Part of the Series
Challenging the Corporate University
In 2023-2024, students in solidarity with Palestine launched the largest campus movement in the U.S. since the anti-Vietnam War protests, and chapters of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and Educators for Justice in Palestine sprang up to support them.
The Palestine solidarity movement has continued on campuses into 2025, but has come under increasing repression as higher education institutions capitulate to the Trump administration’s attacks on the movement. Now professors are being fired, forced to resign or denied tenure. Launching a reign of terror by disappearing and arresting student, faculty and staff dissenters; withdrawing federal funding; forcing departments the administration doesn’t like into receivership presumably as a step towards eliminating them; and dismantling the Department of Education, the Trump administration seeks to destroy our universities and build ones that support its agenda while enriching the tech oligarchs who prop it up.
In spite of these overwhelming threats to higher education, faculty, staff and students throughout the country are resisting. With cross-sector help from labor unions and other organizations, we are fighting the criminalization of free speech and the wholesale destruction of academic freedom.
My institution, Portland State University (PSU), was one of five universities the Trump administration first targeted in February for investigation into baseless claims of “widespread antisemitic harassment.” Immediately, the campus unions came together to issue a response.
The Associated Students of Portland State University, the Graduate Employees Union at PSU, PSUFA AFT Local 3571, PSU-AAUP and SEIU Local 503 Chapter 89 stated that we “reject the premise of the federally directed investigation into antisemitism at PSU. This investigation emerges not from a specific complaint from a PSU community member, but instead from the Trump administration’s desire to intimidate higher education writ large into compliance with the administration’s highly partisan goals and agenda by threatening select institutions with having their federal funding revoked.”
Within days, the Trump administration’s focus on five campuses morphed into “visits” to 10, and then into letters to 60. Faculty throughout the country called on their university administrations to resist the temptation to appease a lawless federal government. For instance, faculty, staff and students at the University of Minnesota sent a letter to President Rebecca Cunningham, calling on her administration to, among other things: unequivocally state their staunch support for the rights of noncitizen community members, specifically those who face threats of arrest or deportation due to their political views; affirm that the university will not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and deportation efforts absent a judicial warrant, and create a process through which students fearing ICE detention will receive the kind of protection and aid Mahmoud Kahlil begged for from his own institution; and affirm that the university will not persecute community members who express criticism of the state of Israel, its actions or Zionism. On March 31, clerical workers with AFSCME 3800 and graduate workers with GLU-UE organized a rally on the mall in front of President Cunningham’s office.
Meanwhile, chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) are rising in force. The University of Pennsylvania’s chapter demanded that Penn must uphold research, sanctuary, DEIA, nondiscrimination and the rights of all members of our community. It backed this statement up with a protest in coalition with five other unions across the university and the health system: GETUP-UAW, CIR/SEIU, Penn Libraries United/AFSCME Local 590, RAPUP and Penn Museum Workers United/Philly Cultural Workers United — AFSCME Local 397.
A joint statement issued on March 12 by AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter, AAUP-MIT, University of Chicago AAUP, AAUP Cornell University Chapter, Ohio State AAUP, Wesleyan AAUP, AAUP University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Chapter, Northern Michigan University AAUP/AFT 6761 Eastern Michigan University-AAUP condemned “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.”
Columbia’s own AAUP chapter published a powerful statement, arguing that the cuts in the university’s funding “arguably aim less to address antisemitism than to destroy the university as a center of critical thought, professional expertise, democratic self-governance, and scientific inquiry.” The signatories point out that “the cuts also reflect this government’s larger project of funneling research funds to private companies where profit, not the common good, determines research priorities.” The chapter called on Columbia’s administration to “reject these demands and the premises on which they rest,” adding: “We see no evidence that compliance would assuage the hostility of the White House, nor blunt ongoing and escalating attacks. Nothing less than the university’s capacity to anchor democratic deliberation is at stake.”
However, Columbia’s board and the interim president (who has since stepped down), capitulated anyway, without even accomplishing the minimal goal of guaranteeing federal funding. What we suspected all along we now know for sure: We can’t count on the people who run our universities to save them. As Timothy Kaufman-Osborn argues in The Autocratic Academy, that authority should never have been theirs in the first place. Why should those who do not understand how academic freedom anchors democratic deliberation have the right to give that freedom away?
Subsequent statements abandon hope in boards and administrations. Cornell University’s AAUP, for example, called on the university community to fight: “The Cornell administration has already given in to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI bullying by removing DEI references, especially those relating to gender and race, from its materials, using draconian punishments of pro-Palestinian student protestors, and preemptively changing university policy regarding protest, all in order to align themselves with outside critics,” they wrote in the Cornell Daily Sun. “Our only power is in our unity and together we must resist.”
Answering AAUP-Cornell’s call, 200 members of the university community came together on March 20 for an emergency rally in support of Momodou Taal.
When institutions and their leaders fail to fight back, it falls upon the people to stand up for the rule of law. The AAUP and AFT are doing what the Columbia board should have done: suing the Trump administration. The AAUP has been swift in taking the fight to the courts, also suing over the administration’s attempt to dismantle the Department of Education, over the halting of science research and over the arrests and threatened deportations of students and faculty.
“We need everyone on board,” AAUP Vice President Rotua Lumbantobing told Ms. magazine. “This is why we’re developing a multi-pronged approach and building alliances with students, other unions and the public.”
Organizers are calling on everyone to join the movement. For instance, Higher Education Labor United has organized actions across the U.S. for April 8, demanding no cuts to education and life-saving research. The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE), the organizing collective behind the April 17 Day of Action, has arranged an entire day of virtual events for people to join, including a national teach-in featuring leading voices in higher education. Leading up to the Day of Action on April 14, CAHE, in concert with NYU AAUP, is hosting a screening of the documentary The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests? And also making it available to any who wish to stream it.
Between the Trump team’s attacks and higher education’s appeasement, we must reclaim our universities for ourselves. Academic freedom is not Trump’s to take or boards’ to give away. Our commitment to truth-telling will not be compromised by lobbying groups, donors and politicians, and the governance of our institutions will not be outsourced to boards for whom we are appendages to investment portfolios. Our universities will be by and for the people who work and study at them, not by and for finance capitalists, “broligarchs” and fascists.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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