AAUP v. Rubio: The AAUP Takes the Trump Administration to Court

In this episode we discuss case AAUP v. Rubio, the lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizens, students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian activism, with Ramya Krishnan, the lead attorney for the AAUP  in the case. We also hear from Todd Wolfson, the AAUP's president, about the AAUP's broader legal work and strategy as it fights to protect higher education from the onslaught of attacks by the Trump administration. 

The guests are ​​Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, and Todd Wolfson, the AAUP president. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn.

Episode links:

• Summaries about AAUP v. Rubio and arguments by the Knight Institute
• Summaries of the current AAUP litigation against the Trump administration

Transcript

AAUP v. Rubio episode transcript

Ramya: Today the administration is going after pro-Palestinian speech, but tomorrow it can go after speech criticizing fossil fuels speech, promoting what it considers to be DEI or speech defending gender affirming care. There's really no limiting principle to the argument they're making.

It's part of a broader pattern of retaliation by the administration against its perceived political enemies. In particular, higher education. The administration is going after sites of possible resistance to authoritarianism. 

 Mariah: Welcome to AAUP Presents, the podcast of the American Association of University Professors. I'm the host, Mariah Quinn. Okay. In today's episode we're focusing on AAUP  v. Rubio, the lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizens, students and faculty who participated in pro-Palestinian activism.

Filed in March by the Knight Institute on behalf of the  AAUP. Our chapters at Harvard, NYU and Rutgers and the Middle East Studies Association. 

 The lawsuit was argued in a two week trial in July before Judge William G.

Young in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. A decision is expected soon. Okay, we will start the show by talking to Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. Her litigation focuses on issues related to protest and dissent, government transparency and social media, and she is the lead attorney for the A UP and A UPV Rubio.

 In the second part of the show, we'll hear from AAUP President Todd Wolfson about what this case and the a's broader work mean in the fight back against the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed.

Okay, let's go to my interview with Ramya.

Mariah: Can you tell us about the case, AAUP v. Rubio? Why did the AAUP, its chapters at Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers and the Middle East Studies Association. Work with the Knight Institute to file this case?

Ramya: Of course. So AAUP versus Rubio is our challenge to the Trump administration's policy of targeting non-citizen students and faculty for deportation based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy.

So since the Trump administration took office in January, we've seen a number of non-citizens targeted under this policy of ideological deportation. A Columbia University undergraduate was arrested when he appeared for a scheduled naturalization interview. Mesa S took a grad student at Tufts University, was seized by ma Ice agents from a public street in Somerville, Massachusetts because she wrote an op-ed colon on her university to, to divest from Israel.

And then we have who helped lead student protests at Columbia, who was arrested in the lobby of his apartment building in New York and spirited away to a detention center in Louisiana. Locked up there for more than three months. These are just a handful of the examples that we've seen in the last several months.

Uh, and these cases and others have cast a powerful chill on college campuses across the United States, causing many students and faculty to self-censor, uh, many a UP and Mesa members have, for example. Withdrawn from political advocacy, declined to publish scholarly or popular writing and have full gone research opportunities that would've required international travel.

Some have even self censored in the classroom. Um, so the a AAUP and MESA joined this case because we all believe. No student or faculty member should have to live in fear that they may be seized from their homes or snatched from the street simply for engaging in lawful political expression. 

Mariah: so in this case, the plaintiffs, which is a AAUP Mesa, our chapters allege the policy of ideological deportations, violates the first amendment rights of non-citizens, as well as US citizens, students, and scholars who wish to associate with them. And you've talked a little bit about the chilling effect that it's had.

Can you walk us through this argument a bit more? 

Ramya: Definitely. So, I mean, look, the government wants to hang the sword of Damocles over the heads of non-citizens living in this country, but it would be totally antithetical to the First Amendment to allow the government to use immigration law as a cudgel against speech that it doesn't like if the First Amendment means anything.

It's that the government can't punish you because it doesn't like what you have to say. And this principle applies as much to non-citizens as it does to citizens. The Supreme Court held in, uh, a case from 1945 called Bridges versus Wixen, that non-citizens live in this country. Enjoy. The protections of the First Amendment just as much as citizens do.

And since that case, a series of lower courts have applied this principle, including most recently by the district courts that have considered the cases brought by individual students like Mr. Khalil. And, uh, Ms. Ozturk, they held that the government can't retaliate. Against these students and faculty based on their political viewpoint.

Now, the government invokes foreign policy or national security, but the Supreme Court's precedent makes clear that invoking that policy or national security isn't a get out of jail free card when it comes to the First Amendment. The rights of citizens also come into play here because US citizen scholars and students are being deprived of the valuable insights and perspectives of their non-citizen, uh, colleagues.

 First Amendment protects not only our right to speak, but also our right to receive information and ideas.

And so it protects the rights of us citizens to hear from and engage with their non-citizen, uh, friends and colleagues. That is another right that has been implicated by the Trump administration's far reaching policy of ideological deportation because US citizens, colleagues, um, and students are no longer able to engage with the valuable insights and perspectives that non-citizens have on issues ranging from.

Foreign policy and war and, to immigration. So for all of these reasons, the Trump Administration's policy of ideological deportation flies in the face of well-established First Amendment doctrine. 

Mariah: so let's turn to the case itself, which went to trial in July. , There were some pretty startling revelations in, in the testimony we learned. The students that you had mentioned and many others were very specifically targeted by what an official at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement called a tiger team.

That was created in early 2025 to investigate student protestors who were protesting the war in Gaza. The Tiger team decided who to investigate based on lists, compiled by the Canary Mission, a right wing pro-Israel website that catalog students, faculty, and others who it deems to have engaged in pro-Palestinian speech.

And let's be clear that Canary Mission is anonymously doxing. People who they view as. anti-Zionists. This is not a reputable organization or website. Can you talk a bit more about these revelations by ICE agents who testified in the trial? 

Ramya: Sure. Well, what we heard was deeply disturbing the testimony of DHS officials, uh, at trial revealed that in March of this year.

A component of DHS called Homeland Security Investigations launched an operation to identify pro-Palestinian protestors on college campuses, an operation that involves scouring lists of suspected protestors and producing reports that repeat unvetted allegations by third parties, that the protestors are antisemitic or pro Hamas.

Now, by far the largest source of names was the Canary Mission. An organization that routinely conflates speech that is critical of Israel or that advocates for Palestinian human rights or uh, right to self-determination with speech that is pro Hamas and antisemitic. This tells us something important that the Trump administration's policy of deporting non-citizen students and faculty was never about combating anti-Semitism or terrorism.

It was about punishing legitimate pro-Palestinian or anti-war advocacy. The way that the operation worked was this, you had an office within the Homeland Security Investigations called the Office of Intelligence, and this office received a directive to go through the names of everyone listed on Canary Missions website and to identify pro-Palestinian protestors.

Whose visas or green cards could then be revoked? That office was also given lists of names from other sources, including beta, um, an extremist, uh, organization that is well known to be Islamophobic. Uh, and it, it created reports on all of these individuals. Those reports were then forwarded to another office within HSI called the National Security Division, and by, uh, government officials own admission at trial.

The reports that were created by the Office of Intelligence repeated in many cases verbatim. Smears and allegations contained, uh, on the websites of third parties, including Canary Mission. They did not vet these allegations. They did not in, in, uh, make their own assessment or determination, whether by their own lives, the speech that these students and faculty had engaged in, uh, was antisemitic pro-hamas.

They just repeated. Um, these act as allegations, and as I noted before, these are organizations well known for conflating pro-Palestinian advocacy with antisemitism, um, and, and terrorism. Now the National Security Division of HSI forwarded these reports to the State Department, which has the authority to revoke, uh, student visas.

As it did in the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, and which also has the power to make a determination that a given student or faculty member is removable, which then allows DHS to go and arrest that individual and start removable proceedings against them, and as part of this new phos tracked process. The National Security Division was forwarding these reports without any further vetting to the State Department, which in turn revoked, uh, protestors visas or found them removal without conducting any meaningful vetting itself.

And under this process, these agencies had targeted. An untold number that potentially hundreds of non-citizens as part of this process. And these include the targeted non-citizens as to which the court allowed discovery in our case, um, which include Rümeysa Öztürk, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, etc.

Mariah: let's go into that a little bit more. So you talked about these unvetted accusations and the targeting, and there was testimony by John Armstrong, who's a senior, state Department official that said these. these action memos that recommended the deportation of student protestors, moved very quickly and he also admitted that statements critical of Israel or US foreign policy could subject a visa or green card holder to deportation.

Can you talk us through a bit more why that's a real problem from the First Amendment perspective and legal perspective and what those revelations meant, for the case? 

Ramya: Sure. So, you know. John Armstrong and other government officials who testified at trial suggested that, um, they took the actions they did to counter antisemitism.

Uh, and that is of course, a legitimate interest. That's common ground in the case, but what John Armstrong's testimony made clear is that the administration views a great deal of. Legitimate anti-war and pro-Palestinian speech to qualify as support for Hamas or anti-Semitic. It was incredible to hear him say a trial.

That statements raging from Denouncement of Zionism to criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza To coals for an arms embargo on Israel to calling Israel an apartheid state. All of these were statements that John Armstrong said could make someone vulnerable to visa revocation and ultimately deportation.

Now, some of this has been clear all along from public statements made by the likes of President Trump and Secretary of State Macho Rubio, but what Armstrong's testimony showed is that those statements weren't just blessed. Agency officials are acting on the statements of President Trump and Secretary Rubio.

They're implementing them. It also gives lie to the government's innuendo in this case and the cases of these individual students that we don't know the full story, that they had good reasons for going after people like Esa, Aztec. In her case, it was just the op-ed. It was just an op-ed criticizing her university's failure to divest.

From Israel, but from, even if the policy we're focused more narrowly on the suppression of truly antisemitic speech, it would be impossible to square with the First Amendment because the First Amendment does not permit the government to prescribe or punish speech that it considers to be hate speech.

And that's for good reason. Um, as we've seen, I think in, in recent years and in the last several months in particular, uh, capacious understandings of hate speech can be weaponized to suppress legitimate political speech, uh, like speech, um, about Israel's military actions in in Gaza.

Mariah: And from the procedural level on the ground, ice agents said at the trial they had never been asked to conduct arrests based on similar legal or factual grounds. What did you make of that testimony as it was such a departure from previous policy and how did that help bolster this case? Uh, when you were, when you heard.

Ramya: So one of the most striking features of the testimony that we heard from these ice agents who are agents who work in HSI, um, that is home and security investigations, is that that was sort of like vast chasm between what they understood the longstanding mission of HSI to be. And what they have been doing since the Trump administration assumed office, and in particular with respect to the individuals who were at the heart of a trial.

So all of these agents, when you ask them about what is  the mission, what? What is you, um, traditionally. Being involved in, they'll say that, and they did say that the mission of HSI is to, uh, investigate, transnational crime crimes like human trafficking, uh, serious financial crimes. And they said universally that they had never been involved in operations of the kind that, 

Are at the heart of this case, the arrests of people like, Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil Um, so that was really, uh, interesting. I mean, a couple of the agencies said that the directive they received to arrest these individuals was so novel that they sought the advice of agency lawyers. to check what the instructions that they had received were in fact lawful.

another thing that was striking about the testimony is just the urgency with which they were asked to arrest these individuals.

So in the case of. The agent who was tasked with supervising his arrest indicated that they were asked to surveil him even before they understood Mahmoud to be the subject of any criminal or other investigation. And when they finally received that instruction to arrest him. Uh. They were told that there was interests, uh, at the highest levels, including the White House, uh, and Secretary Rubio.

And so it was obvious, I think from the testimony that the urgency with which they moved in and other cases. Showed that they wanted to make an example of pro-Palestinian advocates and that they wanted to do so quickly. I think it also shows that despite this pretense of engaging in investigation of these people, the fates of Mahmoud and others was effectively sealed the moment their names were handed to, DHS.

And let's turn to some other testimony in the trial. Faculty testified about how ideological deportations and that policy has chilled their speech and that of their colleagues and students. Can you talk a bit more about that testimony? Sure. So, the court heard from several non-citizen members of the AAUP and Mesa, uh, professor Megan Hika of Northwestern University, professor Naja Lee of Brown University and Professor Bernard Nichol of Harvard University. And they spoke powerfully about the ways in which they have been chilled by the arrests of individuals like, uh, Mahmoud and Rümeysa 

Um, they talked, uh, about watching the videos of those arrests and how, uh, the actions taken against, uh, those students. Terrified them into silence in myriad ways. They have withdrawn from political protest. They have stopped publishing, public writing and scholarship on certain topics and. They're afraid of leaving the country even for research that is critical to advance their scholarship.

So you heard, for example, from Professor Hisker who talked about the fact that she had drafted an op-ed, um, addressing the rise of. Authoritarianism under Trump and addressing what possible resistance to the administration might look like. But after seeing the arrests of Mahmud, and for Mason particular who was arrested based only on an op-ed that she published, she decided not to publish.

The op-ed that she had gone to, um, great trouble to write and you heard similar stories from, uh, professor Nagel Ali and and Professor Nichol. All of these individuals were understandably anxious about testifying in this case, their non-citizens. They're especially vulnerable to possible retaliation by the administration.

 that's what this entire case is about. But they did so because the court assured them that the courtroom is a safe space and because they feared that if they don't, if they didn't speak up, the government would continue its campaign of retribution. Uh, and so these, these individuals are incredibly courageous and I just want to give a shout out, um, to the courage that they and other a UP members have shown, um, in helping us bring and advance this case to hopefully end the administration's policy of ideological deportation.

Mariah: Yeah, it really is incredibly courageous in such, very scary and chilling timesas you'd mentioned. stepping back a bit, what did you think about the government's case and arguments they made during the trial?

Ramya: There are arguments were disingenuous. They went to great effort to paint non-citizens fears of ideological deportation as hysterical. They, in fact, suggested that it was nothing more than a figment of their imagination.

 But it's clear that non-citizens fears that they could be deported for engaging in speech that this administration doesn't like. And in particular, speech about Israel and Palestine is entirely rational and that the whole intent behind. The administration's actions in this context is to stifle this speech and dissent.

That is the very reason that they have arrested individuals, uh, like Mahmud and Mesa to make examples of them. The government made a similar nothing to see, hear argument about the policy's existence.

They suggested that there was no ideological policy, um, deportation policy, that the government was simply exercising immigration authorities that it has always had. It was made abundantly clear by the testimony of government officials in this trial that they were engaged in a very deliberate strategy of identifying pro-Palestinian protestors for deportation in order to suppress the speech of other non-citizens, students and faculty.

On college campuses across the country. But perhaps the most pernicious argument was this idea that noncitizens have no first Amendment rights in the deportation context. Uh, they of course do as, as I earlier explained, but it's important to understand the sort of. Full implications of this argument.

I mean, today the administration is going after pro-Palestinian speech, but tomorrow it can go after speech criticizing fossil fuels speech, promoting what it considers to be DEI or speech defending gender affirming care. There's really no limiting principle to the argument they're making. And if, if non-citizens don't have First Amendment rights in the deportation context, then as any non-citizen will tell you, they don't have First Amendment rights at all because they must always worry that the speech that they engage in will displease those in power.

Um, so the government's arguments in this case I think are deeply troubling, um, and have far reaching implications for free speech in this country. Um, I hope that they won't be accepted.

Mariah: let's go into that a little bit more deeply. 'cause you were talking about there's sort of no limitations on what they seem to be trying to do. Where do you place the administration's ideological deportation policy in these broader attacks on free speech? 

Ramya: It's part of a broader pattern of retaliation by the administration against its perceived political enemies.

In particular, higher education. The administration is going after sites of possible resistance to authoritarianism. You see this perhaps most clearly with higher education, whether it's the threat of funding cuts, knee capping. University's ability to host international students for deporting scholars.

All of these measures are efforts at undermining the role that universities play in fostering independent inquiry and public debate. And what's been so worrying to see is. How few university administrators are willing to put up a fight. I mean, not just university administrators, but more broadly democratic institutions.

And that's part of why the work of the a UP and its members have been so urgent during this administration. the a UP. Has truly been one of the bright spots. It's rising to the occasion and I'm not, I'm not sure where we would be without it.

Mariah: And now let's turn to my interview with AAUP President Todd Wolfson, who will talk more about the a u P's broader legal work and the path ahead for the a UP and its allies in the fight for higher ed. In the interview, you'll hear Todd mention a case involving Harvard and the cancellation of federal grants and funding.

In April, the National AAUP, and our Harvard chapter alongside the United Auto Workers filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the Trump administration's attacks on Harvard.

 Pressured by our filing. The Harvard administration subsequently filed suit and the cases were linked. An update from that case right after we recorded the interview you're about to hear.

The AAUP UP, Harvard AAUP and its allies notched a significant victory. When US District Court, Allison Burroughs ruled that the Trump administration violated the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act, And the administrative procedures act by demanding that Harvard restrict speech and restructure core operations or else face the cancellation of billions in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospital.

In her ruling, judge Burrows found the administration's actions, which included freezing and canceling more than 2 billion in research grants violated the First Amendment rights of Harvard Harvard's faculty, and amounted to retaliation on unconstitutional conditions and unconstitutional coercion. 

 Her ruling vacates the government's funding freeze and permanently blocks it from using similar reasoning to deny grants to Harvard in the future. Okay, let's go to Todd for more.

Mariah: So earlier in this episode, I spoke to Ramya Krishnan about the case, a AAUP v Rubio, and she made a really good point that the Trump administration is going after sites of resistance to authoritarianism like higher ed. And you can see this very clearly with higher ed from funding cuts attacks on international students and scholars and so forth.

What do you view as the most dangerous of these attacks and how is the A A UP fighting back? 

Todd: I guess I would answer this two ways. First, uh, all told the attacks together, are an attempt to completely dismantle the sector and control it.

And so I think that there is an effect or impact that the entirety of the. Attacks are meant to make on the sector, which is to destabilize it and then enable and facilitate, the federal government and actors in alignment with the federal government to take control over higher ed.

So there's something about the entirety of the attacks that needs to be looked at. But if we're gonna talk about what I think is the most dangerous specific attack, is the attempts of the Trump administration to control the operations of universities.

 historically, certainly in McCarthyism, the real thrust of the federal government was to attack individual academics. And their speech what we're seeing today is not only attacks on faculty, students and staff on their speech, particularly as it relates mostly to Palestine, um, but also.

Attacks on the operations of the universities writ large. And so you see this, and I know we'll talk more about the settlements, but just to flag some of what's so dangerous about the settlements, like the Columbia settlement is that. They are telling Columbia how they are to teach Middle East studies, who they should be hiring in Middle East studies, where they should be focusing the hiring of other faculty to counterbalance what they think of as the ideological leaning of.

Ethnic studies writ large so there's a attempt to control the ideological leanings of the institution by the federal government.

There's a control to, there's an attempt to control the admissions process. Of the university by the federal government and there's an attempt to control the disciplining of students by the federal government over the university. And so those are extreme, attempts of control by the federal government over.

Autonomous private institutions, which I think signals a huge, breach into not just in academic freedom, but the freedom of the sector writ large to operate without ideological controls fascism. And so to me that's the, of all the things, and obviously we can talk about the billions cut out of our biomedical research infrastructure, the abductions of our students off the street.

Um, the weaponization of antisemitism, uh, all of these things are really problematic, but to me it's the institutional control that's the most dangerous. 

Mariah: And to dive into what the AAUP has been doing. So in addition to a AAUP v. Rubio the case that we filed, and that we discussed earlier in this episode,AAUP and its allies have brought a number of cases against the Trump administration in 2025.

Can you talk us through some of those cases and why the AAUP did take legal action?

Todd: Absolutely, and I'll start with the cases that connect back to that argument we were, or discussion we were just having. So two cases we filed are a case around the Harvard and the other is a case around the Columbia, not settlements, but attempts of the federal government to force them into settlements.

Um, by threatening extortion, more or less by threatening to cut in the case of Columbia, 400 million out of the biomedical research infrastructure in order to control other aspects of the operations of Columbia in Harvard. It's billions. and we filed those lawsuits on the grounds that they were a freedom of attacks on freedom of speech.

Um, look. The Trump administration's claim in both of those cases is, is rampant structural antisemitism, and they're using Title VI to make an argument, um, to cut funding from the biomedical research infrastructure. And, there's a process in Title VI and it's very clear if there is a grant and that grant and maybe the, the people who have gotten the grant are connected to a, a case of, 

Ethnic or religious, uh, discrimination. there's a hearing and then 30 days after the hearing, there's a ruling. And, and in relationship to the ruling, that particular grant can be pulled back if it's shown that it, um, there is, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, 

 but that's not what happened. What what happened was they said, there's so much. Antisemitism on Columbia and Harvard's campus. We can't even enumerate it. It's so great. We're just gonna go to your biomedical research and we're gonna strip out. Millions, if not billions of dollars out of that sector, often hurting Jewish faculty, um, without any proof.

And so we, we think that's a a, a serious breach of Title six, but also a serious breach, uh, first Amendment rights. And so we, we sued both on the, in, in the Columbia case and in the Harvard case, the Columbia case, we lost and we were said, it was said that we didn't have standing. So we're appealing that.

The Harvard case is due imminently, so we should hear that. But we think we're very on very strong grounds here. Uh, just name one or two other ones that we've launched. We launched a case, um, with, a FT, around the Department of Education, um, and we're really pushing, around the dear colleagues letter.

And then the second one, and one I'll lean into right now that's like on everyone's mind is we sued the, the National Science Foundation for Doge cuts to of about a billion dollars. Um, in NSF grants, largely STEM grants that were were canceled by Doge with no good. With no good cause. I think from our vantage we've been taking on these cases because we don't think that we're gonna solve the problems we face with the federal government in court, but we need to slow the federal government through, down through our courts and then figure out how to get our members and other parts of the sector of higher education in line to fight back in other ways as well.

And so the courts are really a critical, uh, a critical part of this fight, but they're not gonna save us. 

Mariah: And you touched on this a little in your first, answer, but what do you make of universities like Columbia Brown and Penn settling with Trump and what kind of precedent that sets? 

Todd: I think it's a really dangerous precedent.

 Columbia's probably the worst settlement of the lot. Um. Brown and Penn also have their serious problems, in the settlements themselves. And I guess from, from the vantage of the a UP, um, the danger of the settlements is that the institutions made decisions to safeguard their own financial, fiscal, budgetary realities.

Without taking into account the impact it would have on the higher education as a whole. And so, look, you're Columbia president or the board of trustees, what you're looking at is $400 million lost. How are you gonna deal with that, that shortfall? And so you enter into a deal with. Metaphorically the devil here, to, um, work out a way to get that $400 million back.

And, what that does is safeguards Columbia University. I mean, they still gave 200 million to get 400 million, and they gave the Trump administration massive control over different aspects of their, uh, operations. Which we've never seen before. but I think the real danger and the real unfortunate part of this is that it sells out higher education, real large.

Um, so you safeguard Columbia a little bit today, but you make all of us less safe because you give a precedent for the Trump administration that they are in fact allowed to have the right to determine some aspects of admission, some aspects of research, some aspects of teaching, which the federal government, in particularly our right wing.

Radical right wing government, like this one has no right to be involved in. And so it was really, you know. It was not an act of bravery, it was an unfortunate act. Um, some have called a cowardice, but to me, regardless of how we, typify what they did, I think what's what, um, is really important here is that it's really undermines the future operations of our sector.

We need a free higher education. free For our own inquiry critical thought, our students need have need to have the right to protest and to speak their minds. Faculty need to have the right to research without, uh, big Brother watching over them. We need to have the right to have syllabi on them to talk about Gaza without.

Raising a flag that then has federal government coming in and looking at that syllabi and saying, no, no, no, you can't teach about that. That's not the kind of free country that I was brought up in. And that's what the Columbia settlement, and to a lesser degree the Brown Impendent settlement have done, is they've set the stage for federal government to have extreme interference.

So it was a failure on the part of the leadership of all three institutions.

Mariah: 

And so then let's circle back to the AAUP. What do you see as the path forward for the AAUP its members and its allies to fight back against authoritarianism and to fight for higher ed?

What's ahead for the fall and what's your plan? 

Todd: I think first and foremost, at AAUP,

we have to work in concentric circle, so the first thing we have to do is. Organize ourselves. we need to continue to train ourselves. We need to continue to get collectively clear about the fight in front of us. Understand that the fight is not solely about the threat from Trump, but is also about the 60 years prior to that when they were defunding higher education.

Um, and really set sites on that collectively. And build a collective understanding. I think, in any major fight, if you don't have a shared understanding of what battle is in front of you, then people start shooting from all sorts of directions without a clear shared plan about what's what's to be done.

So first and foremost, we need to get clear about what the fight is, and we need to organize ourselves and build our power as a UP. But that's just the first circle. then we need to align ourselves with all higher ed workers. So this first and foremost, a FT, which we're aligned with, which is another 400,000 higher ed workers.

We need to build alignment with them and with all other higher ed workers, and we need to figure out what the way forward is as higher ed workers. How do we fight back? So that's like the next circle. Um, from there, I think we need to build alignment with our students. We will not win a fight around the future of higher education if faculty and staff are fighting it without our students.

And so it means a lot of work, understanding what's on their minds, how they wanna approach this. They're not gonna be, impacted by N-I-H-N-S-F cuts in the same way. Um, and so it's gotta be an understanding of, okay, is this really about, what's this about for students? Is it about the freedom to learn?

Is it about the freedom to protest? How do we align your demands with our demands and build a united front of students, faculty, and staff? And then I, I think that's like the most important work is building those coalitions and then stepping into a resistance movement together. Um, but from there, I think, and I really also believe we can't win this alone.

If we had every student and faculty member and higher ed worker aligned in a fight to take on Trump, I still don't know if we would've enough power to be able to resist the forces raid against us. Um, and so we must build common cause with other sectors of workers under attack. And for me, that's federal workers, K 12 workers, healthcare workers.

Immigrant workers, um, and many others. and then we must find communities that are ready to move as well and are also under threat, whether that's the cities like DC and la or immigrant communities that are, uh, under the thumb of ice. and we have to build a together that's gonna respond to, we're.

Work, building collaboration, hearing from people, learning what their struggles are, not always putting your struggle first, but trying to think through how we can build together. And that's a lot of work. it takes a lot of, um, labor and thoughtfulness and humbleness. And so that's the work in front of us and the US left and the US labor movement and US higher education movement have not necessarily always been great at doing this work.

But I really think there's no other way forward. 

 A front of alignment that brings all faculty and staff in higher ed together with students and then builds alignment out with communities and other workers. And so that's the work in front of us and anything else is gonna sidetrack us from the fundamental work to win back democracy.

Mariah: Thank you to Ramya and Todd for appearing on the podcast today. for more information about a's legal work, visit our website aaup.org. There's also links in the show notes to summaries and updates on the cases we discussed. 

And if you haven't already, be sure to check out our special series Academic Freedom on the Line with host Venita Singh as she examines the interplay between academic freedom faculty, public institutions, boards of governors students, and more in the age of rising authoritarianism. all episodes are in our feed.

And be sure to subscribe to AAUP Presents on your preferred podcast platform to get alerts when new episodes are released. That's all for today. Thanks for listening to AAUP Presents. I'm Mariah Quinn.