2025 AAUP Updates

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.

The national AAUP and our Harvard chapter filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking to block the Trump administration from demanding that Harvard University restrict speech and restructure its core operations or else face the cancellation of $8.7 billion in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospitals.

This week, the AAUP and allies filed two separate friend-of-the-court briefs. With the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, the AAUP submitted a brief supporting the law firm Perkins Coie in its battle against the Trump administration. Perkins Coie was the subject of an executive order which 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 Trump administration. 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 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. 

Thirty faculty groups, including seventeen AAUP chapters, organized to join an amicus brief urging a preliminary injunction against ideological deportations of students and scholars. AAUP members from public and private institutions, from community colleges and research universities, from Texas to Minnesota, California to New Hampshire, and points in between are exercising solidarity to protect students and co-workers.

Preliminary findings for the 2024–25 Faculty Compensation Survey are now available, featuring institution-level appendices, summary tables, and explanation of statistical data.