Author: dabateman

AAUP v. Rubio

https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-briefs-defend-independent-legal-system-reject-ideological-deportations

The national as well as several chapters are suing Rubio.

This week, the AAUP and allies filed two separate friend-of-the-court briefs.

With the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, the AAUP submitted a brief supporting the law firm Perkins Coie in its battle against the Trump administration. Perkins Coie was the subject of an executive order which limited the law firm’s ability to represent government contractors and access federal buildings. Unlike some of the biggest US law firms, who have struck deals with the Trump administration, Perkins Coie sued the Trump administration. The court temporarily blocked the order and is now considering a motion for summary judgment that would permanently enjoin the enforcement of the order. More than 500 law firms have submitted another friend-of-the-court brief, as has the American Civil LIberties Union and a number of other parties, arguing in favor of blocking the order. The AAUP’s brief focuses on the harms that will be caused if lawyers are afraid to take on cases or make certain arguments for fear of retaliation by the government, and discusses the dangerous position taken by the administration through its casual invocation of national security to justify all manner of actions and to push back against robust judicial review. Read the brief here.

To fortify our lawsuit AAUP v. Rubio, thirty faculty groups, including seventeen AAUP chapters, organized to join an amicus brief urging a preliminary injunction against ideological deportations of students and scholars. AAUP members from public and private institutions, from community colleges and research universities, from Texas to Minnesota, California to New Hampshire, and points in between are exercising solidarity to protect students and co-workers. Read the amicus brief here.

Here’s a statement from the MIT AAUP, one of the chapters that joined the amicus brief.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRr5lcMp9axltMvx1tyh-9rUkafFum4j5zu2yRauAlRCDsmgi_Uprc-tbllG4az6XenkCDXjM8tGJvr/pub

Cornell faculty in support of democracy and academic freedom

The brazen assault on academic freedom sweeping across the country has again got Cornell in its sights.

There is a letter to the Cornell board of trustees circulating right now, and we urge all Cornell faculty to sign it.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScCQXl77TWPhipU1-BDIl4RjXJfnjtbBRsRQZS1aYEHg_m2Sg/viewform?fbclid=IwY2xjawJmArJleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHlyrWHA6jW86CBJJcBHosEa3xZLZYUgP0KHVV3YGyN0JbHkfvIgDgigZB-xe_aem_38-jfNWB7O_LR-2rqcZB_A

For some of the legal context, you should check out some of Michael Dorf’s posts, on Columbia and on the AAUP filling the void left by Columbia’s capitulation.

See also the longer statement co-authored with other constitutional law scholars.

Under Title VI, the government may not cut off funds until it has

  • conducted a program-by-program evaluation of the alleged violations;
  • provided recipients with notice and “an opportunity for hearing”; 
  • limited any funding cutoff “to the particular program, or part thereof, in which…noncompliance has been…found”; and 
  • submitted a report explaining its actions to the relevant committees in Congress at least thirty days before any funds can be stopped.

These requirements aim to ensure that any withdrawal of funds is based on genuine misbehavior on the university’s part—on illegal toleration of discriminatory conduct, not just on allowance of First Amendment–protected expression. The requirements aim to make clear to recipients of federal funds just what behavior can form the basis for sanctions. And each of the requirements aims to make sure that the sanction fits the offense.

Yet here the sanction was imposed without any agency or court finding that Columbia violated Title VI in its response to antisemitic harassment or discrimination. Even to the extent that some protesters’ behavior amounted to illegal harassment of Jewish students, no agency and no court has concluded that Columbia illegally failed to reasonably respond to such discriminatory behavior—much less failed to act at a level justifying withdrawal of nearly half a billion dollars in funds. The government’s action therefore risks deterring and suppressing constitutionally protected speech—not just illegal discriminatory conduct.

President by fiat

Cornell AAUP chapter member Eric Cheyfitz has a fantastic piece in the Daily Sun, putting recent university developments within the longer history of the evisceration of meaningful faculty and shared governance at Cornell.

https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2025/04/cheyfitz-president-by-fiat

“By fiat, the Board of Trustees has just appointed Interim President Michael Kotlikoff as the 15th president of Cornell University. For the first time in my 22 years here as a tenured member of the faculty, there has been no national search for the university presidency. Such searches typically include faculty. So this suspension of a search is one more sign of the decline in faculty governance, which has been declining rapidly at Cornell … The increasing decline of faculty governance nationally has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the corporate university, which, over a hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen recognized in his 1918 book The Higher Learning in America. Today, by and large, university presidents play the role of CEO, taking their agendas largely from boards of trustees and donors rather than faculties. President Kotlikoff fits squarely in this mold at a time when the corporate model has become particularly toxic with the Trump administration’s assault on liberal education with its foundation in free speech and academic freedom. “

Read and share!

The ongoing persecution of Momodou Taal

We share a few weeks back a wonderful series of articles detailing the arbitrary treatment of Momodou Taal by the Cornell administration.

Now it’s the turn of the federal government.

On March 15, Momodou as well as another Cornell student and a Cornell faculty member filed a lawsuit against Trump’s executive orders (14161and 14188) to the extent they authorize deportation or prosecution based on protected speech.

Early this morning, Momodou Taal was informed by the DOJ that “ICE has asked us to … invite Mr. Taal and his counsel to appear in-person … for Mr. Taal to surrender to ICE custody.”

The subject line of the email was “Momodou Taal et al v. Trump, 25-cv-335 (NDNY),” ie., Momodou’s pending case against the US government. As Taal’s lawyers put it, they are “not aware of any other instance in which the government has attempted to initiate service of an NTA [notice to appear] through the Department of Justice in response to the non-citizen filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of presidential action.” 

There is every reason to suspect that the order to surrender to ICE was done in response to the lawsuit. His lawyers further suspect that it is an effort to detain Momodou Taal so as to impede his lawyers’ access to him, and to unlawfully remove the case from the Court’s jurisdiction. 

WHOA. On March 15, a Cornell PhD student with UK and Gambian citizenship, here on a student visa, filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Trump's EO aimed at foreign students accused of "antisemitism.Last night, the DOJ emailed asking him to come to ICE to be detained and put into removal proceedings.

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) 2025-03-21T15:51:43.954Z

The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil

12 March 2025

Below is a joint statement from AAUP chapters about the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil and the withholding of federal research funds from Columbia.

For Immediate Release

Contact: kweld@aaup-hfc.org

Statement from Harvard, MIT, UChicago, and Cornell AAUP Chapters Regarding Ongoing Crisis at Columbia University 

We write to condemn in the strongest possible terms two recent and related federal attacks on Columbia University: the impoundment of some $400 million in research funds, and the targeting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement of Columbia students and alumni involved in pro-Palestine protests—in particular, the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, who is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. 

To search for adequate precedent for these brazenly illegal and partisan actions requires looking to the worst days of the Red Scare or the Alien and Sedition Acts. Nothing in the Constitution permits a president to target his political opponents by defying laws passed by Congress or by detaining and threatening to deport people for their viewpoints. Yet the illegality of these moves is almost beside the point; their architects quite candidly describe them as part of a wider crusade against higher education, an attempt to impose top-down control on what Americans teach, study, and learn. 

Columbia has borne the brunt of this onslaught over the past week. Yet we know that our own universities are next in the crosshairs. We do not need the crisis to reach our doors before we will rise to defend the academic autonomy of our research and teaching activities, the free speech rights and safety of our community members, and the essential scientific and humanistic contributions of universities to our society. We, the undersigned chapters of the American Association of University Professors, stand in full solidarity with our colleagues at Columbia.

AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter

AAUP-MIT

University of Chicago AAUP

AAUP Cornell University Chapter