the Trump administration after receiving a settlement proposal that required the university to restrict freedom of speech and expression on campus and to pay $1.2 billion to the federal government. The UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, along with the American Association of University Professors and other unions, sued the administration. The judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration, writing that the administration used a “playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.” (A ProPublica and Chronicle of Higher Education investigation detailed how the administration tasked lawyers to “rapidly ‘find’ evidence backing a preordained conclusion” at UCLA.)
"It may seem obvious, but I’ll be explicit: Faculty with tenure should summon the same level of courage as an all-but-dissertation lecturer or untenured assistant professor to fight against attacks on academic freedom."
brilliant piece from @bakerdphd.bsky.social @insidehighered.com
TODAY: One of the most consequential attempts to assert ideological control over the nation will potentially be thrust upon colleges and universities: the weaponization of federal student financial aid. Participants will learn what's at stake & what they can do.
Register here: bit.ly/4ufJZsj
Testimony needed — Help stop #Ohio HB 531 from bringing religious chaplains into public schools: bit.ly/OhioHB531
E-flier for a research study, searching for participants. Image is blue & white with text & a picture of a clock.
Call for Participants — Research Study
Are you a neurodivergent tenure-track faculty member in the U.S.? I’m conducting a study on how neurodivergent scholars navigate faculty work, the tenure clock, and “crip time.”
Book bans disproportionately affect LGBTQ books, authors, and readers. The Federal Book Ban bill uses funding threats to pressure schools to remove books. Federal control over ideas is among the worst of all ideas. Sign @everylibrary.bsky.social's petition to defend the freedom to read.
Series: Forgotten Pasts, Alternative Futures
"How to Build a College: Experimental Alternatives in History of Higher Ed"
M 3/16
4:00-5:30pm ET/1:00-2:30 PT
Co-sponsored w @aaup.org Center for Def of Acad Freedom, Critical Legal Collective
REGIST >
@higheredlabor.bsky.social
@rooseveltinstitute.org
The Retreat from DEI: The Impact of Legal and Political Developments on DEI Language in U.S. Private Foundations Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, large private foundations in the United States widely adopted language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on their public-facing websites. In 2023, a series of legal and political developments began reversing the institutional pressures that had encouraged this adoption: first the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), then state-level anti-DEI legislation, and culminating in President Trump’s Executive Order 14151 (2025). Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we constructed a longitudinal corpus of 3,612 archived web pages from thirteen large U.S. private foundations and tracked the frequency of sixty-seven DEI-related terms from 2019 to 2025. Among the nine foundations with data in both years, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicates a decline from 2023 to 2025 (one-sided p = .029, two-sided p = .059), with median usage falling approximately 40 percent. The decline was broad-based across many terms. These patterns are consistent with coercive isomorphism: the same process that drove widespread, convergent adoption of DEI language after 2020 now appears to be reversing it. The findings establish an empirical baseline for tracking how political pressure reshapes organizational communication about equity.
🚨What if some intrepid students and I decided to see if private foundations' public stances on justice were thin enough to fold under anti-DEI pressure? We tracked their website language using Wayback Machine. The retreat is real and it seems political vibes alone supercharged it. osf.io/29gda_v1
Hi friends. As I previously noted, the U. of Iowa is planning to get rid of African American studies; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, & the Classical Languages major—along with others. If you wish, please sign the classics petition: www.change.org/p/keep-the-c.... I will add more as I find out.
I finally got time this weekend to read Josh Moody's great story on the war against student free speech (including student journalism). You should read it, too:
www.insidehighered.com/news/student...
States like FL, TX, NC and GA, which have done the most to degrade academic freedom at public universities, are now trying to create their own state-run accrediting agency, the CPHE. What could go wrong? We have until March 4 to send in feedback.
Watching Ohio House Committee hearings makes me want to scream in my office. How, exactly, is creating an invasive registry of ‘former DEI staffers’ that surveils them into their new roles a strategy for ‘protecting the employee’?
It seems to me that the foundational 'wrong turn' in education was the increasing rhetoric from universities themselves and their supporters that the primary value of a university education was increased earning power.
That leads pretty directly to this place we're in now.
