Editor’s Note: The following open letter was first published on March 19, 2025. The letter is the result of widespread efforts among academic associations, campus organizations, and unions to defend each other and resist the use of universities as a front line for fascism. Add your organization here.
Universities are serving as staging grounds for the Trump regime’s escalation of attacks on immigrants, people of color, trans and queer people, and critics of Zionism, ranging from armed attacks including the ICE abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to institutional attacks that withdraw, cancel, and criminalize funding and infrastructure. The demand from the Department of Education to place into receivership Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies is another escalation of these attacks. These are accompanied by the vast widening of ICE arrests and detentions.Without organized resistance and refusal to comply, history shows us that these assaults will undoubtedly expand in reach, in violence, and in the destruction of scholarly communities.
The Trump regime’s attacks on universities have been fueled by baseless smears against students, faculty, and staff propagated by Zionist groups who agitate specifically on college campuses. These include vigilante groups who have issued mass calls to their followers to report student protesters to ICE, claimed credit for inciting the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, and produced names of further students and scholars to be criminalized and targeted. Their perverse and dangerous rationale for identifying scholars and students as threats is rooted in the disingenuous conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As evident with the arrest of Leqaa Kordia and visa revocation of Ranjani Srinivasan, students and faculty continue to be targeted in vastly concerning and escalating ways, for their (presumed) association with community-based and political organizing groups including Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and local student and community organizations.
These efforts to criminalize political participation and critiques of racism, militarism, colonialism, and state violence – and additionally, to do so through incendiary rumor and smear – are familiar to scholars of history as the bare-knuckled tools of fascism. Many higher education institutions have made themselves vulnerable to these tactics over the past several years by adopting their terms: the weaponized redefinition of political speech and study as “discrimination,” “hate,” “antisemitism,” “violence,” or “terror.”
We call on universities and academic communities to refuse these terms. While the costs of retribution and loss of funding may be great, the costs of abandoning our vulnerable community members and one another is greater. We call on universities and campus communities to refuse cooperation with the policy demands of the Trump regime and its supporting institutions, and mount the most vigorous possible defense of students, faculty, and staff against these assaults.
Students and faculty – and in particular, the most precarious members of our academic communities – are not safe coming on to campuses right now. University leaders have failed dismally to affirm that they will protect their community members, and in many cases are actively inviting and cooperating with forces intending to harm us. As a result, we support any calls for faculty and graduate instructors to withdraw labor from their campuses unless demands for academic freedom, freedom of speech, employment rights, and the removal of police and ICE from campuses are met. We have been horrified to watch university leaders act with cowardice and preemptively capitulate to state and vigilante threats and attacks. We must safeguard our students and colleagues when our university leaders fail to do so.
Signed,
List in formation, add your organization.
First published March 19, 2025.
National Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Jewish Voice for Peace
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Asian American Justice & Innovation Lab
Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
The Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC)
Rice University Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine
University of California Santa Cruz Faculty for Justice in Palestine
Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine @SDSU
Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at University of North Carolina Asheville
University of Washington Tri-Campus Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Right to Resist Zionism
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis & the Indivisibility of Justice
Arab Left Forum
Healthcare Workers for Palestine-Bay Area
Temple Law Students for Justice in Palestine
Rutgers University Faculty for Justice in Palestine
William and Mary Faculty For Justice in Palestine
Sanctuary Campus Network
Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
Labor for Palestine National Network
U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI)
UPTE Members for Palestine
Georgetown University Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Historians for Palestine
National Women’s Studies Association
UMN Educators for Justice in Palestine
Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective
UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council
The President is subject to civil lawsuits under The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a federal law codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-68 Treble damages can be awarded.
Trump is engaging in racketeering activities that are never allowed. The statute explicitly names him, and all the members of the Congress and the Executive branches as covered government officials. They can be imprisoned for 15 years and barred from holding public office again. SCOTUS has only granted the President immunity in cases where his authority or functions would suffer interference. But he is specifically prohibited from ever corruptly influencing private employment decisions. Every official is also prohibited from applying different punishments or penalties to an alien under color of law for rights and privileges guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
He has withheld $400 million in taxpayer dollars in order to corruptly influence a private employer’s decision to abridge free political speech, free exercise of religion, kidnap students, falsely imprison them, and deport persons who are residing here legally and exercising unqualified rights. He did that to Colombia, and is moving on to Tufts. He also has not concealed attempts to corruptly influence foreign government officials by threatening to withhold foreign aid in order to involuntarily transfer these students and millions of Palestinians to other countries permanently, as part of a plan to violate their human rights, property rights, and right of return. This is all unconstitutional and violates a plethora of US statutes and treaties too.
See: 18 U.S.C. § 242 Deprivation of rights under color of law
18 U.S. Code § 227 – Wrongfully influencing a private entity’s employment decisions by a Member of Congress or an officer or employee of the legislative or executive branch.
I just wrote this to the president of Harvard:
Watching how people in positions of power are buckling to pressure, I remembered a story in Peter Drucker’s memoir, “Adventures of a Bystander.”
In 1933 he was a journalist and a lecturer at Frankfurt University. He says, “Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university… Outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist-physiologist of Nobel-Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar was announced … every teacher and graduate assistant at the university was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear this new master.”
The Nazi commissar made it clear that all the Jews would be expelled, and that everyone would obey him or he’d put them in a concentration camp. When he finished, everybody waited for the great liberal scientist. He rose and said, “Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating: but one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?”
Academics – teachers, librarians, professors – are generally people who are, shall we say, comfortable with authority structures. They don’t expect to be called upon to display great courage. But now they are.
What Trump is doing to destroy academic freedom, and indeed education in general, reminds me of Stalin’s rejection of genetics, and of Hitler’s rejection of “Jewish science.”
Harvard has plenty of money. It doesn’t have to obey in advance. It doesn’t have to obey at all! Columbia has crumbled. So have other colleges and universities. If Harvard does not lead, does not stand up to Trump, who will?
Elizabeth Block ’65
The President lacks any statutory or constitutional authority to regulate or prescribe anyone’s religious or political beliefs under Title VI. He is prohibited by the bill of rights from infringing those freedoms. He can’t obtain a mandate from an regular election or alter those prohibitions with an Executive Order. That’s why his EO Section 2, paragraph (b) prohibits any agencies from diminishing or infringing any rights that are protected by Federal Law and the First Amendment.
The President is attempting to prescribe or regulate what constitutes Jewish or Palestine religious or political orthodoxy. There is nothing Trump’s Executive Order about “ensuring robust enforcement” can legally do to trespass on any of those freedoms:
Sec. 2. Ensuring Robust Enforcement of Title VI. (a) In enforcing Title VI, and identifying evidence of discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, all executive departments and agencies (agencies) charged with enforcing Title VI shall consider the following:
(i) the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism adopted on May 26, 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which states, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”; and
(ii) the “Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism” identified by the IHRA, to the extent that any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.
(b) In considering the materials described in subsections (a)(i) and (a)(ii) of this section, agencies shall not diminish or infringe upon any right protected under Federal law or under the First Amendment.