On November 14, 2025, the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction in AAUP v. Trump, halting the Trump administration’s illegal weaponization of federal antidiscrimination laws and federal funding to restrict academic freedom and free speech on University of California campuses. The order is the latest in a series of rulings in lawsuits led by the AAUP and its partners—not universities themselves. The rulings underscore how the administration’s efforts to redefine discrimination and abuse the legal process place the linked projects of democracy, higher education, and civil rights at serious risk.
As the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure wrote in its recent report On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom, the Trump administration is hijacking the language of antidiscrimination as a means of unmooring the Civil Rights Act from its foundational commitment to addressing structures of discrimination that prevent educational access. The report discusses the severity and scale of the Trump administration’s attempts to redefine discrimination and, in the process, to erode democratic norms on and off campus. It demonstrates how the administration has used Title VI, like Title IX, to create an enforcement apparatus that sidesteps long-established AAUP-recommended standards of shared governance—to the detriment of academic freedom and free speech.
The administration’s actions follow state-level legislative attacks in Florida and elsewhere. Committee A’s 2022 statement Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Racism and Antisemitism describes in detail such “political attempts to restrict the public education curriculum and to portray some forms of public education as a social harm,” including “teaching about the history, policies, and actions of the state of Israel and teaching about the history and perpetuation of racism . . . in the United States.” Today, these trends continue at the federal level, where the targeting of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—a catchall for any programs or, increasingly, teaching and research that involve topics like race, sexuality, and gender—and overly expansive understandings of antisemitism go hand in hand. These actions function synergistically to undermine universities and portray them as unable to govern themselves, in turn justifying unprecedented governmental incursions.
In February 2025, building on Trump’s executive orders attacking DEI programs, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a “Dear Colleague” letter declaring its intent to launch broad Title VI investigations into DEI programs that purportedly “stigmatize students that belong to particular racial groups” based on “crude racial stereotypes” and teach that those students “bear unique moral burdens that others do not.” The “Dear Colleague” letter thus “protects” white students from DEI programs that address the ethical duty to expand access to higher education. For now, the OCR has been blocked by yet another federal district court’s preliminary injunction. Nonetheless, the attacks on DEI constitute what the AAUP has described as an attempt “to turn back the clock on advances that have been made toward the goal of diversity in the faculty, student body, and areas of study.”
Using the overly broad definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the Trump administration has similarly weaponized antisemitism, conflating it with political criticism of Israel and Zionism as a pretext for cutting federal funding. Trump’s multiagency “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” has accused colleges and universities of creating a hostile environment for those with “shared Jewish ancestry.” Federal District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs responded by issuing a permanent injunction against the administration’s withholding of federal funds from Harvard, stating, “The fact that Defendants’ swift and sudden decision to terminate funding, ostensibly motivated by antisemitism, was made before they learned anything about antisemitism on campus or what was being done in response, leads the Court to conclude that . . . the government-initiated onslaught against Harvard was much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism.”
The AAUP will continue to defend its principles in coalition with students, staff, and other workers on our campuses, even if university leaders continue to waver in the face of the Trump administration’s overreaching demands.
Rana Jaleel is chair of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and an associate professor at the University of California, Davis. Risa L. Lieberwitz is professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University and a member of Committee A.