AAUP Mobilizes Against Trump 2.0

Since President Donald Trump took office for the second time in late January, higher education has been the target of an unprecedented onslaught. It has become clear that we cannot count on Congress or college administrations to defend our campuses and communities. Instead, faculty and unions must lead the fight. The AAUP is working with and for our members and the academic community to build new alliances and take action on campuses, in the courts, and in the streets to secure the future of a sector that benefits the common good through essential, innovative, and lifesaving instruction and research.

Coalition Building for Direct Action

The AAUP has joined in solidarity with other unions, higher education associations, and progressive advocacy organizations to reject the Trump administration’s devastating cuts to the federal workforce and grants that support learning and research in US colleges and universities—including the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education.

The AAUP is a founding member of the Labor for Higher Education coalition and cosponsored its February 19 and 25 rallies and its April 8 “Kill the Cuts” day of action. With events in Washington, DC, and nineteen states, the day of action was organized with the help of AAUP chapters across the country to oppose brutal and ill-planned cost-cutting by the current presidential administration of federal jobs and grant programs that support critical education, research, and health care. The coalition noted on its planning website, https://www.killthecuts.org, that “Trump’s attacks on NIH, NSF, and the Department of Education jeopardize medical progress in areas like cancer, viral pandemics, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s, while threatening the jobs of researchers across the country.” Other cosponsors of the Labor for Higher Education day of action included the United Auto Workers; Stand Up for Science; the AFT; the National Education Association; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Communications Workers of America; Higher Education Labor United (HELU); the Service Employees International Union; the Debt Collective; and the Union for Everyone.

The AAUP is also a member of the Coalition for Action in Higher Ed and cosponsored its day of action on April 17. Additional sponsors included HELU, the Debt Collective, AAUP Local 6741 of the AFT (representing AAUP members who do not belong to a unionized chapter), Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, AFT-Oregon, and several other organizations and faculty groups. The day of action featured a series of online educational events on a variety of topics related to the defense of higher education, including the protection of immigrant rights, free access to “college for all,” and fighting back against “universities as political battlegrounds.”

Legal Work

The AAUP has a long history of weighing in on judicial matters that affect higher education. Over the years, the Association has submitted or joined in many amicus briefs in cases before the US Supreme Court or appellate courts that implicate key AAUP principles such as academic freedom and the broad interests of the academic profession. In response to the rapid pace of unconstitutional actions by the second Trump administration, the AAUP has elevated its level of judicial activism by participating as a plaintiff in several lawsuits. AAUP members have stepped up to provide information and testimony, and they have put themselves on the line as public participants in these legal cases.

In February, the AAUP initiated a lawsuit with three other coplaintiffs—the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore—to block Trump administration executive orders that aimed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at colleges and universities. The AAUP sought an injunction to prevent enforcement of the executive orders. Noting that “in the United States, there is no king,” the brief in support of the injunction asserted that “in his crusade to erase diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility from our country, President Trump cannot usurp Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, nor can he silence those who disagree with him by threatening them with the loss of federal funds and other enforcement actions.” It goes on to offer a detailed critique of the executive orders’ vague and inaccurate characterizations of DEI. On February 21, a Maryland district court judge issued a preliminary injunction that was subsequently put on hold.

The AAUP initiated three additional lawsuits in March.

Democracy Forward filed a complaint in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts on behalf of the AAUP, the Easthampton School District, the Somerville Public School Committee, AFT-Massachusetts, the national AFT, AFSCME Council 93, and the Service Employees International Union to block the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the US Department of Education and to eliminate essential programs and services it offers to students, families, educators, and educational institutions. The complaint highlights how mass firings, the proposal to eliminate the department, and the discontinuation of vital programs violate statutes passed by Congress and interfere with the rightful role of the legislative branch in budgetary decision-making. AAUP President Todd Wolfson warned that without a viable Education Department, “access to education for working-class Americans will decrease. Funding for college education will be stripped away, programs for students with disabilities and students living in poverty will be eviscerated, and enforcement of civil rights laws against race- or sex-based discrimination in higher education will disappear.”

The AAUP and the AFT filed on behalf of their members a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Trump administration’s cutting of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University. This unprecedented executive action—the first of a series targeting elite institutions—was framed as collective punishment for campus activism, using charges of antisemitism among protesters as a pretext. The attempt to use federal grant funding as a weapon to force Columbia to adopt the Trump administration’s political priorities jeopardizes academic freedom and institutional autonomy for all US colleges and universities and the future of university-based scientific research and innovation. Columbia’s concession to restrictive speech codes and other Trump administration demands in return for the restoration of canceled funding sets a dangerous precedent. Columbia-AAUP President Reinhold Martin commented on the failure of university administrations “to take any action to counter the Trump administration’s unlawful assault on academic freedom,” observing that faculty members “don’t have the luxury of inaction.”

In another lawsuit, the AAUP—along with the Middle East Studies Association and AAUP chapters at Harvard, Rutgers, and New York Universities—sought to block the Trump administration’s “ideological-deportation policy” that terrorizes noncitizen faculty members and students who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests and other constitutionally protected activities. This campaign seeks to create a climate of fear on campus through surveillance and immigration enforcement by targeting visa-holders and permanent residents for deportation, including Mahmoud Kahlil, a recent Columbia University graduate arrested in a university-owned apartment building. The plaintiffs are represented in this case, filed in the federal district court in Massachusetts, by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Ahilan Arulanantham, and the law firm Zimmer, Citron & Clarke LLP. Knight First Amendment Institute Executive Director Jameel Jaffer said, “The First Amendment means the government can’t arrest, detain, or deport people for lawful political expression—it’s as simple as that. This practice is one we’d ordinarily associate with the most repressive political regimes, and it should have no place in our democracy.”

To fortify this lawsuit, thirty faculty groups, including seventeen AAUP chapters, joined an amicus brief in early April urging a preliminary injunction against ideological deportations of students and scholars. AAUP members from public and private institutions, from community colleges and research universities, and from states ranging from Texas to Minnesota and from California to New Hampshire are exercising solidarity to protect students and coworkers.

Also in early April, the AAUP submitted a brief with the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality supporting the law firm Perkins Coie in its battle against the Trump administration. Perkins Coie was the subject of an executive order that 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 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 five hundred law firms have submitted another friend-of-the-court brief, as have 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 it 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.

Resources

The AAUP has centralized materials on protecting higher education from political attacks at https://www.aaup.org/issues/political-attacks-higher-education. You can find details about our recent lawsuits and materials that measure the impact of such attacks, provide information about how to fight them, and offer opportunities for collective action. Fact sheets and other informational resources address concerns related to immigration, science and research, federal funding, accreditation, and DEI.

We have also boosted our webinar offerings with workshops on programming relevant to faculty concerns in the current political climate. They have focused on topics such as “anticipatory obedience” by college and university administrations and the targeting of vulnerable immigrants and visa-holders. We teamed up with PEN America for a series on digital safety to help members protect themselves from online abuse and doxing campaigns and with the AFT for a webinar on navigating attacks on classroom teaching and the freedom to learn through the elimination of DEI initiatives.

What You Can Do

If you are not a member of the AAUP, please join! If there is no chapter on your campus, you can unite with other members to form one; in the meantime, you can participate at the national level through the AAUP at-large chapter. Make sure that you are signed up for member emails in order to receive frequent notices about everything we are doing to defend higher education and the values of the academic profession.

You can connect with AAUP colleagues around the country, share concerns and resources, and get involved in organizing by attending all-member meetings. These meetings, initiated by the AAUP’s elected leadership in fall 2024, are being held with increasing frequency amid the current crisis in higher education.

Finally, if you are able to do so, consider making a gift to the AAUP Foundation’s Legal Defense Fund, which supports faculty members in cases at the trial and appellate levels that implicate important legal rights and involve legal issues of national significance in higher education, or its Academic Freedom Fund, which supports projects that safeguard academic freedom and thereby benefit higher education for the common good.