Tag: Trump

  • Federal Union Sues Trump Admin Over Political OOO

    Federal Union Sues Trump Admin Over Political OOO

    Employees who had the messages put on their accounts told Inside Higher Ed that it was “wild to see your name attached to a message that you had nothing to do with.”

    J. David Ake/Getty Images

    The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing federal workers, sued the Trump administration Friday, challenging the automated out-of-office email responses it placed on many employees’ email accounts when the government shut down. 

    The message, which was placed on the email accounts of all furloughed staff members without their consent, blamed Democrats in the Senate for causing the shutdown.

    AFGE’s members, who will be represented by the legal firms Democracy Forward and Public Citizen Litigation Group, argue in the complaint that the message Trump attached to their email accounts is “partisan political rhetoric.” Not only does it violate the Hatch Act, a federal law that requires nonappointed government staff to stay nonpartisan, but it also violates the First Amendment rights of the individual employees, they argue. 

    “The Trump-Vance administration is losing the blame game for the shutdown, so they’re using every tactic to try to fool the American people, including taking advantage of furloughed civil servants,” Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, said in a news release. “Even for an administration that has repeatedly demonstrated a complete lack of respect for the Constitution and rule of law, this is beyond outrageous. The court must act immediately to stop this flagrant unlawfulness.”

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  • Why YouTube caving to Trump is cowardly

    Why YouTube caving to Trump is cowardly

    Another one bites the dust. That’s what the headline should be this week. 

    On Monday, YouTube agreed to pay $24.5 million to President Trump and several others, settling a lawsuit over YouTube’s suspension of their accounts following the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    This marks the third major social media company to capitulate to the Trump administration this year. In June, Meta settled for $25 million, followed by X, who agreed to a $10 million settlement less than a month later. Unfortunately, this is in addition to media companies like Paramount Global, who bent the knee to Trump for $16 million this past July, and ABC News, who settled for $15 million late last year. That’s also not to mention the universities that caved after government pressure and bullying. Columbia, for example, agreed to a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration in July. And Harvard, after a long fight, is also reportedly approaching a $500 million settlement this week.

    If you care about free speech, this should really piss you off. These companies and institutions traded principle — and, most importantly, the opportunity to stand on their First Amendment rights — for profit and short-term peace of mind.

    How do we know? Because in many cases, such as that of Paramount Global, the settlement was a thinly veiled prerequisite to FCC approval of a major — and lucrative — business deal the company was after.

    We also know it because many of the lawsuits themselves were, to quote FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere, “forehead-slappingly stupid”— such as Trump’s claim against CBS (which is what held up the Paramount deal).

    The complaint against YouTube is merely the latest example of this baseless legal posturing. It rests on two counts: First, that YouTube violated the First Amendment by suspending Trump and his fellow plaintiffs’ accounts. Second, that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is an unconstitutional source of immunity for companies like YouTube to engage in censorship.

    Both counts are without merit.

    YouTube is a private company with its own First Amendment rights

    Throughout the complaint, Trump and his fellow plaintiffs argue that YouTube was doing the bidding of the Biden White House and Democratic members of congress, effectively turning the platform into a government actor. As a result, the complaint argues, YouTube became subject to First Amendment restrictions on censoring “constitutionally protected speech on the Internet, including by and among its approximately 2.3 billion users that are citizens of the United States.”

    To the untrained ear, this may actually sound reasonable. After all, YouTube is a place where millions of people communicate with one another and receive information about the news of the day. But none of that changes the fact that YouTube is also a private company with its own First Amendment rights — which includes the right not to publish or platform content or speakers it disfavors. When you recognize that, the entire argument in this complaint falls apart.

    The complaint attempts to justify its contention by noting that the platform was “encouraged and immunized by Congress” to suspend the accounts of Trump and the other plaintiffs. (Part of this so-called immunity comes from 1996’s Section 230, which the complaint also attacks. We’ll get into that in a moment.) “In censoring the specific speech at issue in this lawsuit and deplatforming Plaintiff, Defendants were acting in concert with federal officials, including officials at the CDC and the (Biden) White House,” the complaint reads. “As such, Defendants’ censorship activities amount to state action.” Unfortunately for Trump and his fellow plaintiffs, that’s not how the law works. 

    According to the complaint, the Biden administration engaged in coercive and indirect tactics to pressure these social media companies to censor and deplatform views the administration didn’t like — otherwise known as jawboning. This, as we’ve argued before, does violate the First Amendment. A year ago in NRA v. Vullo, the Supreme Court agreed, unanimously affirming what had been ruled in 1963’s Bantam Books v. Sullivan: The government can’t do indirectly what the First Amendment prevents them from doing directly.

    However, if Trump and his fellow plaintiffs are arguing that the Biden administration jawboned YouTube, they’re suing the wrong people. While jawboning is a violation of the First Amendment, it doesn’t magically transform the coerced party into a government actor. It certainly doesn’t cause a private company to lose its own First Amendment rights. There are multiple tests for when a private person or entity becomes a state actor, but in order to justify this claim in this context, the complainants would have to show concerted action — in other words, the platform consciously acted as the government. The allegation that the platform sometimes gave into government pressure doesn’t satisfy that standard.

    Section 230 is not unconstitutional

    The second count in the complaint attempts to further justify the first, but inadvertently emphasizes why both are baseless. “Defendants would not have deplatformed” Trump and his fellow plaintiffs, the complaint reads, “but for the immunity purportedly offered by Section 230.” That is nonsense. The platforms did not need “immunity” in deciding to deplatform anyone because nothing in the law compels them to carry particular speakers.

    In a nutshell, Section 230 says that platforms like YouTube, X, and Facebook cannot be held legally liable for the content posted on their sites by their users. The law also further protects platforms’ right to curate and moderate that content as they see fit, like a bookseller would.

    For years, politicians on both sides of the aisle have railed against and mischaracterized Section 230 for their own partisan reasons. This complaint against YouTube is no different:

    Section 230… [was] deliberately enacted by Congress to induce, encourage, and promote social media companies to accomplish an objective — the censorship of supposedly “objectionable” but constitutionally protected speech on the Internet — that Congress could not constitutionally accomplish itself.

    The complaint argues that Section 230 is little more than a tool for jawboning. As a result, the complaint “seeks a declaration that Section 230…[is] unconstitutional insofar as [it purports] to immunize from liability social media companies and other Internet platforms for actions they take to censor constitutionally protected speech.”

    This is, to put it bluntly, wrong.

    First of all, Section 230 was passed in 1996, long before the advent of social media. The idea that it was “enacted by Congress to induce, encourage, and promote” censorship on social media would require a time machine to make true. Second, Section 230 actually works as a safeguard against jawboning — granting publishers and platforms an additional layer of protection against government pressure when it comes to content moderation (and from private causes of action, too). And I say “additional” here because the First Amendment already protects the right of these platforms to use their own editorial discretion, as the Supreme Court held just last year in Moody v. NetChoice. 

    In other words, Section 230 doesn’t grant these platforms any rights the First Amendment does not. Rather, it further protects those rights from baseless legal action — such as the complaint YouTube just paid $24.5 million to avoid fighting.

    And this is why it’s so disappointing that YouTube caved.

    These companies cower at their — and our — peril

    Just as with Paramount, ABC, Meta, X, and even Trump’s “SLAPP” lawsuit against the Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register (who, thankfully, have not rolled over), the YouTube settlement is another example of what we’ve been calling the extortion-industrial complex: The Trump administration’s intention to seize control of America’s media industry through the use and abuse of government powers.

    Add to that the administration’s unlawful and unconstitutional attempts to nationalize private institutions of higher education, and we have a serious problem on our hands. These actions, and the majority of the targets’ unwillingness to fight back, pose a major threat to our most foundational freedoms. If our colleges and universities are forced to toe the ideological line of whoever is in power, and if our media companies operate under the boot of the state, we lose both the free inquiry given to us by academic freedom and the open discourse given to us by a free press.

    What makes all this worse is that the lawsuits are based on obviously meritless claims that would never withstand scrutiny if they actually went to court. The Trump administration has been mauling these institutions with paper tigers, and the institutions have decided to cower in fear rather than fight. Sure, in the short term, the settlements may help to achieve government favor. The mergers may go through. The federal funding may resume or continue to flow. Costly legal battles may be at least temporarily avoided. But meanwhile, “the freedom of Speech may be taken away,” as George Washington once said, “and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”

    That’s the cost of these companies’ cowardice: The First Amendment freedoms we all depend on to protect our individual rights and keep our democracy going. When those are given up, there’s no getting them back. We should all be fighting like hell to keep them.

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  • Trump Administration Compact Demands Universities Align With Political Agenda

    Trump Administration Compact Demands Universities Align With Political Agenda

    The Trump administration has escalated its confrontation with higher education institutions by sending detailed policy demands to nine universities, conditioning their continued access to federal funding on compliance with the president’s political objectives.

    The unprecedented move, delivered via letters signed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other senior officials, presents a 10-page “compact” that outlines sweeping requirements affecting tuition pricing, international student enrollment, gender policy, and campus speech.

    The compact mandates that participating institutions freeze tuition rates for five years, place restrictions on international student enrollment, and adopt administration-approved definitions of gender. Universities must also commit to preventing any policies that the administration characterizes as punishing conservative viewpoints.

    The nine institutions that received letters on Wednesday include Dartmouth College, Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, and Vanderbilt University.

    According to The New York Times, May Mailman, the White House’s senior adviser for special projects and a letter signatory, indicated the administration remains open to dialogue with contacted universities. “We hope all universities ultimately are able to have a conversation with us,” Mailman stated.

    The demands represent a significant threat to institutional autonomy and could have far-reaching implications for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on college campuses. The restrictions on international student enrollment raise particular concerns about the future of global education exchange and the presence of international scholars who contribute substantially to research and campus diversity.

    The administration’s approach effectively creates a two-tiered system where compliance brings preferential treatment in federal grant competitions. As one senior White House official told The Washington Post, universities would technically remain eligible for grants, but compliant institutions would gain a “competitive advantage.”

    This compact represents the latest escalation in the administration’s sustained campaign targeting higher education. Previous actions have included funding freezes, threats to revoke tax-exempt status, and attempts to eliminate universities’ authorization to host international students.

    The administration has particularly focused on policies related to international students, pro-Palestinian campus activism, transgender student athletes, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.

    Harvard University stands alone among major research universities in actively resisting the administration’s demands through litigation. In an April open letter to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber articulated the stakes for academic freedom: “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

    However, on Tuesday, President Trump claimed a deal with Harvard was nearing completion. The administration has already announced agreements with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Brown University earlier this year.

     

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  • Trump May Attempt to Tie Grant Allocation to Capitulation

    Trump May Attempt to Tie Grant Allocation to Capitulation

    The Washington Post caught wind of these latest ideas through two anonymous White House officials.

    Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

    The Trump administration may be moving away from using individual investigations to try to force colleges into compliance with the president’s agenda and instead encourage compliance by giving institutions that demonstrate adherence to his policies a competitive advantage in obtaining research funding, according to The Washington Post.

    The new plan, which Post reporters heard about from two anonymous White House officials, would change the grant-application process and give a leg up to institutions that conform to President Donald Trump’s agenda regarding admissions, hiring and other campus policies. 

    If the plan takes effect, the Trump administration will no longer have to go after universities one by one through investigations and corresponding penalties, but rather can induce compliance from hundreds of institutions at once.

    “It’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” one official told the Post.

    The current award-selection process for federal research grants is based primarily on scientific merit. Critics say that overriding such a standard would be a demonstrable example of executive overreach and a violation of academic freedom.

    “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. 

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  • Trump plans overhaul of H-1B visa favouring high paid workers 

    Trump plans overhaul of H-1B visa favouring high paid workers 

    The notice, published in the Federal Register on September 24, proposes an overhaul of the H-1B visa process to establish a “weighted selection process” favouring “higher skilled and higher paid” workers. 

    If finalised, the proposal would give greater odds of selection to workers with higher wages, if the number of applicants exceeds the 85,000-limit set by Congress, which has been the case every year for over a decade. The system would replace the current lottery selection process.

    The changes – initially put forward for White House review in July – follow a major hike in the H-1B visa fee to $100,000 announced last week, triggering widespread panic among US companies and prospective foreign employees.  

    Prior to the announcement, employers typically paid between $2,000 to $5,000 for H-1B visa applications, with Trump claiming the increase would put an end to employers “abusing” the system by hiring foreign workers at a “significant discount” in comparison to American workers. 

    As per yesterday’s proposal, prospective employees would be assigned to four wage bands, with applicants in the top band (level four) placed into the selection pool four times, those in level three entered three times, and so on.  

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said the process would “incentivise employers to offer higher wages or higher skilled position to H-1B workers and disincentivise the existing widespread use of the H-1B program to fill lower paid or lower skilled positions”. 

    The department said it “recognised the value” in maintaining opportunities for lower wage earners and maintained they would not be precluded from the visa, unlike the Trump’s 2021 proposal which “left little or no opportunity” for lower earners.

    But critics argue the proposed weighted system will harm US employers’ ability to build international knowledge and fill jobs.

    “By favouring more experienced foreign workers and reducing the number of new job entrants, US companies will find themselves struggling to grow,” Intead CEO Ben Waxman told The PIE News.  

    The plans now face a 30-day public comment period before they are considered by the administration for a final rule, a process that could take several months.  

    Extensive feedback to government from US businesses on how the proposal would damage US competitiveness is widely expected, with experts also anticipating possible court challenges against the legislation.

    Early reports from Bloomberg have suggested the US Chamber of Commerce has begun polling member companies about a potential lawsuit to challenge the $100,000 fee hike.

    DHS itself has estimated that 5,200 small businesses currently employing H-1B visa holders would suffer significant damages due to loss of labour.

    “There simply are not enough American computer science graduates to support the decades-long record of US innovation and economic growth. That is the wonder of the US tech sector,” said Waxman.

    “Why would the US government want to constrain that engine?” he asked.

    With analysis by the Chamber of Commerce forecasting a continued decline in the US labour force participation by 2030, advocacy bodies such as IIE have emphasised the importance of international students to fill gaps in labour markets across the country.   

    There simply are not enough American computer science graduates to support the decades-long record of US innovation and economic growth

    Ben Waxman, Intead

    The visa, popular with tech companies, enables US employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in “specialty occupations” spanning a wide range of industries from healthcare and teaching to computer science and financial analysis.  

    Under the current system, there is a statutory annual cap of 85,000 new H-1B visas: 65,00 for regular H-1B visas and 20,000 for individuals with advanced degrees from US institutions known as the master’s cap. 

    Each year, US employers submit registrations to USCIS for each worker they want to sponsor for a visa. Typically, this number exceeds the cap, in which case, applicants are placed into a random lottery which determines who is awarded a visa. 

    Since 2012, 60% or more of H-1B workers have held a computer-related job.

    Amazon remains the single largest sponsor, with 10,000 out of its total 1.56 million employees holding H-1B visas. Microsoft, Apple and Meta have also expanded foreign hiring through this stream in recent years, according to Newsweek analysis of new federal data.

    Commentators have already warned that if the new structure is implemented, the US tech sector will ramp up offshoring facilities and jobs. “Not the outcome anyone in the US wants,” said Waxman.

    The visa program has been the subject of much debate in recent months, with Elon Musk, himself once an H-1B worker, coming out in defence of the visa against calls for its abolition from some MAGA hardliners who argued it allowed firms to suppress wages and sidelines American workers.  

    Denial rates for H-1B visas peaked at 15% during Trump’s first administration due to stricter immigration rules and the tightening of the definition of “specialty occupations”.  

    India, America’s largest source of international students, is also the top country of origin for H-1B visa holders, with Indian nationals making up 73% of new H-1B approvals in 2023.

    China was the second-most common birthplace of H-1B workers, accounting for 12% of skilled workers approved in 2023, while no other birthplace accounted for more than 2% of the total. 

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  • What Missouri Can Teach Trump About Merging ED and Labor

    What Missouri Can Teach Trump About Merging ED and Labor

    In a recent statement and a series of fireside chats, Education Secretary Linda McMahon repeatedly drew attention to her efforts to move all career, technical and adult education programs from the Department of Education to the Department of Labor and consolidate some as part of the Trump administration’s quest to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.

    “I can’t think of a more inefficient system than to have duplication and just one side not knowing what the other is doing,” she said at one conservative policy summit last week. “So let’s consolidate them all in the Department of Labor, where I think they should be. And if we show that this is an incredibly efficient and effective way to manage these programs, it is my hope that Congress will look at that and approve these moves.”

    According to ED, many staff members from the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education are already working under the supervision of the DOL, though the funding for the programs they oversee is still managed by McMahon. Moving that money, which was appropriated by Congress to the Education Department, would require legislative approval. But symbolically, the integration process is under way.

    The Trump administration is not the first government body to propose or execute such a merger, however. A handful of states have combined their departments of higher education and workforce development agencies in the hopes of better aligning state budgets, curriculum and grant allocation with the needs of local employers. Missouri, for example, has been working since 2018 to integrate what was the Department of Higher Education and the Division of Workforce Development into a new Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development.

    Inside Higher Ed spoke with the newly fused department’s commissioner, Bennett Boggs, and deputy commissioner, Leroy Wade, to understand how it came to be, what challenges they faced in the process and the benefits they’ve seen as a result.

    The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: Take me back and tell me a little bit about what sparked this merger for Missouri.

    Wade: There was a realization that we weren’t being as effective as we could be as a state in terms of our economic development. And so Governor Parson, at that point, put together a group called Talent for Tomorrow that looked at what direction do we need to go and what kinds of things do we need to focus on? And then there was an ancillary piece called Best in the Midwest that looked around at our surrounding states to decide, from an economic development, from a workforce perspective, how are we doing?

    Unfortunately, what we found was that we weren’t doing really very well. We were toward the bottom in almost everything that we looked at. And so out of that process and a listening tour all around the state to hear what folks wanted and what their perspective was, came two things. One was to try and streamline our Department of Economic Development. The other piece was to look at, how do we change our pipeline system? And that’s what brought the Division of Workforce Development to merge with the Department of Higher Education

    Q: How did the process of merging these two institutions work? Was it all led by the governor and the state executive branch, or did it require any legislative backing?

    Wade: The governor has the authority to reorganize state government, if you will, at least to a certain extent. So the process started with an executive order laying out what that reorganization would look like. Now, the Legislature has a role in that process. They can’t make changes to it, but they can either vote to accept it or not. But it went through; there was no legislative opposition.

    There was some existing statutory language that talked about the Department of Higher Ed, and so there had to be some language changes to adopt the new name of the organization and to reflect some of the structural changes that took place. But it was really all driven by that executive order.

    Q: One of the core justifications we’ve heard from the Trump administration for merging the CTE operations at a federal level is to eliminate what they say are duplicate programs. When Missouri combined its agencies, was that one of your motivations as well, and did you find any duplicates to consolidate?

    Boggs: What we have found here in Missouri is not so much duplication as an opportunity for coordination. A large part of it was about combining functions that have similar end goals but are not exactly the same program. It’s about asking, how can they be coordinated to be more effective together?

    Commissioner Bennett Boggs

    One of the answers to that is leveraging broader expertise. If you bring people and programs together and help broaden the perspective of the work that they’re doing, it allows the organization to move from silos to strategic partnerships.

    For example, Missouri is very strong in registered apprenticeships. But it’s not just in the trades. We’ve also developed some really effective programs in education and health care and some other professional industries. Part of that is because we’ve been able now to coordinate with local workforce boards, local regional employers and then the two- and four-year institutions, particularly regional ones. Before, these three groups may have been unintentionally competing because they weren’t that aware of each other, but now by working together they can be a funding stream. They can bring resources together to help strengthen and accelerate workforce development that would not have happened if they kept operating separately.

    It also just strengthens our communications and helps us as a department talk about higher education in terms of, how does this make life better for Missourians? And that’s a better, healthier conversation to be having.

    Q: Despite the shared end goal, there had to be times where there was internal conflict in trying to streamline things. For example, if both an apprenticeship program and a health-care school are training hospital technicians, I can imagine they’re each trying to fill their own seats. So what were some of the challenges you faced in the merger process and how did you overcome them?

    Boggs: We know in Missouri, 65 percent of all jobs currently require education or training past high school, and that number is only expected to grow. Of that, 35 percent would be an associate degree or some certification, and 30 percent would be a bachelor’s degree and above. So this is a statewide effort to create pathways for all Missourians—so this is not either-or, it’s yes-and.

    Why can’t a student have an internship or a work-based learning experience while in a postsecondary institution? And so part of those regional partnerships is that they help us think about things like that. They’re not only preparing students for the current job but asking, how do we get them on a pathway to be ready for the next one?

    One of the challenges in this is understanding that different sections of our department work in different time frames. For example, we run 21 job centers in the state, and when folks come in the door there, they need a job to pay the rent next week. We also have different parts of the department that are approving academic programs in a way that might not really take off for three to five years. It’s not only a difference in pace but also culture and lingo. We just have to be aware of each other and learn.

    The other challenge is potential for misalignment related to policies, data and physical infrastructure. This really hits home in terms of our planning and budget folks. We now have an array of state and federal programs that support Missourians in paying for education, whether that’s state-funded financial aid or federal [Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act] funds. These separate funding streams have different requirements, different reporting structures and eligibility criteria, so our staff then has to be able to think quickly, know about and pivot between multiple particular funding streams.

    Q: We’ve also heard critics of the merger at the federal level suggest that there may be barriers in statute that make it difficult to merge or consolidate various programs and grants. Did you experience any difficulties legally when merging your two agencies?

    Boggs: We didn’t encounter any legal hurdles, but as I was mentioning earlier, understanding the differences in the federal and state funding streams and the requirements and the structures and the eligibility requirements, those kinds of things had to get worked through.

    Q: So would you say it was less about trying to change the existing rules and regulations for various programs and more trying to understand those stipulations in order to use the funding in a more strategic, collaborative way?

    Boggs: I think that’s pretty accurate. It’s about keeping the similar end goal in mind, and then asking, what funds can be used to help advance to that shared goal?

    Q: All challenges aside, over all, has this merger positively affected Missouri’s higher ed and workforce development landscape? And, if so, how?

    Boggs: Absolutely. It’s changed the tone and the conversation statewide in terms of postsecondary education being part of economic and community development. It has pulled in strategic partners, from job centers, regional workforce boards, chambers of commerce and regional universities to have really interesting gatherings and talk about where they need to grow. And it makes for a better conversation about the cutting-edge research our flagship institution does. Over all, it helps us as a state have a better, more comprehensive conversation about learning and workforce development.

    Q: Has the Trump administration reached out to you in an effort to learn from Missouri’s experiences in merging these two departments?

    Boggs: No, but if they wanted to contact us, we’d be happy to assist however we could.

    Q: Do you think there’s an opportunity for the federal government to learn from both the challenges and the successes that you have experienced at the state level?

    Boggs: You know there’s a famous quote from Louis Brandeis that says, “States are the laboratories of democracy.”

    I wouldn’t pretend to know what the federal government can take away from Missouri. They are operating at a much more complicated level, with many more components in play. But certainly in Missouri, we’ve had a good experience doing this, and we’re still discovering new areas for improvement all the time.

    In fact, we’ve got a technical cleanup bill we’re proposing this upcoming legislative session of just small bits and pieces in the state statutes from before the merger that still need to be addressed. Part of what helped us out, though, is data—the integrating of some of the disparate data systems into now a more comprehensive data group, and that’s helping us statewide with better policymaking.

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  • AAUP Accuses Trump of Weaponizing Civil Rights Law

    AAUP Accuses Trump of Weaponizing Civil Rights Law

    The Biden and Trump administrations have both stepped up enforcement of Title VI in the last two years.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images | Scott Olson/Getty Images

    A new report released Monday by the American Association of University Professors and its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure argues that the Trump administration has weaponized federal civil rights laws with a goal of discrediting colleges and compromising their academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

    The report focuses in part on a surge of investigations that have been launched by the Department of Education since Oct. 7, 2023, especially those that involve national origin and religion. Based on an analysis of those cases, AAUP argues that in many instances the Trump administration has targeted types of speech or programming that do not actually qualify as legally actionable discrimination. Rather, the association says, the Trump administration has used this surge to sidestep historical procedures and enforce its own interpretation of the law.

    Both the Biden and Trump administrations stepped up their enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, after the Hamas attack on Israel prompted a number of protests on college campuses and an increase in reports of antisemitism. Their approaches, however, have been quite different.

    Biden civil rights officials took issue with how colleges responded to reports of antisemitic harassment and found several colleges in violation of that law.

    However, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to cut off funds and to demand sweeping changes at institutions—all in the name of combating antisemitism. More recently, the administration has used Title VI as a way to restrict and investigate race-based practices and programs as well as admissions decisions.

    “In a perverse reading of DEI, the administration makes it an instance of racial discrimination rather than an attempt to dismantle the structures of discrimination based on race,” the report notes.

    Over all, the AAUP argues that the Trump administration is attempting to “unmake” and “hijack” Title VI.

    The Trump administration is “unmooring the Civil Rights Act from its foundational commitments to addressing structures of discrimination that prevent educational access,” the report stated. And doing so “is nothing less than an attempt to rewrite the history of the nation.”

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  • Feds Press CPS to End Black Student Initiative, Transgender Student Guidelines – The 74

    Feds Press CPS to End Black Student Initiative, Transgender Student Guidelines – The 74


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    The Trump administration says it will withhold some federal funding from Chicago Public Schools over an initiative to improve outcomes for Black students and guidelines allowing transgender students to play sports and use facilities based on the gender with which they identify.

    Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, wrote the district Tuesday saying his office has found CPS violated anti-discrimination laws and will lose grant dollars through the Magnet School Assistance Program. The district, with a budget of roughly $10.2 billion, has a five-year, $15 million Magnet Schools Assistance Program grant it received last year.

    The feds are demanding that the district abolish the Black Student Success Plan it unveiled in February and issue a statement saying it will require students to compete in sports or use locker rooms and bathroom facilities based on their biological sex at birth, among other demands.

    However, Illinois law conflicts on both fronts, putting CPS in a difficult position. The state issued guidance in March that outlines compliance with the Illinois Human Rights Law, including that schools must allow transgender students access to facilities that correspond to their gender identity. Separately, an Illinois law passed in 2024 requires the Chicago school board to have a Black Student Achievement Committee and plan for serving Black students.

    Chicago Public Schools said Wednesday in an emailed statement that it “does not comment on ongoing investigations.” Previously, its leaders have said that the Black Students Success Plan is a priority to address longstanding academic and discipline disparities that Black students face. They have vowed to forge ahead with the five-year plan in defiance of the Trump administration’s crackdown on race-based initiatives.

    Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said earlier this year that he would take the Trump administration to court if it takes federal funding away from CPS because of the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. His office also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    In response to a complaint from a Virginia-based conservative nonprofit earlier this year, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the Black Student Success Plan, which sets goals to double the number of male Black teachers, reduce Black student suspensions, and teach Black history in more classrooms. Trainor said in his department’s interpretation, the initiative runs afoul of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year banning the consideration of race in college admissions by offering added support to Black students and teachers exclusively.

    “This is textbook racial discrimination, and no justification proffered by CPS can overcome the patent illegality of its racially exclusionary plan,” he wrote.

    The OCR also launched an investigation in March of CPS, the Illinois State Board of Education, and suburban Deerfield Public School District 109 to look into their policies on transgender students using facilities and participating in school sports. Trainor said Chicago’s Guidelines Regarding the Support of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education.

    District officials told Chalkbeat recently that the members of a new school board Black Student Achievement Committee tasked with overseeing the plan’s rollout will be unveiled later this month.

    Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, issued a statement decrying the federal move to withhold funds from CPS and saying the district will stay the course.

    “We will not back down,” she said in the statement. “We will not apologize. Our duty is to our students, and no amount of political bullying will shake our commitment to them.”

    Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.


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  • Trump student visa policies pose outsized risk to speciality colleges

    Trump student visa policies pose outsized risk to speciality colleges

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    A loss of international students due to restrictive federal policies could disproportionately harm small private colleges that have specialized focuses or are affiliated with Christian churches, according to a recent report from the Brookings Institution. 

    Many public institutions that charge much higher tuition for international and out-of-state students could also face serious financial hits, said the report’s author, Dick Startz, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    In his analysis, Startz looked at the common traits of colleges where international students made up at least 30% of enrollment. He found that all of those colleges were private, tended to be small, and have a special focus like business or arts. 

    They were also disproportionately Christian colleges. According to the report, Christian institutions represent 34.3% of colleges and universities where international students comprise more than 30% of total enrollment. 

    “Perhaps the importance of international students to Christian schools should not be so surprising,” the report said. “Many Christian schools are affiliated with evangelical beliefs, spreading their faith globally.”

    Many small private and religious colleges in the U.S. have closed in recent years amid enrollment losses. For such institutions, a sudden loss of 30% of their student population could be a “disaster,” the report warned.

    “The majority of schools will see very little effect,” said Startz. “But there are a small number of schools — private schools that are not very large — and 30% of their budget could disappear. It could be devastating.”

    In June, the U.S. Department of State reopened consular interviews for foreign students looking to apply or renew their student visas after freezing the process the month prior. The State Department, however, now requires those students to unlock their social media accounts so consular officers can review whether they consider their posts hostile to the U.S. or to its culture and founding principles, The Associated Press reported. 

    International students who were previously in the country with active visas are less likely to be affected, said Startz. But first-year students, new graduate students, or some students who need to renew their visas will be impacted, he said. 

    It’s unclear how much those policies will affect international student enrollment or when colleges may start seeing significant impacts, said Startz. But some major colleges and university systems are already beginning to report a major drop in international student enrollment. 

    Over the summer, NASFSA: Association of International Educators projected international enrollment at U.S. colleges could decline by as much as 150,000 students this semester if the federal government did not start ramping up efforts to issue visas. 

    International freshmen enrollment at elite institutions like Princeton University and Columbia University remained steady heading into fall, The New York Times reported. However, other institutions, such as the University at Buffalo, are reportedly experiencing significant declines in international student enrollment, NPR reported. 

    Affecting the economy, affecting colleges

    Volatility in international student levels could affect nearly every college in the country that enrolls foreign students, the Brookings report stated. But not every college — even the ones with large foreign student enrollments — would be affected equally. 

    Colleges such as the University of California, Santa Barbara — where international students make up 9% of enrollment — could face serious financial threats. That’s because those students pay triple the tuition paid by in-state students at UC Santa Barbara, the report stated. 

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  • Ford, Trump and the War on Education (Henry A. Giroux and William Paul)

    Ford, Trump and the War on Education (Henry A. Giroux and William Paul)

    Analyses of fascism too often fixate on its most spectacular expressions: staggering inequality, systemic racism, the militarization of daily life, unbridled corruption, monopolistic control of the media, and the concentration of power in financial and political elites. Fascism thrives on a culture of fear and racial cleansing and the normalization of cruelty, lies, and state violence. Yet what is often overlooked is how culture and education now function as decisive forces in legitimating these authoritarian passions and in eroding democratic commitments. As Hannah Arendt, Jason Stanley, Richard Evans, Chris Hedges, and others remind us, the protean origins of fascism are never fully buried; they return in altered and often disguised forms, seeping into everyday life and reshaping the common sense of a society.

    Under US President Donald Trump, we face a terrifying new horizon of authoritarian politics: the erosion of due process, mass abductions, vicious attacks on higher education, and the steady construction of a police state. Canada has not yet descended into such full-fledged authoritarianism, but troubling echoes are undeniable. Public spaces and public goods are under assault, book bans have appeared in Alberta, languages of hate increasingly target those deemed disposable, the mass media bends to corporate interests, labour is suppressed, and democratic values are met with disdain. These may not replicate the worst horrors of the past, but they reveal how culture and education become the terrain upon which democracy is dismantled and authoritarianism gains legitimacy. These are warning signs of a gathering darkness that must be confronted before they harden into something far more sinister.

    Culture and Pedagogy

    Fascism thrives not only on brute police power, prisons, or economic violence but also on culture and pedagogy. Culture has increasingly become a site in the service of pedagogical tyranny. It works through erasure and repression, through memory stripped of its critical force, and through dissent silenced in the name of order. Fascism is never solely a political or economic system; it is a pedagogical project, a machinery of teaching and unlearning that narrows the horizon of what can be said, imagined, or remembered.

    Today authoritarianism seeps insidiously into everyday life, embedded in seemingly obvious maneuvers that consolidate power under the guise of technical or bureaucratic necessity. Its mobilizing passions often emerge unobtrusively in maneuvers that hide in the shadows of the mundane, often at the level of everyday experience.

    This creeping logic is starkly visible in Ontario, where Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative (PC) government has moved to seize control of local school boards. What may look like routine administrative measures should be read as a warning: authoritarianism does not arrive only with grandiose spectacles or open attacks on democracy’s foundations; it gains ground quietly, through the erosion of the ordinary, the capture of the local, and above all, through the weaponization of education as a tool to dismantle democracy itself.

    The Ford government’s seizure of the Toronto, Toronto Catholic, Ottawa-Carleton, and Dufferin-Peel Catholic district school boards is extraordinary, even for this democracy-averse regime. Education Minister Paul Calandra has even mused about eliminating trustees altogether before the 2026 local elections, declaring “Everything is on the table.” His justification that Ontario’s Ministry of Education (MOE) has allowed them to make too many decisions on their own is both unsupported and revealing. It exposes a deeper authoritarian project: the desire to centralize power and strip away democratic oversight from institutions closest to local communities. It curbs liberal instincts of trustees who see first-hand the vast diversity of lives and needs of the families who rely on their schools.

    This is precisely how authoritarian control operates: by eroding intermediary structures that connect people to power. Just as Donald Trump sought to bend national cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Museum to his will, Ford dismantles the modest democratic functions of trusteeship. Both cases illustrate how authoritarianism works through the fine print of governance as much as through grandiose pronouncements.

    Manufactured Deficits and Structural Starvation

    The pretext for takeover was financial mismanagement. Yet none of the investigators found evidence of serious fiscal incompetence. The truth is that boards submitted balanced budgets year after year but only after slashing programs and services, closing outdoor education centres, selling property, cutting staff, and raising fees. What really drives their fiscal crises is a decades-old funding model – first imposed by the Mike Harris PC government in 1997 – that shifted resources from local taxes to provincial grants. This was not a move toward equitable funding; these were neoliberals of the first order who believed in central control of funding so they could squeeze school boards and education workers to contain costs.

    This model, based on enrolment rather than actual need, starved boards of resources for special education, transportation, salaries, and infrastructure. For instance, school boards don’t get funding for actual children who need special education support but rather on the basis of a predictive model MOE devised. Boards pay for the kids MOE doesn’t fund. The Ford government hasn’t funded the full increase for statutory teacher benefits for years, leaving boards short by millions. The result is a structural deficit: chronic underfunding that leaves even well-managed boards teetering on insolvency. The Ford government, while claiming to increase spending, has in fact cut funding per student by $1,500 in real terms since 2018. This is the problem faced by with 40 percent of Ontario school boards.

    It is this manufactured insolvency that led Minister Calandra to get the most out of a useful crisis and put the four school boards under supervision and maybe next eliminate all school boards in the province. Here we see neoliberal austerity converging with authoritarian ambition. Underfunding is not a policy mistake; it is a deliberate strategy to weaken public education, undermine trust in democratic institutions, and prepare the ground for privatization schemes such as vouchers and charter schools. In this instance, the policy of underfunding is a way of weakening public education and then blaming whatever problems occur on education itself. This is gangster capitalism at work, cloaked in the language of fiscal responsibility but fueled by a pedagogy of dispossession.

    Eliminating Trustees, Silencing Communities

    If board takeovers were simply about money, supervisors would have been told to just find savings. Instead, elected trustees were suspended, their offices shuttered, their tiny stipends cut off, and their ability to communicate with constituents forbidden. Calandra’s power grab has all the elements of Elon Musk’s DOGE assaults in the US: move fast, offer absurd excuses, and blame the victims. The supervisors replacing trustees – accountants, lawyers, and former politicians with no background in education – now wield greater power than the elected community representatives they displaced.

    This substitution of technocrats for democratically accountable representatives is part of fascism’s pedagogy. It teaches the public to accept disenfranchisement as efficiency, to see obedience as order. Parents who ask why a program disappeared or why their child’s special education class has grown larger are now met with silence. In this vacuum, the lesson learned is that participation is futile and resistance meaningless – precisely the kind of civic numbing oligarchic fascism requires.

    Command, Control, and the Policing of Education

    Ford’s government frames these takeovers as a “broader rethink” of governance, but the real project is clear: the imposition of command and control over education. This move sends a strong message that it’s time to duck our heads and get back to basics: teaching “reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic and the whole shebang…” as Doug Ford complained last fall after teachers and students attended a rally in support of the Grassy Narrows First Nation and its efforts to deal with generations of mercury contamination in their area. He proclaimed, with no evidence, that the field trip was “indoctrination” by teachers because activists protesting Israeli genocide were present. Community members who supported an Indigenous curriculum, modern sexual education, or even school-name changes honoring anti-colonial figures are dismissed or painted as obstacles. The message from Ford and Calandra is blunt: stick to the basics – reading, writing, arithmetic – and leave politics at the door.

    Yet politics hangs over classrooms like a shroud. Despite his Captain Canada complaints about the Trump tariffs, Ford admires the President quick-marching America toward fascism. In an off-mic moment he commented recently: “Election day, was I happy this guy won? One hundred per cent I was.” It’s not the racism, the authoritarianism, the compulsive lying, the fraud, the sexual assaults that bothers the Premier; it’s that he got stiffed by his friend.

    Usurping trustees according to University of Ottawa professor Sachin Maharaj is just another step toward the Progressive Conservatives’ goal to “squelch the pipeline of more progressive leaders” like those gaining notice and experience attending to the needs of local schools.

    The banning of the Toronto Muslim Student Alliance’s screening of the film No Other Land, which documents Israeli settler violence, shows how censorship now masquerades as neutrality. This is the pedagogy of repression in action: narrowing what can be taught, remembered, or discussed until education is reduced to obedience training. What parades as a “broader rethink” is part of the authoritarian language of censorship and control. Like Trump’s attacks on “critical race theory” or his censorship of the Smithsonian, Ford’s moves are not about protecting students from politics but about protecting power from critique. The real issue here is constructing authoritarian policies that narrow critical thinking, teacher autonomy, essential funding, and knowledge that enable schools to both defend and facilitate democracy.

    For Ford and his adherents, the real issue is not that schools are failing but that they are public and have a vital role to play in a democracy. The real threat to Ford is that a democracy can only exist with informed citizens. Yet that is precisely the role education should assume.

    Bill 33: Codifying Authoritarianism

    The perversely named Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act extends this authoritarian logic. It allows the Minister to investigate boards or trustees on the mere suspicion they might act “inappropriately” or against the “public interest” – an elastic phrase that grants unchecked power. It checks much-maligned Diversity Equity and Inclusion efforts by refusing boards the right to name schools, forcing them to abandon diversity-affirming figures in favor of colonial or sanitized names. It mandates the reintroduction of police officers into schools, despite community opposition to surveillance and “unaccountable access to youth by cops.”

    At work here is the legacy of colonialism, a legacy that is terrified of diversity, of those deemed other, being able to narrate themselves. Viewed as threat, this anti-democratic language ultimately falls back on issues of control and security. This is one instance of how authoritarianism consolidates itself, not through tanks in the streets but through legislation that transforms education into an arm of the security state. Pedagogical spaces are militarized, memory is policed, and students are taught that surveillance is normal and dissent dangerous.

    Trumpasitic Authoritarianism

    Ford’s methods echo those of his southern counterpart. Just as Trump’s politics thrive on dispossession, erasure, and the weaponization of culture, Ford borrows from the same authoritarian playbook. The takeover of school boards not only tightens political control but also grants easy access to billions of dollars in public land, enriching developers tied to his government. Here, neoliberal profiteering fuses seamlessly with authoritarian centralization, an example of the merging of gangster capitalism with the pedagogy of repression.

    What do you expect from a government that makes decisions reflecting the arrogance of power? The Ford government cut Toronto city council in half soon after took office in 2018 and threatened to use a constitutional override, the Notwithstanding Clause, Section 33 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to overturn a Superior Court justice’s decision that the move was unconstitutional. Ford actually used the clause to push through a bill restricting election advertising in 2021 and again, pre-emptively, in 2022, buttressing back-to-work legislation against striking public workers, among the lowest paid in the province. He’s considering using it again after his decision to remove bike lanes from Toronto streets was overturned in court; power makes you petty.

    Democracy in the Smallest Details

    The takeover of Ontario school boards may appear less dramatic than Trump’s assaults on national institutions, but its implications are just as dire. Authoritarianism advances not only through spectacle but through the slow erosion of local democratic practices that once seemed secure.

    If fascism is a pedagogy of fear, amnesia, and conformity, then resistance must be a pedagogy of memory, solidarity, and imagination. To defend education is to defend democracy itself, for schools are not simply sites of instruction but laboratories of citizenship, places where young people learn what it means to speak, to question, to remember, and to act. When trustees are silenced, when curricula are censored, when communities are stripped of their voice, what is lost is not only oversight but the very possibility of democratic life.

    What is at stake, then, is far larger than budget shortfalls or bureaucratic reshuffling. It is whether the future will be governed by communities or dictated from above by those who mistake obedience for learning and silence for peace. Fascism thrives in these small erasures, in the details that seem technical until they harden into structures of domination.

    The lesson could not be clearer: democracy dies in increments, but it can also be rebuilt in increments – through collective memory, through civic courage, through the refusal to allow education to become a weapon of obedience. To resist the Ford government’s authoritarian incursions is not only to protect local school boards; it is to reclaim the very ground on which democratic hope stands. •

    Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website is henryagiroux.com.

    William Paul is editor of School Magazine website.

    This article first appeared at the Social Project Bullet

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