2025 AAUP Updates

Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure reinforces the AAUP’s March 14 statement and highlights the specific dangers to academic freedom and shared governance in the Trump administration’s demand that the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department at Columbia University be placed into receivership and that drastic changes should be made to student discipline, admissions, and other processes.

Like so many recent actions, this is the move of an authoritarian, and shows the Trump administration’s fundamental disregard for working people. It is also a blatantly retaliatory move, against federal workers and against unions, which have led the opposition to defend our communities and defeat the Project 2025 agenda.

Apparently, President Trump believes his job to be stripping rights from workers and students, persecuting immigrants, muzzling critics, and handing the governance of our country over to his billionaire cronies.

We know what our job is: to defend our campuses and communities and to protect freedom of speech and academic freedom, research that saves lives, and the institutions that provide crucial services that benefit every person residing in the US.

After months of delays, negotiations, and one-on-one engagement, faculty at Ohio University won a decisive victory on Monday as an overwhelming majority voted YES to being represented in collective bargaining by the United Academics of Ohio University, AAUP/AFT.

The national AAUP; chapters at Harvard, Rutgers, and NYU; and the Middle East Studies Association today filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other protected First Amendment activities.

The AAUP and the AFT today sued the Trump administration on behalf of our members for unlawfully cutting off $400 million in federal funding for crucial public health research in an attempt to force Columbia University to surrender its academic independence. While the Trump administration has been slashing funding since its first days in office, this move represents a stunning new tactic: using cuts as a cudgel to coerce a private institution to adopt restrictive speech codes and allow government control over teaching and learning

Today, the AAUP and a coalition including educators, school districts, and unions filed a legal action against the Trump administration to stop the dismantling of the Department of Education and mass firings that will decimate the crucial services the department provides to every American. This lawsuit is the first filed since President Trump’s executive order attempting to shutter the department.

A joint statement from AAUP chapters condemning the impoundment of $400 million in research funds and ICE's targeting of Columbia students and alumni involved in pro-Palestine protests.

The AAUP condemns in the strongest possible terms any university that would sacrifice its own students to the demands of an authoritarian government. Columbia University’s decision to punish students with multiyear suspensions, degree revocations, and expulsions is an outrageous assault on freedom of speech, student and faculty safety, shared governance, and free inquiry and thought.