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AAUP in the News

When the AAUP speaks, it is the voice of the profession. Read a sampling of what the media is saying about the AAUP.

2025 AAUP in the News

Wichita State professors worry as university silent on Trump immigration crackdown

The Kansas Conference of the AAUP is calling on all colleges and universities within the State of Kansas to take concrete steps to support students and scholars at risk and refuse to assist in this assault on higher education.

Wake Up, America. Cutting Health and Science Funding Costs Lives

"When a loved one is critically ill, families often ask, 'Is there anything else we can try?' It's NIH-funded research that provides families with a glimmer of hope, delivering revolutionary treatments for all diseases, potential miracles for someone's mother, father, child or spouse....We call on members of Congress from both parties who care about their constituents to defend NIH’s critical role in lifesaving research."

Columbia Student Loans Are Threatened by Trump’s "Secret Weapon"

The administration is showing increased willingness to leverage federal funding against schools, said Todd Wolfson, president of the advocacy group American Association of University Professors. “They are bullies pressing full strength on higher education to see where institutions break,” he said. “And where they break, they’re going to follow with a lot more force. What starts at Columbia doesn’t end at Columbia.”

“Worse Than McCarthyism”: Historian Ellen Schrecker on Trump’s War Against Universities & Students

“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Ellen Schrecker, historian and member of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom. “The damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education.”

Colleges to use summer break to regroup after rough start with Trump

“The reason why the United States of America has the most advanced research infrastructure in the world is because of its relationship to the federal government, and if we want to stay the most important nation in the world … there is no way forward without the federal government being intimately involved in the support of, not control over, but support of our research infrastructure,” said Todd Wolfson, national president of the American Association of University Professors. “The Trump administration and their approach to higher education is probably the worst and most destructive approach to higher education I’ve ever seen in the history of this country,” said Wolfson.

Hope as US universities find ‘backbone’ against Trump’s assault on education

“The workers and the unions, faculty, students, staff are leading and developing the fight in how to respond to the Trump administration, and we’re sort of dragging the universities along with us, slowly,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, which has led faculty organising efforts on many campuses and filed four separate lawsuits against the administration over its attacks on universities.

Harvard sues the Trump administration in escalating confrontation

Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which filed a lawsuit earlier this month to block the Trump administration’s cuts, praised the university for taking legal action. “It is high time for leading civil society institutions like Harvard to refuse and resist this federal government overreach and abuse,” said Kirsten Weld, a history professor at Harvard and president of the AAUP Harvard faculty chapter.

University protests blast Trump’s attacks on funding, speech and international students

“College campuses have historically been the places where these kind of conversations, these kind of robust debates and dissent take place in the United States. It’s healthy for democracy. And they’re trying to destroy all of that in order to enact their vision and depraved agenda.”

'It’s a time to be brave’: Cornell professor talks federal funding freeze

“Institutions that stood up are remembered for standing up to that power & that coercion, they're remembered for their acts of bravery. Institutions that capitulated are remembered for their willingness to cave to autocratic demands.” — Risa Lieberwitz, president of the Cornell chapter of the AAUP

How university professors are reacting to Trump cancellations of education grants over DEI

"Researchers are receiving a stop work order for wanting to understand things like differences in infant mortality in ubran and rural communities. That's being labeled as DEI. The slash and burn approach to our research is unfair, unlawful, and fundamentally wrong." — AAUP president Todd Wolfson

Amid Right-Wing Attacks on Education, the American Association of University Professors Organizes for Academic Freedom

"Look, this is going to be a long fight. We need everyone on board. This is why we’re developing a multi-pronged approach and building alliances with students, other unions and the public. This is the only way to stop the anti-worker and anti-union policies that are being promoted by Trump and his administration." - AAUP Vice-President Rotua Lumbantobing.

Chaos on campuses as schools warn Trump cuts could harm US ‘for decades’

“Billions of dollars in research has been frozen, and that’s research on things that every American depends on,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said. “Our members having to lay people off, having to close their labs, having to ask for special circumstances to be able to keep rare supplies, like animals, alive. It’s been a complete, utter, destruction of the United States research infrastructure.”

The NIH Cuts Are Part Of An All-Out War On Higher Education

Labor for Higher Ed, a coalition of unions and advocacy groups, sponsored events that mobilized 10,000 demonstrators across 18 different U.S. cities. The message, AAUP president Todd Wolfson said, was clear: “Impacts [of cuts] for everyday Americans will be deadly. We will lose funding for crucial medical research that can save people’s lives. Treatments for diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and so much more are being gutted so that billionaires can get more tax breaks. They are intent on making America sicker so they can pad their pockets.”

The DEI Hills Higher Ed Is Willing to Die On

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, described the letter as “a deep political intrusion into the operations of higher education institutions” that “must be responded to with absolute conviction and force.” “I would stand with every inch of my soul against every one of these intrusions and bring all my members with me and put our bodies on the line to stop it,” he said.

Judge temporarily blocks key parts of Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI

“That is textbook viewpoint-based discrimination,” the judge wrote of the Trump administration's order, which the AAUP and partners sued to stop. “The government’s threat of enforcement is not just targeted towards enforcement of federal law. Rather, the provision expressly targets, and threatens, the expression of views supportive of equity, diversity and inclusion.”