2025 AAUP Updates

The Trump administration’s attempt to strip Columbia University of its accreditation is yet another authoritarian attempt to control what can be said, thought, taught, and learned on college campuses. Once again, the Trump Education Department is trampling academic freedom and forcing students, faculty, and staff at Columbia to answer to one and only one person: Donald J. Trump. This week’s aggression against workers and students at Columbia adds accreditation to the arsenal of weapons being used by the Trump administration to bully colleges and universities.

When wide-ranging program cuts and terminations of faculty appointment are a possibility, AAUP standards insist that the faculty must be involved in deliberation and decisions at every stage of the process, beginning with a determination that a state of financial exigency exists. The Duke faculty and staff were not consulted but were summarily informed that the institution would lose librarians, researchers, and other staff members, severely damaging research programs and the education of students. Many Duke faculty are concerned that these layoffs will specifically target the university’s renowned programs in the humanities and social sciences. According to our AAUP members, a lack of transparency and new policies limiting free speech have further exacerbated a campus climate of fear.

AAUP President Todd Wolfson sent a letter calling on the administration of NYU to grant graduate Logan Rozos’s degree without delay and end any disciplinary proceedings against him after Rozos spoke about “atrocities currently happening in Palestine” during his speech at a graduation ceremony last week.

In response to the Trump administration's recent actions subjecting more than one thousand international students to visa revocations or other involuntary changes to their immigration status, the AAUP has written to college and university counsels to clarify that they are not legally bound to deny legal assistance or housing to students facing these threats. While some institutions have provided support to noncitizen students in such cases, others have hesitated to do so for fear of being held criminally liable. The AAUP letter addresses concerns that colleges and universities may have about "harboring" individuals vulnerable to threats of detention or deportation by the Trump administration.

The news that Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi has asked university trustees to approve closing seven of its campuses despite the fact that university finances are strong is dismaying. So is the fact that administrators arrived at this proposal without faculty involvement in decision making. The threatened campuses serve thousands of students and employ hundreds of faculty and staff across Pennsylvania. The proposal to substitute online classes for the in-person instruction, mentoring, research, and service conducted at these campuses does a disservice to students and their communities and threatens the academic integrity of existing programs as well as quality, equity, and access.

Last week Johns Hopkins University Press published the twelfth edition of the AAUP's Policy Documents and Reports, informally known as the Redbook. The Redbook brings together in one convenient place AAUP policy documents and reports developed collaboratively over more than a century, providing an authoritative source for sound academic practice and for defending and strengthening today's academic communities.

A new AAUP report, Academic Freedom and Tenure Muhlenberg College, concludes that the administration, in initially dismissing Dr. Maura Finkelstein, acted in violation of AAUP-supported principles and standards of academic freedom and due process. The report also found that the college’s equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policies, developed by outside consultants, do not sufficiently protect academic freedom and due process, nor do they comport with widely accepted standards of academic governance.

President Donald Trump’s executive order on accreditation is yet another attempt to dictate what is taught, learned, said and done by college students and instructors. Threats to remove accreditors from their roles are transparent attempts to consolidate more power in the hands of the Trump administration in order to stifle teaching and research. These attacks are aimed at removing educational decision-making from educators and reshaping higher education to fit an authoritarian political agenda.