education – Cornell Chapter of the AAUP

Northwestern University AAUP endorses suing Trump administration

NU faculty recently voted overwhelmingly against “any capitulation on the part of Northwestern University” to the Trump Administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” by a 595 – 4 margin with eight abstentions. A related resolution from the spring, sponsored by the local AAUP chapter, called on NU to sue the Trump administration. That passed 338 to 83.

NU is in a similar position as Cornell, insofar as we have not received any official demands or allegations of Title VI violations. Cornell President Kotlikoff has explained that this has made it harder for Cornell to sue.

NU law professor Heidi Kitrosser has written a nice rebuttal of this argument in the Daily Northwestern. Everything they say is equally relevant on our campus.

NU reportedly has never received any official “demands or requests from the Trump administration, including the Justice Department, the Education Department and the White House,” as President Henry Bienen explained in his recent interview with The Daily. The absence of an official demand letter poses two related challenges.

First, there is no formal statement to which NU can point to demonstrate that the government froze its funding for viewpoint-based reasons or for alleged Title VI violations. Thus, the defendants might argue that NU can, at most, make out a claim for breach of funding contracts.

Second, if NU were left only with such a contract claim, its ability to sue in federal court would be impacted by the Tucker Act, which directs contract disputes with the federal government to the Court of Federal Claims. In contrast, as Judge Burroughs explained, “First Amendment and Title VI claims do not ordinarily fall within the ambit of the Tucker Act, which is very specifically contract-focused.”

Even without an official demand letter, however, NU has a strong case that the funding freeze is viewpoint-based and that it violates Title VI. First, courts ought not to reward government actors for refusing to explain themselves through one particular channel when they take consequential actions — financially devastating ones, in this case — and when ample evidence of their motivations is available elsewhere.

Second, one can find such evidence in multiple public statements and actions by federal officials. With respect to Title VI, the Trump Administration has announced investigations into alleged violations by NU. Indeed, when The Daily first reported on the funding freeze in April, it noted that the White House had referred it “to a tweet by Fox News senior producer Patrick Ward. Senior administration officials told Ward the funding freeze was a result of ‘ongoing, credible and concerning Title VI investigations,’ according to the tweet.”

With respect to the First Amendment, administration officials, including Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, have publicly described their attacks on universities as attacks on left-wing ideologies. Judge Burroughs, as well as the federal district court judge overseeing the UC cases, cited such statements by Trump and McMahon — statements made in multiple forums ranging from executive orders to social media posts — to support their findings of viewpoint discrimination.

NU, in short, has a very solid case to make to a federal court. Doing so won’t be easy, but it strikes me as the only reasonable response to the federal government’s onslaught against academic freedom in the United States.

Shakedown at Columbia

Analysis from the Knight First Amendment Institute:

“After months of negotiation, Columbia University announced on July 23 that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to resolve investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. The settlement provides that Columbia will pay fines of $221m over three years, and that in consideration for these payments and other concessions—including concessions made by Columbia as a precondition to the negotiations 1. After it canceled $400m in grants to Columbia in March, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia take a number of steps as a “precondition” to further negotiations. The commitments Columbia made in response, on March 21, are referenced in the July 23 settlement and incorporated into it. Columbia made additional commitments on July 15 without expressly linking them to the Trump administration’s demands. Columbia’s press release announcing the settlement describes the July 23 settlement as “building on” the July 15 commitments.—the Trump administration will reinstate the “vast majority” of the federal grants the government paused or canceled in March. In announcing the settlement, Columbia stated that the settlement’s terms are “carefully crafted to protect the values that define us.” In Columbia’s telling, the settlement “preserves Columbia’s autonomy and authority over faculty hiring, admissions, and academic decision-making.”

We see this differently. As an initial matter, we fear that the Trump administration will view the settlement as validating its most outlandish claims about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, student protests relating to Gaza, and Columbia’s response to allegations of antisemitism. To be sure, Columbia has not admitted wrongdoing—it “denies liability” in the settlement’s first paragraph. But Columbia’s acquiescence to the agreement is nonetheless likely to provide cover for the Trump administration’s ongoing, lawless assault on higher education.

We also have serious concerns about many of the settlement’s terms, as we discuss below. The settlement narrows Columbia’s autonomy with respect to admissions, the hiring and promotion of faculty, and curriculum—all aspects of what the Supreme Court has called the “essential freedoms” of the university. It imposes new rules relating to protest on campus and student discipline that should be entirely the province of the university to decide. It also supplies the Trump administration with ongoing leverage by requiring the university to satisfy nebulous contractual terms and burdensome reporting requirements under the threat of litigation if its compliance is deemed to be less than satisfactory. In addition, the settlement creates a monitoring and surveillance regime that is certain to chill the exercise of freedoms that are central to the university’s mission.

…

But all of us should be clear-eyed about the settlement’s costs. The settlement is an astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to the government—and not just to the government, but to an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day. It will have far-reaching implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia—even if we assume that the provisions that are susceptible to more than one interpretation will be construed narrowly, as the settlement itself says they should be (¶ 5). We also doubt that the Trump administration will be satisfied with the territory it has won. The settlement does not foreclose the Trump administration from demanding more from Columbia on the basis of the university’s real or imagined failure to comply with the settlement’s terms, or on the basis of purported transgressions that are new or newly discovered. Indeed, the settlement itself gives the administration an array of new tools to use in the service of its coercive campaign.

Those of us at Columbia should understand how our university is being transformed, and those at other universities contemplating similar settlements should understand how much is at stake. We are sympathetic to Columbia’s leaders, who are operating under extraordinary pressure, but we cannot agree that the settlement “protect[s] the values that define us.” “

An Agreement That Settles Nothing

From the Columbia University Chapter of the AAUP, for immediate release: July 29, 2025

The Agreement between the federal government and Columbia University announced on July 24, 2025, has been presented as a settlement of Title VI violations, specifically the university’s alleged failure to curtail bias and harassment directed toward Jewish faculty, staff, and students. However, as has been pointed out by several of our colleagues, the statutory processes encoding Title VI enforcement have been entirely ignored in arriving at this deal. Far from being a legal settlement, the Agreement merely fulfills the Trump administration’s desire to dominate a prominent university, to diminish its autonomy, and to silence critical speech. This Agreement and the many concessions that have preceded it will ineluctably transform Columbia for the worse and stain its reputation in the eyes of the world.

One-off deals that result from coercion are not only antithetical to the rule of law, but also implicate the university in corrupt and authoritarian practices. The illegal rescission of funds, including research grants, community outreach, and all CUIMC training grants has already caused irreparable damage; threatened permanent reductions in budgets that support science research portend even more profound harm. While this Agreement offers some short-term relief to some of those impacted, there is no reason to believe that the deal is a stable one, given the Trump administration’s record on honoring its commitments and the acknowledgment, in the document itself, that perceived breaches of the terms of the deal may result in additional demands and penalties.

The Agreement is, in short, the blunt instrument through which the Trump Administration has demonstrated its power to bludgeon American universities into undermining the traditions of free and open inquiry, robust political speech, and shared governance that have long distinguished them. Despite the university’s leadership’s claims that Columbia has held true to these fundamental principles, it has not.

The Agreement formalizes recent changes to rules governing student/faculty conduct and discipline, and prescribes the acceleration of hearings and punishments (articles 26-27). It authorizes the review and restructuring of departments and areas of study, mandating new hiring in certain fields (12-13). It imposes ideological tests as a precondition for the admission of international students (21-22). It eliminates diversity as a factor in admissions, hiring, and promotion, while also requiring the sharing of all admissions and hiring data “broken down by race, color and national origin” (18-19). Compliance with these and other measures will be ensured by an internal “Administrator” and an external “Resolution Monitor” with broad yet largely undefined powers (11).

We are already inhabiting a changed university.

In this changed university, the Board of Trustees and an Acting President chosen from that Board are making unprecedented concessions to the federal government about matters such as admissions, faculty hiring, and the oversight of departments and curriculum that have historically been exercised by the faculty and university Senate. Consultation with the elected representatives of the faculty has been replaced by ad hoc listening sessions and dean-dominated special committees. The powers of the Senate have been curtailed, and further review of its operations is threatened. Students engaging in political protest, such as those who occupied a reading room in Butler Library in May, face punishments of unprecedented severity. Soothing rhetoric assuring us that we have remained true to our “north star” is, in these circumstances, laughable.

The Columbia AAUP chapter urges every member of the community to read the Agreement carefully and to weigh its implications. For example, we ask our colleagues to consider and call upon the university leadership to explain:

Why, despite no admission of wrongdoing, and no legal finding of guilt, has the university agreed to pay the enormous sum of $200 million to the federal government? Where will the funds for these payments be found? Will they come out of financial aid budgets, or faculty and staff salaries and benefits? And to which individuals or branches of government will this money flow?

● As the Agreement allows for the possibility of new action against the university in the case of perceived non-compliance (6, 39), what ensures that there will not be additional funding cuts in the future? Will funding that has been terminated for projects that do not align with the government’s ideological priorities, e.g., research on climate, vaccines, social justice, or gender, be restored?
● On what basis was the Resolution Monitor selected, and how will the internal Administrator be chosen? What are the powers of each and to whom are they accountable? What is their relationship to the usual bodies of faculty governance?
● The Agreement guarantees single-sex housing for women who request it as well as all-female sports, locker rooms, and showering facilities (20). What protections and opportunities will be offered to non-binary or trans students and colleagues?
● Acting President Shipman’s statement of July 15, 2025, in combination with the Agreement, implement additional measures to combat antisemitism, including the appointment of a student liaison and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which qualifies certain criticisms of Zionism and the state of Israel as antisemitic. Under the framework of “zero tolerance” announced by Acting President Shipman, how will it be decided whether texts, syllabi, lectures and published research, in addition to protest actions, cross this line? Will any member of the faculty feel safe teaching or publishing on the history of Palestine, for example? Will off-campus activity, including social media posts and opinion pieces in news outlets, be subject to surveillance under this aspect of the Agreement?
● The Agreement makes no mention of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias and discrimination, though a recent survey found that the fear and anguish of Muslim and Arab students is comparable to that of Jewish students. If the goal is to eliminate discrimination and create a safe and welcoming environment for all, why are both the Agreement and Columbia’s public rhetoric silent on this point?

At this inflection point in the history of the university, it is essential that all members of the community—students, faculty, and staff—scrutinize and publicly debate the terms of this so-called settlement and decide together on appropriate forms of action. In the absence of strong and principled leadership from Columbia’s Board of Trustees and Acting President, it falls to the faculty, above all, to defend the values and norms that have defined the university and allowed it to flourish. It is essential at this moment of crisis to support the work of our elected governance bodies such as the university Senate and the Planning and Policy Committee of the Arts and Sciences. Indeed, we urge all schools to establish institutions of self-governance to defend institutional norms and the rights of faculty and students.

The Columbia Chapter of the AAUP is expanding its own response by planning public forums needed to understand the current situation and build consensus on future action. We are also actively reaching out to elected officials to advocate for robust science and basic research budgets, and to enlist support both for Columbia and for all institutions of higher education. And we are creating and expanding coalitions with the many groups on and off-campus that oppose outside interference in Columbia’s institutional practices and wish to defend all members of the community from discrimination, illegal deportation, and the exercise of academic freedom. We invite all members of the Columbia community to join us in this difficult but vital work.

Cornell AAUP Chapter Statement Condemning Cornell’s Disinvitation of Kehlani

The disinvitation of Kehlani – preceded by a revision to their contract specifying that they could not have any “political events” at their performance – raises serious academic freedom issues. Some of these were addressed in a diverse series of letters to the Daily Sun, by AAUP members, alumni, musicians, students, of various political persuasions. Below is the Cornell AAUP Chapter’s statement, contrasting the cancellation of Kehlani to the invitation provided other speakers.

On March 13, 2024, then-Provost Mike Kotlikoff offered a full-throated defense of his decision to host Ann Coulter, a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and anti-Semitic comments, on Cornell’s campus. An earlier visit by Coulter had been disrupted by student protests: the Provost wanted to give her a second bite of the apple. Kotlikoff wrote: “I agreed that there could be few more powerful demonstrations of Cornell’s commitment to free expression than to have Ms. Coulter return to campus and present her views. This is certainly not because I agree with what she has to say, or because I feel that the content of her presentation is important for our community to hear, but because I believe that Cornell must be a place where the presentation of ideas is protected and inviolable. Shielding students or others in our community from viewpoints with which they disagree, or filtering campus speakers based on the content of their presentation, undermines the fundamental role of a university.” This theme was repeated in now-President Kotlikoff’s March 31 op-ed in the New York Times.

In spite of protestations by many—including those who wrote a letter to the Sun, titled “Jewish Students and Faculty Speak Out Against Coulter”—University leadership staked out a position that the platforming of hateful and hurtful presentations, was a “powerful demonstration” of the University’s commitment to free expression.

Fast forward to Wednesday morning, April 23, when the campus received an email announcing that the performer selected by students to headline this year’s Slope Day had been uninvited by President Kotlikoff. The grounds were that the artist, Kehlani, the first Black woman headliner, had “espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos, and on social media.” No evidence for the first claim was provided: faculty have asked for such evidence, particularly of comments that were antisemitic, separate from those that were critical of the government and policies of the state of Israel or of an ideology, such as Zionism. Kehlani, herself, has explained that her protests are against the State of Israel and Zionism, not against Jews.

As we wait for the President’s reply, we might reflect on the differences between Coulter and Kehlani. Coulter was given a prominent platform to share her views, accompanied by a robust defense of free expression. Kehlani was first censored and then, after having agreed to the content restrictions imposed upon them, disinvited. We have gone beyond “shielding students … from viewpoints with which they disagree.” Kotlikoff determined it was sufficient for Kehlani to even have such views – whether expressed or not – to bar them from performing. While Kotlikoff had distanced himself from Coulter’s views, he insisted the “fundamental role of a university” was to provide a place in which they could be presented. Kehlani, by contrast, was publicly repudiated and defamed, with a meager concession by Kotlikoff that “any artist has the right in our country to express hateful views.” In “our country,” but not – it seems – in a University whose “fundamental role” seems to have changed in the last year.

The inconsistency of celebrating free expression in the New York Times only to censor and cancel it three weeks later is obvious. Accordingly, President Kotlikoff leans heavily on Slope Day as an exception: It is a “cherished tradition,” the “signature social event” of the year, and a day for “uniting our community, not dividing it.” But we cannot condemn Kehlani’s views as having no legitimate place at Slope Day without also condemning those students who were looking forward to attending on the basis of those views. When President Kotlikoff acts to “ensure community,” who does he drive out? If we are going to now be screening artists on the basis of their political views, as he has suggested, who will be drawing the line and on what basis?

Cornell leadership seems to believe that by censoring speech we can avoid being further targeted by the federal government or putting a “bullseye on our back.” In fact, it makes us the instrument of the Trump administration’s far-reaching assault on the First Amendment and civil society. As stated in a recent letter signed by 550 US rabbis and cantors, “We cannot allow the fight against antisemitism to be twisted into a wedge issue, used to justify policies that target immigrants and other minorities, suppress free speech, or erode democratic norms.”

The Cornell University Chapter of the AAUP condemns the cancellation of Kehlani’s performance as yet another instance of discrimination by the central administration against Palestine-related speech and expression. It calls on President Kotlikoff to affirm the University’s unequivocal commitment to safeguarding academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression on our campus. Speakers and performers, just like staff, students, and faculty, should not be required to censor themselves. For the University to undertake preemptive screenings of Slope Day performers’ politics would inevitably result in violations of academic freedom through viewpoint discrimination and the prioritizing of some students over others.

On behalf of the Cornell AAUP Chapter
David Bateman, President
Suman Seth, Vice President
Risa Lieberwitz, Former President

National day of action speeches, Michael Dorf

The April 17 National Day of Action had a great turnout at Cornell. We had speakers from across the university, in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, and the law school.

Michael Dorf’s remarks were not printed, and so don’t lend themselves to being re-printed. Instead, we cross-post material from his blog – www.dorfonlaw.org – which was also posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Harvard University’s rejection of the Trump administration’s April 11 demand letter (styled as a proposed agreement in principle) almost immediately led the White House to announce a freeze on $2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard. Undoubtedly, Harvard’s leadership contemplated such an announcement as a possible consequence of its resistance. Thus, its decision deserves either praise for courage or condemnation for foolhardiness. I choose praise–in no small part because, as we have already seen with Columbia, capitulation to President Donald Trump’s demands brings only more demands. There’s no point in selling your soul if all you receive in exchange is a worthless I.O.U.

That’s generally the way things work with bullies and hostage takers. Appeasement leads to more bullying and more hostage taking. But there’s an additional reason why appeasement by universities will not work in the current moment. The anti-intellectual ideologues (no, that’s not an oxymoron) running education policy within and adjacent to the White House do not wish to reform higher education; they want to break it. A university that concludes it can survive only by bending to the Trump administration’s demands will find that what survives is not recognizable as a university.

Consider just one aspect of the astounding ultimatum that three agencies of the Trump administration sent to Harvard. It contained this demand: “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.”

“Every department” includes the sciences. I majored in physics at Harvard in the 1980s. At the time, there was debate about how many dimensions of space-time string theory should postulate as well as whether string theory was valuable at all, given its failure to make falsifiable predictions. Similar debates now rage. Suppose Harvard had acceded to the administration’s demands, including for viewpoint diversity. The administration’s proposed agreement included a requirement that Harvard appoint “an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith” to conduct a viewpoint diversity audit. How exactly would such a body decide how many string theorists, how many string theory skeptics, how many solid state physicists, how many cosmologists, and how many experimentalists the Harvard physics department should employ to achieve adequate viewpoint diversity?

Perhaps the Trump administration wouldn’t care about diverse views about physics. After all, the focus of the viewpoint diversity demand are supposed “criteria, preferences, and practices . . . that function as ideological litmus tests.” But what counts as ideological?

House Speaker Mike Johnson–a close Trump ally–has done legal work for the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, which he describes as “one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.” Other so-called “young Earth creationists” are likely well represented in the Trump administration. If Harvard had acceded to the administration’s demands, would it have been obligated to hire creationists to its biology and geology faculty to achieve viewpoint diversity? It is not unrealistic to think that any auditor the Trump administration would approve would regard acceptance of evolution as an unacceptable ideological litmus test. So too for acceptance of the reality of human-generated climate change.

To be clear, substantial viewpoint diversity is often a virtue in an academic institution, at least when the varying viewpoints reflect the diversity of views among knowledgeable people in a field. An economics department can benefit from interchange among and opportunities for students to study with neoclassicists, Keynesians, and monetarists. Methodological diversity is also valuable. Most good law school faculties include doctrinalists, legal historians, empiricists, philosophers, economists, critical theorists, and more.

However, that doesn’t mean that all forms of viewpoint diversity are equally valuable or even valuable at all. The creationism example makes that clear for the natural sciences, but the observation also holds true in the humanities, the social sciences, and professional schools. Is a philosophy department sufficiently diverse if it numbers among its moral philosophers utilitarians, deontologists, and skeptics but no Aristotelians who believe that some people are rightly born to be enslaved? Must a political science department appoint people whose work asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, even if they offer no credible evidence for that view? Should a medical school be required to diversify its faculty by adding anti-vaxxers?

Those and countless other examples that could be marshaled illustrate the proposition that–as Yale Law Professor and former Dean Robert Post has argued at much greater length–academic freedom properly exists within disciplinary boundaries defined by people with relevant expertise. The point is not that experts always know best or that the conventional wisdom is always correct. On the contrary, disciplinary assumptions should always be open to challenge through evidence and argument. But not all evidence and not all arguments are equal–and thus neither are all viewpoints.

Moreover, it should be open to an academic institution to build on its strength. The University of Chicago economics department in the 1970s and 1980s grew its reputation by favoring libertarian-leaning neoclassicists. The Yale English Department became a center of deconstructionism in the same period. In my own field of law, the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School and the University of San Diego Law School have made constitutional originalism a focus of their faculty and programs. Whatever one thinks of any of these particular orientations, they reflect legitimate choices that create cross-fertilization of ideas among like-minded scholars and special opportunities for students who wish to study from a particular viewpoint or methodology. Specialization of this sort contributes to what Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken has aptly called “second-order diversity,” which is itself valuable and, in any event, should be a matter of institutional self-direction.

Meanwhile, the same Trump administration demand letter that, in the name of diversity, would impose on Harvard an affirmative action program for under-represented viewpoints–surely intended to mean conservative ones–also demands that Harvard “shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives.” The letter thus reveals its own lawlessness. Recipients of federal funds like Harvard have implemented DEI programs in part to satisfy their obligations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet the Trump administration demands that such programs–which it is charged with enforcing–be shut down and a new one wholly outside its jurisdiction and in no way responsive to any illegal conduct be erected in its place.

Harvard was right to reject the Trump administration’s unlawful and unreasonable demands. Other universities in the administration’s crosshairs should take inspiration from its leadership.

Michael C. Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law