Tag: Trump

  • Trump attacks DEI; faculty pick between silence, resistance

    Trump attacks DEI; faculty pick between silence, resistance

    Republicans in red states have been attacking diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education for years. But when Donald Trump retook the White House and turned the federal executive branch against DEI, blue-state academics had new cause to worry. A tenured law professor in the University of California system—who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation and harassment—said they read one of the executive orders that Trump quickly issued on DEI and anticipated trouble.

    “Seeing how ambiguous it is with respect to how they are defining diversity, equity and inclusion, and understanding that the ambiguity is purposeful, I decided to take off from my [university website] bio my own specialty in critical race theory, so that I would not be a target either of the [Trump] administration or of the people that they are empowering to harass,” the professor said.

    The professor said they also told their university they’re not interested in teaching a class called Critical Race Theory for the rest of the Trump administration. They said they faced harassment for teaching it even before Trump returned to the presidency. “A lot of law schools also have race in the law classes, we have centers that are focused on race,” the professor said. “And so all of these kinds of centers and people are really, really concerned—not just about their research, but really, again, about themselves—what kind of individualized scrutiny are they going to get and what’s going to happen to them and their jobs.”

    Given all that, self-protection seemed important. “Things are going to get much worse before they get better,” the professor said, adding that “people are very scared to draw attention to their work if they’re working on issues of race. People like me are pre-emptively censoring themselves.”

    Other faculty, though, say they’re freshly emboldened to resist the now-nationalized DEI crackdown. One with tenure declared it’s time to “take it out and use it.” Inside Higher Ed interviewed a dozen professors for this article, including some at institutions that have seen changes since Trump’s return to office, to see how the crackdown is, or isn’t, affecting them and their colleagues. Their responses range from defiance to self-censorship beyond what Trump’s DEI actions actually require, but all share concern about what’s yet to unfold.

    Diversity, Equity and Confusion

    Trump’s efforts to eradicate DEI began on Inauguration Day, with the returning president issuing an executive order that called for terminating “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI” across the federal government. The dictate went on to state that these activities must be stamped out “under whatever name they appear.”

    That order didn’t specifically mention higher education, but the one Trump signed the following day did. It directed all federal agencies “to combat illegal private-sector DEI” programs, demanding that each agency identify “potential civil compliance investigations”—including of up to nine universities with endowments exceeding $1 billion.

    That was Week One. Week Two began with news of a DEI-related funding freeze whose scope was simultaneously sweeping and confusing. A White House Office of Management and Budget memo told federal agencies to pause grants or loans. The office said it was trying to stop funding activities that “may be implicated by the executive orders,” including DEI and “woke gender ideology.”

    Federal judges swiftly blocked this freeze. The Trump administration rescinded the memo. Nevertheless, the White House press secretary wrote on X that “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.”

    The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article. While college and university DEI administrators and offices may feel the brunt of the anti-DEI crusade as these positions and entities are eliminated, the campaign could also cast a pall over faculty speech and teaching.

    “This administration does not seem to care about the Constitution or about the existing law,” the anonymous law professor said, adding that “I think, unlike ever before in my own lifetime, I don’t feel safe or secure or I don’t feel the safety of the Constitution in the way that I have in the past.”

    Vice President JD Vance has called professors “the enemy.” The professor said this “has really empowered a lot of civil society to see us as the problem.”

    But Jonathan Feingold, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Law who’s on the cusp of earning tenure and says he’ll continue to teach critical race theory, is counseling against what he and others have called “anticipatory obedience” to Trump.

    “What I am seeing anecdotally reported across the country is universities either scrubbing websites or even potentially shuttering programs or offices,” Feingold said. But he said of the Jan. 21 anti-DEI executive order that “with respect to DEI, there is nothing in it that I see that requires universities to take any action. It certainly is rhetorically jarring and should be understood as a threat, but I don’t see anything that should compel institutions to do anything.”

    “The executive order does not define what Trump is saying is unlawful,” Feingold said. He noted it “almost always is attaching to DEI the term ‘illegal’ or ‘unlawful’ or ‘discriminatory’—which, I believe, is a recognition that DEI-type policies of themselves are not unlawful.” He said the order “rehearses the same racist-laden, homophobic-laden, anti-DEI talking points that the Trump administration loves to go to, but, if you read it closely, it reveals that even the Trump administration recognizes that under existing federal law, most of the DEI-type programs that universities have around the country are wholly lawful.”

    The bottom of that executive order also lists a few carve-outs that may limit the impact on classrooms. The exceptions say the order doesn’t prevent “institutions of higher education from engaging in First Amendment–protected speech,” nor does it stop educators at colleges and universities from, “as part of a larger course of academic instruction,” advocating for “the unlawful employment or contracting practices prohibited by this order.”

    While Feingold said the order doesn’t have teeth, he nevertheless thinks “it’s a very, very dangerous moment right now for faculty members to do their job because the administration is making very clear that it is not OK with any political opposition.” But, he said, “Voluntary compliance is a foolish strategy, given that Trump has telegraphed that he views an independent, autonomous higher education as an enemy. And so I think it’s foolish to think that scrubbing some words on a website are going to satiate what appears to be a desire to suppress any sort of dissenting speech.”

    Still, scrubbing is happening.

    Scrubbing Words

    A few days after Trump’s executive orders, Northeastern University, also in Boston, changed the page for its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to instead say “Belonging at Northeastern.” Northeastern spokespeople didn’t explain to Inside Higher Ed why the institution took this step; its vice president for communications said in a statement that “while internal structures and approaches may need to be adjusted, the university’s core values don’t change. We believe that embracing our differences—and building a community of belonging—makes Northeastern stronger.”

    In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Kris Manjapra, the university’s Stearns Trustee Professor of History and Global Studies, declined to speak specifically to what’s happening at Northeastern “because I just don’t have a clear sense of what’s happening.” But, nationally, Manjapra said, “We are witnessing a series of challenges to academic freedom” and witnessing the rise of “what seems to be a fascist coalition, and we are clearly seeing the beginning of reprisals against different institutions that are essential to the functioning of democracy.”

    “Although the current language of the attack is being framed as the crackdown on DEIA,” Manjapra said, using the longer initialism for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, he said he thinks that’s a “shroud” for what will likely “become a wider attack on the very foundations of what we do at universities—fundamentally, the practice of scientific inquiry and pursuit of ethical reflection.” He also said there’s a larger “attack on democracy and on civil society” in the offing.

    “Part of my research has been on the context of German-speaking Europe, and what was happening in the 1920s, in the 1930s, in Germany, and it’s chilling to see patterns from the past return—especially the attack on universities and on free speech and on books,” Manjapra said.

    But he said he’s not being chilled; quite the opposite. “The only change that may happen is that I will just be speaking more boldly,” Manjapra said. He said this is “an attack on the very essence of our purpose as academics. And in the face of that attack, the only thing that can be done is to face it head-on.”

    In the Midwest, a Republican-controlled state that already cracked down on DEI now appears to be going further, according to one faculty member. An untenured Iowa State University assistant professor—who said he wished to remain anonymous for fear of exposing colleagues to retaliation and for fear of colleagues limiting their future communication—said he attended a town hall meeting for his college last week after Trump’s executive orders. While state legislators had already banned DEI offices across Iowa’s public universities, the assistant professor said his dean now said more action was required.

    “Our directive is to eliminate officers and committees with DEIA missions in governance documents and remove language from strategic plan documents about DEIA objectives, and plans for both those are underway across the university,” the professor said. He said, “We know from state politics that state legislators and the governor’s office are going to be looking for workarounds, so they’re not just interested in the literal language, they’re going to be looking probably to see if there’s any way that people are trying to linguistically skirt the specific requirements.”

    The professor said his dean guessed “we have something like two weeks to make these changes.” In an emailed response to Inside Higher Ed’s questions, an Iowa State spokesperson said simply that the university “continues to work with the Iowa Board of Regents to provide guidance to the campus community on compliance with the state DEI law,” without mentioning any role Trump’s recent actions may be playing.

    As for his own teaching, the Iowa professor said, “I don’t intend to change my own curriculum.” He said, “There are classes that I regularly teach that the current content of which would almost certainly get me into trouble.” He said, “I’m asking myself now, ‘What would I be willing to lose my job for?’ and, ‘What would our administrators and university leadership be willing to lose their jobs for?’”

    On Thursday, a communications officer for the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing sent out an email saying that “Georgia Tech communicators, including myself, have been directed to delete all content that contains any of the following words that are in the context of DEI from any Georgia Tech affiliated website,” including “DEI,” all the words that make up DEI, “inclusive excellence” and “justice.”

    “Unfortunately, this will result in the deletion of dozens of stories that I and previous communications officers have written,” he wrote. He also said that the faculty hiring page had been taken down and would remain down until faculty and staff “submit new copy” for that page.

    Faculty shared this communication online, expressing concerns and debating what it meant. Dan Spieler, an associate psychology professor at Georgia Tech, said the threats of universities not getting research grant funding “has the potential to blow a massive hole in Georgia Tech’s budget—a massive hole in, like, everyone’s budget.” So, he said that, among administrators, “my guess is that there’s a lot of discussion about how do we stay off the radar, how do we keep the grants flowing?”

    (In an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed, a Georgia Tech spokesperson said, “As a critical research partner for the federal government, Georgia Tech will ensure compliance with all federal and state rules as well as policies set by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to continue accelerating American innovation and competitiveness. Efforts to examine and update our web presence are part of this ongoing work.”)

    At institutions with weak faculty governance such as Georgia Tech, Spieler said, “administrators will largely have free rein, at least in the first pass” for deciding how to respond. But, when it comes to his own teaching, he said, “I’m not going to change a goddamn thing, because I have tenure and if you don’t take it out and use it once in a while, then, you know, what’s the point?”

    “I think we’re going to find out who truly was actually interested and committed to ideals like diversity, equity and inclusion, and who was just paying lip service to it,” he said.

    Dànielle DeVoss, a tenured professor and department chair of writing, rhetoric and cultures at Michigan State University—which made headlines over canceling and then rescheduling a Lunar New Year event after Trump retook the presidency—said, “I think we’re in the midst of a deliberate, strategic campaign of generating fear and anxiety.” She suggested faculty and administrators may have to respond to Trump’s DEI crackdown differently.

    “I suspect university-level messaging has to be much more nuanced,” DeVoss said. “I mean, we’re a public institution. Individual faculty and academic middle managers like myself have, I think, more wiggle room to be activists and advocates. But our top-level administration, their responsibility is to protect our institution, our funding, our budgets.” However, she said, “faculty have academic freedom, and of course freedom of speech, protecting our individual actions.”

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  • ‘Betraying an entire generation of students’? What do Trump University and Matt Goodwin’s excoriating new book tell us about universities today?

    ‘Betraying an entire generation of students’? What do Trump University and Matt Goodwin’s excoriating new book tell us about universities today?

    Browsing in a good bookshop sure beats scouring the internet for things to read. And when I was recently in my local independent bookshop (the Book House in Thame since you ask), I stumbled across a new biography of Donald Trump focusing on his pre-politics business career. Seeing that the book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump squandered his father’s fortune and created the illusion of success by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, included a section on Trump University, I snapped it up.

    Every leader’s weaknesses are clear before they rise to power if you look in the right places. We knew Gordon Brown’s seriousness could merge into tantrums long before the revelations about throwing phones at staff came to light, and we knew Boris Johnson’s joie de vivre hampered an eye for detail long before he caught the ball ‘from the back of the scrum’ and entered Number 10. If Nigel Farage ever makes it to the top job, as ever more people seem to be predicting, no one will be able to claim his destructive approach to politics was previously hidden.

    Similarly, this new biography of Trump written by two New York Times journalists proves the US President’s weaknesses were evident beneath the bluster throughout his long business career in hotels, casinos and golf courses. If the authors are right, Trump has long been prone to taking big risks on a hunch, to acting litigiously and to seeking credit for things that aren’t his doing. The title suggests he was a Lucky Loser, though perhaps that is just an uncharitable way of saying he was a big winner against the odds.

    As a businessman, the book shows how Trump began lucky, with ‘the equivalent of half a billion dollars from his father’, and ended lucky, with ‘another half billion as a reality television star’. These allowed him to take on huge debts, aided by paying as little tax as possible and reclaiming what tax he had paid whenever he could (as during Obama’s Great Recession recovery programme).

    Trump’s dollars from the TV show ‘The Apprentice’ came not so much from appearance fees as from his right to half the profits from any sponsorship deals and from lending his name to all sorts of businesses attracted by his TV success, from health supplements to early video phones. These enabled him to keep afloat. But there were many lows to Trump’s business career and a number of his big projects declared bankruptcy in the 1990s and 2000s, leading the two authors to conclude, ‘He would have been better off betting on the stock market than on himself.’

    If there’s one person responsible for Trump’s rise to the top, it is Mark Burnett, a British Falklands veteran who is now the United States Special Envoy to the UK. Burnett invented the TV programme ‘Survivor’ before creating an urban equivalent in The Apprentice (and later also creating ‘The Voice’). And if there’s one thing responsible for Trump’s rise it seems to be vanilla-and-mint Crest toothpaste as Proctor & Gamble were the first mass consumer company to do serious sponsorship of The Apprentice. They paid $1.1 million to get the contestants to come up with a new toothpaste, thereby drawing attention to the actual new vanilla-and-mint product sitting on shop shelves.

    Ostensibly, this all has little to do with higher education. But Trump University (also known as Trump U) is one of the most notable of all the current US President’s past projects and one of the ventures undertaken just before he stood for the Presidency for the first time. Trump not only lent his name to the project, he also invested millions of dollars in return for 93% of the business –like Victor Kiam, he liked it so much he bought the company. But the authors of this book conclude the whole thing was a disaster from start to finish.

    Beginning as a way to sell recorded lectures to small and medium-sized businesses, Trump University quickly moved into get-rich-quick in-person seminars. The Trump Elite Gold programme had a fee of $34,995 (about the same as the entire cost of a three-year degree in England or Wales). Prospective learners were told, ‘There are three groups of people … People who make things happen; people who wait for things to happen; and people who wonder, “What happened?”’ If you wanted to be in the first group, you were encouraged to open your wallet or else borrow the necessary fee.

    One failed applicant for The Apprentice, Stephen Gilpin, found himself tapped up to work for Trump U but later wrote an exposé that claimed, ‘the focus for Trump University was purely on separating suckers from their money.’ At the time, Trump said he hand-picked the instructors, but he did no such thing. The whole venture ended up in three major lawsuits, which were settled just as Trump became President for the first time.

    In the end, the story of Trump University confirms a truism: it is vital to protect the use of the term ‘University’ and to police it actively and in real time. The book serves as a reminder that – as Jo Johnson has argued persuasively on the HEPI blog – pausing new awards for University Title means the Office for Students is giving less attention to this area than it should.

    It is ironic that the global leader of right-wing populism should not only have sought to establish his own ‘University’ but that, having done so, it should embody in such exaggerated form all the negatives that populists tend to ascribe to traditional universities: poor value for money; an unoriginal curriculum taught by ill-trained staff; and insufficient personal attention to students. However, if a new book being published today attacking UK and US universities, Bad Education: Why our universities are broken and how we can fix them by Matt Goodwin, is any guide to populism more generally, then the failure of Trump U has not deterred the attacks on places that actually do have the legal right to call themselves a ‘University’.

    Goodwin starts with a chapter called ‘Why I decided to speak out’ though it could just have easily been called ‘The grass is always greener’ or ‘Looking back with rose-tinted spectacles’. The book’s core argument is that:

    the rapid expansion of the university bureaucracy, the sharp shift to the left among university academics and the politicization of the wider system of higher education have left universities in a perilous state.

    As a result, Goodwin argues, ‘our universities are not just letting down but betraying an entire generation of students.’

    He notes that, as the number of EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) champions has gone up, some types of diversity, such as diversity in academic thought, have gone down. But Goodwin is a political scientist rather than a historian and the problems he identifies are not as new as he makes out. Far-left students used to disrupt Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph and Leon Brittan when they spoke on campus; now they try and block Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock and Jo Phoenix. The issue of whether such individuals should be allowed to speak even if some people on campus will be ‘offended’ are the same. The recourse to legislation in response is the same too: the rows of the 1980s led to the Education (No. 2) Act (1986) and the rows of today led to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (2023).

    Notably, Goodwin’s views seem to have changed even more over time than the institutions he criticises. Two decades ago, Goodwin was a progressive studying for a PhD under Professor Roger Eatwell, an expert in fascism and populism at the University of Bath, after which he moved to Manchester and Nottingham, where he worked with political scientists like Rob Ford and Philip Cowley, and thereafter to Kent. These days, Goodwin has not only given up his professorship but is found speaking at Reform UK meetings while accepting a job as a GB News presenter.

    And while Goodwin says his book has been 20 years in the making, it reads like it was 20 weeks in the writing. That is not meant to be rude for the piece is pacey, personal and polemical – and all the more readable for that. But while it is based in part on others’ research – including pieces of HEPI output – it generally draws from just one well: the place inhabited by Eric Kaufman, Jonathan Haidt and Niall Ferguson. The dust jacket includes endorsements from Douglas Murray, Claire Fox and Nigel Biggar among others.

    Goodwin’s pamphleteer-style of writing ensures his text has little in common with the meticulous research on recent university history by Mike Shattock or Roger Brown and Helen Carasso or Steve Jones (who will be writing his own review of the book for HEPI in due course). Nonetheless, whisper it quietly but – whether you like his general approach or not, whether you like his new acquaintances or not and whether you like his writing style or not – Matt Goodwin may have something of a point.

    Universities do not always welcome or reflect the full diversity of viewpoints in the way that perhaps they should, given their business is generating and imparting knowledge. It has been said many times before by others, so it is far from original, yet that doesn’t make it false. Goodwin quotes the US economist Thomas Sowell: ‘when you hear university academics talk about diversity, ask them how many conservatives are in their sociology department.’ It seems a fair question.

    But grappling with that is not easy. The best answer, Goodwin argues, is a muscular response. Rather than leaving it to the sector to resolve its own issues, he wants to see hard-nosed interventions from policymakers and regulators:

    only government action and new legislation, or pressure from outside universities, can change the incentive structures on campus. This means adopting a proactive rather than a passive strategy, making it clear that the individual freedom of scholars and students is, ultimately, more important than the freedom or autonomy of the university.

    At the very end, Goodwin even argues someone should ensure ‘all universities be regularly audited for academic freedom and free speech violations’, with fines for any that transgress. Yet that begs more questions than it answers: we don’t know who would do the audit or what the rules for it would be.

    So there is a paradox at the heart of Goodwin’s critique. He ascribes the problems he sees to flaws in the ‘system’ whereby the number of university administrators, institutions’ central bureaucracy and the pay of vice-chancellors have all increased rapidly. But such changes have often reflected:

    1. external influences, such as the increase in the regulation of education (in response to scandals of the Trump U variety);
    2. the need to have flattering statistics (such as to present to the Treasury in the battle for public resources); and
    3. recognition that the old ways of working are not going to root out inappropriate behaviours (for example, sexual harassment).

    Perhaps making universities more accountable to regulators and policymakers will make them bastions of free speech in the way Goodwin hopes, but might it not just clog up the lives of academics even more?

    Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

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  • Trump signs order banning trans athletes in women’s sports

    Trump signs order banning trans athletes in women’s sports

    President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday banning transgender women from participating in women’s sports.

    “The war on women’s sports is over,” he said. “With my action this afternoon, we are putting every school receiving taxpayer dollars on notice that if you let men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding.”

    The executive order, signed on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, declares that it’s “the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.” Under the order, the assistant to the president for domestic policy will bring together representatives of “major athletic organizations and governing bodies, and female athletes harmed by such policies, to promote policies that are fair and safe, in the best interests of female athletes.”

    The president’s latest action builds on the GOP’s broader campaign to remove all recognition of transgender individuals from state and federal programs. On his first day in office, Trump signed a separate executive action declaring that there are only two sexes and banning federal funding for any program related to “gender ideology.” And House Republicans have passed a bill that would unilaterally ban trans women from competing in women’s sports. In nearly half of the country, trans women are banned from playing women’s sports at the K-12 or higher education level, but the order would take those bans nationwide.

    Additionally, the order calls on the education secretary to prioritize “Title IX enforcement actions against educational institutions (including athletic associations composed of or governed by such institutions) that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.” (Federally funded K-12 public schools and colleges are required to comply with Title IX, which bars discrimination based on sex in educational settings.)

    Charlie Baker, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, told Congress recently that out of the more than 500,000 college athletes, fewer than 10 were transgender. The NCAA released a statement Wednesday that said, “The NCAA Board of Governors is reviewing the executive order and will take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days, subject to further guidance from the administration.”

    As Trump spoke Wednesday, girls and women—including former University of Kentucky swimmer and anti-trans advocate Riley Gaines—stood behind him, often clapping in support.

    After thanking them, the president turned back to face the rest of the East Room audience. He acknowledged the federal lawmakers, state attorneys general and governors in attendance, describing them as “friends of women’s sports.”

    “My administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter women,” he said. “It’s going to end and nobody’s gonna be able to do a damn thing about it because when I speak [I] speak with authority.” (Trump was referring to an Olympic gold medal–winning Algerian boxer whom some accused of being transgender; the boxer has publicly said she was born a woman.)

    Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement that trans students do not pose a threat in sports and deserve the same opportunities as their peers.

    “The far-right’s disturbing obsession with controlling the bodies, hearts, and minds of our country’s youth harms all students,” Graves said.

    Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon attended the ceremony, though her confirmation hearing for the office has yet to be scheduled. In the meantime, the department is being led by a collection of acting officials and appointees, including Deputy General Counsel Candice Jackson, who described the president’s order as “a demonstration of common sense.”

    “The President affirmed that this administration will protect female athletes from the danger of competing against and the indignity of sharing private spaces with someone of the opposite sex,” Jackson said in a news release. “The Department of Education stands proudly with President Trump’s action as we prioritize Title IX enforcement against educational institutions that refuse to give female athletes the Title IX protections they deserve.”

    Other Republican lawmakers praised the order Wednesday, arguing it would ensure women and girls won’t be pushed to the sidelines.

    But Representative Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and ranking member on the House education committee, was quick to oppose the order, calling it “yet another overreach by this administration” and saying its lack of clarity will further complicate what should be addressed by sports associations.

    “Rather than address the real, urgent issues that students and families are facing every day, this administration continues to target vulnerable students—specifically transgender girls and women—with a shameless attempt to bully them,” he said in a statement. “They are willing to use the most vulnerable Americans as pawns in a political game.”

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  • Coming soon: ‘Executive Watch’ — Tracking the Trump Administration’s free speech record — First Amendment News 456

    Coming soon: ‘Executive Watch’ — Tracking the Trump Administration’s free speech record — First Amendment News 456

    To lift a line from the songwriter extraordinaire of our era, “the times they are a- changin’.” Indeed, they are — and this is certainly true in our own corner of the world, the world of free speech. 

    For better and worse, Donald Trump and his agents are rearranging the structure of free expression in America. Only a few weeks into his presidency, things are proceeding at a breakneck speed, with a flurry of executive orders flying out the windows of the White House. Even early on, there is a sense that what will follow may well mark one of those pinpoints in our history when that “experiment” of which Holmes spoke is tested. Whatever else happens, it is important that there is some record of these times and what happened in them. To that end, we will soon launch a new segment within FAN called “Executive Watch” to track it all: the President’s orders, the executive agencies’ actions, the activities of the President’s affiliates, and Mr. Trump’s personal undertakings.

    Enter Professor Timothy Zick, the William and Mary Law School Robert & Elizabeth Scott Research Professor and John Marshall Professor of Government and Citizenship. 

    Prof. Timothy Zick

    Zick is the author of five books on the subject: “Speech out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places,” “The Cosmopolitan First Amendment: Protecting Transborder Expressive and Religious Liberties,” “The Dynamic Free Speech Clause: Free Speech and its Relation to Other Constitutional Rights,” “The First Amendment in the Trump Era,” and “Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest.” He is also the co-author of a First Amendment casebook, “The First Amendment: Cases and Theory.”

    For all of the above reasons and others, Professor Zick is well suited to undertake the “Executive Watch” bi-monthly feature of First Amendment News. 

    Even at this early stage, this project comes a time when news stories like the following 21 surface with increasing frequency:



    WATCH VIDEO: Trump Calls For Changes To First Amendment, Demands “Mandatory One-Year In Jail” For U.S. Flag Burning.

    By chronicling such information and then analyzing it, the hope is that our readers will have a more informed sense of the state of free speech at a time when so much is in flux. There is the hope that “Executive Watch” will prompt further discussion of that vital freedom that is at the core of constitutional government in America.

    FBI agents file First Amendment class action

    While FBI agents may be at-will employees who can, generally speaking, be fired for “any reason or no reason,” they can’t be fired for an unconstitutional reason, or as punishment for the exercise of their constitutional rights (e.g. he can’t fire all the African-American agents, or all the agents registered as Democrats).

    The Complaint, filed in DC District Court, is posted here. Plaintiffs are “employees of the FBI who worked on Jan. 6 and/or Mar-a-Lago cases, and who have been informed that they are likely to be terminated in the very near future for such activity.” They “intend to represent a class of at least 6,000 current and former FBI agents and employees who participated in some manner in the investigation and prosecution of crimes and abuses of power by Donald Trump, or by those acting at his behest.”

    Knight Institute on need for fact-checking platform

    [Recently] Meta announced changes . . . to its content moderation policies, including that it’s replacing third-party fact checking with a Community Notes model that allows users to publicly flag content they believe to be incorrect or misleading. 

    The following can be attributed to Katherine Glenn Bass, the Knight Institute’s research director:

    Katy Glenn Bass Research Director Knight Institute

    Katy Glenn Bass

    “Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement today is a stark reminder that many of the biggest platforms we use to communicate about issues of public importance are owned by billionaires who are not accountable to us. Apart from the obvious effort to signal political allegiance, the impact of the announced changes will not be clear for some time. But if we have any hope of measuring or understanding what is happening on these platforms, we need strong protections for the independent researchers and journalists who study them, and better mechanisms for ensuring they can access platform data.”

    In 2019, more than 200 researchers signed an open letter in support of the Knight Institute’s efforts to persuade Facebook to amend its terms of service to establish a “safe harbor” for public-interest journalism and research on the platform. Read more about that effort here.

    Shibley on Harvard’s anti-Semitism settlement

    Robert Shibley

    Robert Shibley

    Just one day after President Trump took office, Harvard agreed to settle two lawsuits brought against it by Jewish students that alleged the university ignored “severe and pervasive anti-Semitism on campus” and created “an unbearable educational environment” in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the ongoing war in Gaza.

    While the settlement language itself does not appear to be public, a press release filed on the official docket of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law v. President and Fellows of Harvard College included some details. Most notably, Harvard agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of anti-Semitism. FIRE’s worry, shared by many others — including the definition’s primary author — is that, when added to policies used to punish discriminatory harassment on American campuses, the definition is too likely to be used to punish speech that is critical of Israel or its government but that is not motivated in animus against Jews or Israelis.

    FIRE has repeatedly proposed steps to address anti-Semitic discrimination on campus that would safeguard students from harassment while protecting freedom of speech, most recently in our inauguration-day letter to President Trump. Getting this right is important; any proposal that chills or censors protected speech on campus won’t pass constitutional muster at public universities, won’t square with free speech promises at private universities (like Harvard), and won’t effectively address anti-Semitism.

    Nevertheless, attempts to codify the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism into laws or regulations are nothing new. FIRE posted a roundup of the widespread civil libertarian opposition to its codification last year, when Congress considered adopting it as federal law. Among those opponents is the definition’s primary author, Kenneth Stern, who spoke at length with FIRE’s Nico Perrino on our So to Speak podcast about why it’s not the right tool for the job of regulating speech. As Stern wrote back in 2016 for The New York Times: “The definition was intended for data collectors writing reports about anti-Semitism in Europe. It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus. . . . And Jewish students are protected under the law as it now stands.” (Perhaps “as it is now written” would have been more precise; whether colleges follow the law is a different issue.)

    As Stern predicted in that piece:

    If this bill becomes law it is easy to imagine calls for university administrators to stop pro-Palestinian speech. Even if lawsuits alleging Title VI violations fail, students and faculty members will be scared into silence, and administrators will err on the side of suppressing or censuring speech.

    Stern’s prediction is about to receive ground testing at Harvard, and likely at other universities that may follow its lead.

    Forthcoming book: New edition of Neier’s ‘Defending My Enemy’

    A new edition of the most important free speech book of the past half-century, with a new essay by the author on the ensuing fifty years of First Amendment controversies.

    Cover of the book "Defending My Enemy: Skokie and the Legacy of Free Speech in America" by Aryeh Neier

    When Nazis wanted to express their right to free speech in 1977 by marching through Skokie, Illinois — a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors — Aryeh Neier, then the national director of the ACLU and himself a Holocaust survivor — came to the Nazis’ defense. Explaining what many saw as a despicable bridge too far for the First Amendment, Neier spelled out his thoughts about free speech in his 1977 book Defending My Enemy.

    Now, nearly fifty years later, Neier revisits the topic of free speech in a volume that includes his original essay along with an extended new piece addressing some of the most controversial free speech issues of the past half-century. Touching on hot-button First Amendment topics currently in play, the second half of the book includes First Amendment analysis of the “Unite the Right” march in Charlotteville, campus protest over the Israel/Gaza war, book banning, trigger warnings, right-wing hate speech, the heckler’s veto, and the recent attempts by public figures including Donald Trump to overturn the long-standing Sullivan v. The New York Times precedent shielding the media from libel claims.

    Including an afterword by longtime free speech champion Nadine Strossen, Defending My Enemy offers razor-sharp analysis from the man Muck Rack describes as having “a glittering civil liberties résumé.”

    Praise for Defending My Enemy

    “Aryeh Neier’s Defending My Enemy is as relevant today as it was when it was first published. The book is a powerful reminder of why free speech matters—not just for the voices we agree with, but for the voices we abhor. Neier’s story of defending Nazis’ rights to speak in Skokie underscores a timeless truth: If we want to preserve freedom for ourselves, we must be willing to defend it for others, no matter how deeply we disagree. At a time when censorship is on the rise globally, Defending My Enemy stands as a bold and principled call to action. Every advocate of free expression needs to read this book—and more importantly, live its lessons.” — Greg Lukianoff

    Forthcoming scholarly article: ‘Output of machine learning algorithms isn’t entitled to First Amendment protection’

    Stanford Law Review logo

    Machine learning algorithms increasingly mediate our public discourse – from search engines to social media platforms to artificial intelligence companies. And as their influence on online speech swells, so do questions of whether and how the First Amendment may apply to their output. A growing chorus of scholars has expressed doubt over whether the output of machine learning algorithms is truly speech within the meaning of the First Amendment, but none have suggested a workable way to cleanly draw the line between speech and non-speech.

    This Article proposes a way to successfully draw that line based on a principle that we call “speech certainty” – the basic idea that speech is only speech if the speaker knows what he said when he said it. This idea is rooted in the text, history, and purpose of the First Amendment, and built into modern speech doctrines of editorial discretion and expressive conduct. If this bedrock principle has been overlooked, it is because, until now, all speech has been imbued with speech certainty. Articulating its existence was never necessary. But machine learning has changed that. Unlike traditional code, a close look at how machine learning algorithms work reveals that the programmers who create them can never be certain of their output. Because that output lacks speech certainty, it’s not the programmer’s speech.

    Accordingly, this Article contends that the output of machine learning algorithms isn’t entitled to First Amendment protection. With the Supreme Court signaling its intent to address unresolved questions of online speech, we are poised to enter a new era of First Amendment jurisprudence in the coming years. As we do, scholars, practicing attorneys, and judges can no longer ignore how the algorithms underlying online speech actually work – and how they have changed with the advent of machine learning. 

    Without recognizing this paradigm shift in algorithmic speech, we risk sleepwalking into a radical departure from centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence. By failing to distinguish between traditional and machine learning algorithms, current consensus about algorithmic speech suggests that the Constitution should, for the first time in its history, protect speech that a speaker does not know he has said. Speech certainty provides a novel and principled approach to conceptualizing machine learning algorithms under existing First Amendment jurisprudence. 

    Related

    More in the news

    2024-2025 SCOTUS term: Free expression and related cases

    Cases decided 

    • Villarreal v. Alaniz (Petition granted. Judgment vacated and case remanded for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam))
    • Murphy v. Schmitt (“The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam).”)
    • TikTok Inc. and ByteDance Ltd v. Garland (The challenged provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.)

    Review granted

    Pending petitions

    Petitions denied

    Last scheduled FAN

    FAN 455: “Eight free expression cases pending on SCOTUS docket”

    This article is part of First Amendment News, an editorially independent publication edited by Ronald K. L. Collins and hosted by FIRE as part of our mission to educate the public about First Amendment issues. The opinions expressed are those of the article’s author(s) and may not reflect the opinions of FIRE or Mr. Collins.

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  • Trump Signs Executive Order on Combating Antisemitism on Campus

    Trump Signs Executive Order on Combating Antisemitism on Campus

    by CUPA-HR | February 5, 2025

    On January 29, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” The order directs certain federal agencies to use appropriate legal tools to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”

    Background

    The new EO directly connects to and expands upon Trump’s EO 13899, “Combating Anti-Semitism,” that was signed in December 2019. The 2019 EO tasks federal departments and agencies charged with enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to use the law to investigate potential cases of discrimination against Jewish individuals where such action does not run contrary to rights protected under other federal laws.

    The Biden administration did not rescind EO 13899, and they pursued regulations at the Department of Education to amend Title VI for cases involving discrimination based on shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics. The proposed rule, which was not published during the Biden administration but was most recently included in the Fall 2024 Regulatory Agenda, indicated that the regulations were in part in response to EO 13899.

    2025 Executive Order

    The new EO states that it reaffirms EO 13899 and “directs additional measures to advance the policy thereof in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023.” It takes direct aim at institutions of higher education, stating that the attacks resulted in “an unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence … especially in our schools and on our campuses.”

    In response to these claims, the EO directs all federal agencies to submit a report within 60 days of the order that identifies “all civil and criminal authorities or actions within the jurisdiction of that agency, beyond those already implemented under Executive Order 13899, that might be used to curb or combat anti-Semitism.” Notably, the order directs these agency reports to include “an inventory and analysis of all pending administrative complaints … against or involving institutions of higher education alleging civil rights violations related to or arising from post-October 7, 2023, campus anti-Semitism.”

    The EO provides additional requirements for the reports submitted by the U.S. attorney general and the secretary of education. Specifically, the order directs the attorney general’s report to include “an inventory and analysis of all court cases against or involving institutions of higher education alleging civil rights violations related to or arising from” antisemitism that potentially occurred after the October 2023 attacks. The attorney general is also required to indicate whether they intend to or have taken any action with respect to the cases at institutions of higher education. Moreover, the secretary of education is tasked with submitting additional inventory and analysis of Title VI complaints related to antisemitism that were filed to the Office for Civil Rights after the October 7 attacks.

    Finally, the EO directs the secretaries of state, education and homeland security to report recommendations to familiarize “institutions of higher education with the grounds for inadmissibility under 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3) so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds” and to ensure “that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.”

    Next Steps

    As explained above, the EO directs agencies to promulgate reports for the president within the next 60 days. Additional information and guidance are needed from relevant agencies to determine next steps for institutions of higher education. CUPA-HR will keep members apprised of additional updates related to Title VI enforcement and public policy related to antisemitism on campus.



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  • Trump reiterates plan to abolish the Education Department

    Trump reiterates plan to abolish the Education Department

    Amid reports that the White House is finalizing an executive order to get rid of the Education Department, President Donald Trump said Tuesday that when he nominated Linda McMahon as secretary, he instructed her to “put herself out of a job.” 

    “Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,” the president said to a group of reporters in the Oval Office.

    The comment was the first time Trump has publicly talked about his campaign promise to dissolve the department since taking office last month. Several media outlets reported Monday that the administration is preparing an executive order that would direct department officials to shut down some functions and develop a plan for the agency’s demise. The timing of such an order is still unclear.

    When asked Tuesday whether abolishing the department was something he could legally do, the president said, “I’d like to be able to do that.” He later added that “there are some people that think I could.” Many experts say that only Congress can kill off the federal agency.

    Trump said that the largest obstacle in the way of passing a bill to dissolve the department is teachers’ unions.

    “The teachers’ unions are the only ones that are opposed to it,” he said. “No one else would want to hold [us] back.”

    A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 61 percent of registered voters oppose getting rid of the department. Numerous education lobbying groups, higher education experts and Democratic lawmakers have criticized the concept, saying that it would cause chaotic disruptions and make college hard to access for low-income students and those with disabilities.

    “Investment in our children is an investment in our future. Dismantling the Department of Education would do the opposite by making it harder for children to achieve and for parents, caregivers, and communities to thrive,” Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a news release. “President Trump wants to lock the promise of public education—of equal opportunity and hope for all—behind an ivory tower accessible only to his billionaire donors … It is callous and cynical.” 

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  • Statement: Trump restores crucial due process rights for America’s college students

    Statement: Trump restores crucial due process rights for America’s college students

    The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced today it agrees with a federal court ruling that appropriately found the Biden-era Title IX rules to unconstitutionally restrict student First Amendment rights.  

    Those rules, effective in August 2024, infringed on constitutionally protected speech related to sex and gender. They also rolled back crucial due process rights for those accused of sexual misconduct on campus, increasing the likelihood that colleges would arrive at unreliable conclusions during those proceedings. OCR announced it will instead enforce the 2020 rules adopted during the first Trump administration which carefully considered the rights of complainants and respondents alike, while providing robust free speech and due process protections. 

    The following can be attributed to Tyler Coward, FIRE lead counsel for government affairs:

    The return to the 2020 rules ensures that all students — whether they are the accused or the accuser — will receive fair treatment and important procedural safeguards. That includes the right of both parties to have lawyers present during hearings, the right for both attorneys to cross-examine the other party and witnesses, and the right to receive all of the evidence in the institution’s possession. Colleges are also required to adopt a speech-protective definition of sexual harassment that enables schools to punish genuine harassment instead of merely unpopular speech. 

    Restoring the Trump administration’s rules means that students can once again feel secure that their rights to due process and free speech will be respected while ensuring administrators have the tools they need to punish those who engage in sexual misconduct and harassment.

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  • Trump vows to revoke student visas of pro-Palestine protesters

    Trump vows to revoke student visas of pro-Palestine protesters

    A fact sheet on the order pledged to take “forceful and unprecedented steps” to “combat the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets” since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.  

    “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” the fact sheet said.  

    Its direct order to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on college campuses” has sparked fear among international students who participated in the pro-Palestine protests that swept US college campuses last year.  

    The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called the order a “dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable attack on both free speech and the humanity of Palestinians”.  

    “Free speech is a cornerstone of our Constitution that no president can wipe away with an executive order,” it said, adding that the protests had been “overwhelmingly peaceful”. 

    To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you

    Trump Administration

    The order pledges immediate action, “using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence”. 

    Its third section sets out specific measures to “combat campus antisemitism”, requiring agency leaders to recommend to the White House within 60 days all civil and criminal powers that can be used to combat antisemitism.  

    It requires attorney generals to submit a full analysis of court cases involving K-12 schools, colleges and universities and alleged civil rights violations associated with pro-Palestinian protests. If warranted, such reports could lead to the removal of “alien students and staff”.  

    While US institutions are required to report to immigration services any information deemed relevant to student visa determinations, federal efforts to impose an obligation to investigate and report on students are unprecedented and would raise serious legal questions, according to O’Melveny law practice.  

    The measures have alarmed many students and faculty on colleges campuses, but experts have said that the directive would likely draw legal challenges for violating free speech rights protected by the Constitution.  

    The American Jewish Committee (AJC) issued a statement welcoming the Trump Administration’s commitment to “combatting antisemitism vigorously”. 

    Student visa holders “who have been found to provide material support or resources to designated terror organisations – as defined by the Supreme Court and distinguished from the exercise of free speech – are clearly in violation of the law and are therefore unworthy of the privilege of being in this country,” said AJC.

    However, many pro-Palestinian protesters denied supporting Hamas, saying that they were demonstrating against Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 47,000, according to health authorities.

    In a letter representing students from the University of California’s 10 campuses, students argued that the order inaccurately conflated “pro-Palestine advocacy with antisemitism” and set a “scary precedent of censorship for the student community”. 

    The threat of visas being revoked and students being removed was heightened after legislation was passed earlier this month allowing immigration officers to carry out raids in “sensitive locations” including churches, schools and college campuses that were formerly protected.

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  • Would you sell your country to Trump?

    Would you sell your country to Trump?

    Greenland is three times the size of the U.S. state of Texas, making it the world’s largest island if you don’t count the continent of Australia.  

    It sits on critical rare earth minerals and fossil fuel reserves. Its retreating ice, due to global warming, is opening up new trade routes and longer shipping seasons. 

    No wonder U.S. President Donald Trump wants it for the United States. A purchase price would be steep. Based on past purchases of territory and Greenland’s economic potential, it is estimated that the price of Greenland could be anywhere between $12.5 billion and $77 billion. And he only has to convince the 56,000 people who live there that they would prosper under U.S. rule. 

    Greenland is a former Danish colony that still relies heavily upon Denmark for its economy.

    If Trump were able to buy it, he’d have to take it as is, and the country suffers from high rates of suicide, alcoholism and sexual abuse. 

    Is there art in the deal?

    A Google map of Greenland.

    Trump made an offer in December, called “absurd” by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. It was the second time he broached this subject, having first spoken of it during the lead up to his first presidential term. 

    This time, he said he won’t rule out using economic or military force to buy the world’s biggest island based on the logic that Greenland is necessary for “national security and freedom” of the United States. Greenland and the United States are separated by about 2,289 kilometers (1,422 miles) of water between the two closest points — Grand Manan in the U.S. state of Maine and Nanortalik in Greenland.

    Much of the world has been laughing at Trump’s demand but it is no laughing matter for Denmark. This week, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen visited German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte, to talk about strengthening the EU’s security and defence and to further prioritise the Arctic.

    In the meantime, Greenlanders are feeling their value to Denmark has risen.

    Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953, when it became a self-governing region of Denmark. This means that it has its own local government and two seats in the Danish parliament. The relationship also means that Greenlanders are citizens of the European Union, with the benefits that come with that. 

    A fractured relationship

    The relationship between Greenland and Denmark is still recovering from that colonial past. The majority of Greenlanders support full independence from Denmark despite its deep reliance on the Danish government. 

    Denmark is still responsible for Greenland’s foreign, security and defence policy, and provides Greenland an annual financial aid of DKK 3.9 billion (roughly €522 million), which makes up around 20% of Greenland’s gross domestic product. That’s the value of all the goods and services a country produces and it is used as a measurement of a nation’s economic health. 

    The scars of colonialism are still fresh for many Greenlanders. In 1953 Denmark allowed the forced relocation of an Indigenous population from the Dundas area in Greenland, for a U.S. military base. The Thule tribe had been semi-nomadic catchers in the Dundas area for thousands of years. Their relocation took place over just a few days. 

    Later, in the 1960s and 70s, Danish health authorities fitted thousands of Inuit women and girls the IUD contraceptive device, many without proper notification or consent. An investigation into the procedure suggests that its aim was to curb a growing population — which worked. Many of these women went on to suffer health issues due to the IUD. 

    Now Greenlanders are being told that their future is theirs to decide. 

    There’s green beneath the ice.

    What does Trump want with Greenland? 

    Greenland’s ice sheet covers nearly 80% of the country, which is losing mass at a rate of around 200 gigatonnes per year due to climate change. That seems like an incomprehensible amount. It is the equivalent of 200 billion metric tons or, according to NASA, if you could picture it, two million fully-loaded aircraft carriers. 

    Trump has framed his interest in Greenland as a matter of national security and freedom. By this, he points to the island’s strategic value: its untapped reserves of rare earth minerals and fossil fuels, as well as emerging trade routes enabled by retreating ice. 

    Greenland’s mineral reserves are largely untouched. The island harbors significant deposits of rare earth elements, essential for various high-tech applications, including electronics, renewable energy technologies and defence systems. 

    Owning Greenland would ease U.S. concerns over China’s dominance in the rare earth market, with China currently controlling 70–80% of the world’s critical rare earth minerals. Acquiring access to Greenland’s mineral reserves could serve to diversify and secure the U.S. supply chain, reducing reliance on Chinese exports. 

    Controlling the Arctic

    Exploiting Greenland’s mineral wealth still presents considerable challenges. The island’s harsh climate and limited infrastructure means large start-up costs for mining projects.

    Having control over new trade routes in the Arctic is also appealing, as well as having an expanded military presence in the region to monitor Russian navy vessels and nuclear submarines.  

    Is it possible to buy another country? 

    This isn’t the first time the United States has offered to buy Greenland. In 1946, President Harry Truman offered Denmark $100 million for the island. Denmark rejected the proposal but permitted the construction of the Pituffik Space Base which is responsible for missile warning systems and monitoring of satellites in space. 

    But for an exchange from Greenland to the United States to happen, both Denmark and Greenland would need to agree to the sale, with an Act on Greenland Self-Government stating that the people of Greenland have a right to self-determination.

    And right now, Greenlanders don’t want to be under anyone’s rule but their own. 

    The international news service Reuters reported 29 January that a poll commissioned by the Danish paper Berlingske, found that 87% of Greenlanders would turn down Trump’s offer and another 9% are undecided.

    But they’re not telling the United States to go away. While Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said that his country is not for sale, Greenlanders are open to cooperating with the United States on defence and exploration of its minerals. 

    And then there’s golf. With all that melting ice, maybe Trump is picturing a fabulous par-72 resort. Right now Greenland only has two courses. Just picture those sand traps on the edge of the Arctic. 

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. How would the United States benefit from controlling Greenland?
    2. What’s Greenland’s relationship with Denmark?
    3. If you were a Greenlander, would you vote to become part of the United States? Why?

     

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  • After Trump DEI order, MSU cancels Lunar New Year event

    After Trump DEI order, MSU cancels Lunar New Year event

    A college within Michigan State University canceled a lunch celebrating the Lunar New Year in part because of President Trump’s recent executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal government and elsewhere, the news site Bridge Michigan reported Thursday.

    The order, signed last week, doesn’t define DEI but calls on federal agencies to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” Colleges with endowments valued at $1 billion or more could be investigated for potentially violating the order, under the White House directive. Michigan State has a $4.4 billion endowment.

    A handful of colleges have taken down or reworked websites related to DEI since the order, while others have called off events. For instance, a conference at Rutgers University about registered apprenticeships and historically Black colleges and universities was canceled last week following the order. (Rutgers officials say calling off the conference wasn’t a university decision. Rather, it was canceled because the organizers, a group outside the university, received a stop work order from the Department of Labor.)

    Michigan State administrators told Bridge Michigan they canceled the lunch, which was scheduled for Jan. 29 and has been held four times before, after Chinese students “expressed concern about an event tied to one racial group.”

    The College of Communications Arts and Science was set to host the event. Lauren Gaines, the college’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion director, wrote in an email obtained by Bridge Michigan and the State News student paper that the cancellation was in response to concerns related to Trump’s immigration and DEI executive orders.

    “These actions have prompted feelings of uncertainty and hesitation about gathering for events that highlight cultural traditions and communities,” Gaines wrote. “We feel it is important to honor those concerns with sensitivity and care.”

    Heidi Hennink-Kaminski, the college’s dean, wrote in a follow-up email obtained by the news outlets that the decision was not “a statement of policy, but rather as an appropriate on-the-ground response given a very short decision window.”

    Michigan State officials did not respond to a request for comment by press time but confirmed after publication that staff at the college canceled the event, adding that other Lunar New Year events continue.

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