Tag: unprecedented

  • Trump’s unprecedented assault on higher education

    Trump’s unprecedented assault on higher education

    Debates around academic freedom and freedom of speech in UK higher education have often revolved around a small number of high-profile cases involving individuals with views that can cause offense – like those of Kathleen Stock or David Miller.

    Following the recent fine levied by the Office for Students (OfS) against the University of Sussex, the regulator has written to universities to urge them to focus on these areas.

    It seems like attention will remain firmly fixed on the shades of difference in the tensions inherent in the law, institutional inclusion policies, and the various framings of academic freedom.

    These are important questions on serious issues and we collectively need to explore them in productive ways. But debating them now to the exclusion of all else – at this moment in global history – is a vast mistake with consequences that will be felt for generations.

    Those consequences will be felt not only by academics researching in controversial areas, but they will be felt by members of the public around the world.

    Trump uprising

    In the short period since Donald Trump was returned to the US presidency, we have seen an assault on the independence of the academy that is unprecedented in scale or speed.

    The Trump government opened by issuing a series of shocking demands to Columbia University while threatening $400 million in federal grants – this has now mounted to hundreds of millions more in cuts.

    What does this mean? Every grant – every grant – held by researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health has been frozen or cancelled. All of them.

    The Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department has been taken into “receivership”, which is a polite way of saying that outspoken academic departments now are to be led only by professors approved by the Trump government.

    Columbia leadership has been made to hire a private security force with arrest powers. Disciplinary matters are to be investigated and dealt with by the university’s president, attacking a principle of collective governance that has grown and developed over a millennium.

    And most shockingly, students like Mahmoud Khalil are being arrested and transported without due process on the basis of their alleged political speech and activities: without judges, lawyers, trials, or charges. There can be no more clear violation of academic freedom than this.

    While Columbia has nominally been threatened because of its approach to tackling alleged antisemitism on campus, other universities are also in serious trouble. The University of Maine system has had funding withheld because the governor of Maine has contested Trump’s anti-transgender executive orders.

    Trump’s own alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has been hit with threats of $175 million in cuts allegedly because they permitted a transgender woman to compete in swimming – in 2022.

    The Johns Hopkins University – one of the world’s leading universities, especially for medical research – has been hit hard by the unprecedented dismantling of USAID, with the university shedding more than 2,200 jobs around the world in the face of $800 million in cuts.

    Freedom fails

    As the weeks go by, news breaks almost daily with stories about further cuts and threats.

    We have to be clear that we are in a new world now. These attacks on the US academy will have two global effects that should be very worrying to everyone.

    First, these actions effectively dismantle the notion of academic freedom worldwide. If the wealthiest, most prestigious, and most influential universities on the planet can be cowed in two weeks, no other university will see themselves as able to resist any demand from Trump – or any other authoritarian leader.

    The current wave of demands will lead to further restrictions and policing, especially now that Trump has seen how easy it was to roll powerful institutions. Trump learned from autocrats like Orban. This is not a problem exclusive to the United States and we need to address it from a global perspective.

    Second, the chilling effect of these actions on research and teaching will have dramatic, complex, and far-reaching consequences that we will not fully understand for decades.

    Federal grant recipients have been instructed to remove mentions of words like “women”, which will have an almost-inconceivable impact on research on topics like cancer, childbirth, and domestic violence. Colleagues in the US tell me about departments in total chaos – lab cultures spoiling in refrigerators, clinical trial patients going without medication or observation, and doctoral funding wiped away mid-project.

    The impact on climate science, on public health, on any number of existential areas of research will be incalculable. These are not problems that can be solved by a future administration – even if we act right now, we will feel the damage of the Trump’s war on universities for decades to come. What may have seemed inconceivable two months ago has happened.

    There are some glimmers of resistance in the US – and there certainly are many brave colleagues and students organizing directly against Trump and the shameful collaboration of university leaders.

    In the UK, we need to learn from the failures of the US academy and understand that Trump’s authoritarianism will affect us too.

    We have to learn that we cannot trust politicians, regulators, or the state to respect the logic of academic freedom. We must protect staff and students by warning against travel to the United States. We must work together urgently to decentralize power in universities so that dictators like Trump cannot pressure individual university leaders.

    While institutional policies will not stop fascism, we must see our efforts as an attempt to delay and mitigate the impact as much as we can manage. While we should work with the government and unions, protest, write letters, and shout, we should also be clear-eyed that we cannot rely on the systems and institutions that failed to prevent the return of fascism.

    Engage in direct action. We must learn from activists and movements that have been fighting for a long time – use what power you have. Protect your most vulnerable colleagues and students. Fascism requires a politics of helplessness and fear. Respond with care and courage. Things will get worse before they get better.

    Source link

  • Supreme Court must halt unprecedented TikTok ban to allow review, FIRE argues in new brief to high court

    Supreme Court must halt unprecedented TikTok ban to allow review, FIRE argues in new brief to high court

    Today, FIRE filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in support of TikTok’s emergency application for an injunction pending review of a law that would force it to shut down absent divestiture of Chinese ownership. The Summary of Argument from the brief, on which FIRE is joined by the Institute for Justice and Reason Foundation, explains the law’s grave threat to free speech. 

    The nationwide ban on TikTok is the first time in history our government has proposed — or a court approved — prohibiting an entire medium of communications. The law imposes a prior restraint, and restricts speech based on both its content and viewpoint. As such, if not unconstitutional per se, it should be subject to the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny. Given the grave consequences, both for free speech doctrine and for the 170 million Americans who use TikTok to communicate with one another, this Court should at least hit the “pause button” before allowing such a drastic policy to go into effect.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit correctly recognized the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, (“the Act”) as a direct regulation of speech. Exercising original and exclusive jurisdiction over TikTok’s constitutional challenge, the court held the Act “implicates the First Amendment and is subject to heightened scrutiny,” and assumed but did not decide strict scrutiny was warranted. . However, the court held the Act “clears this high bar,” granting deference to the government’s characterization of alleged national security concerns to conclude the Act was “carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the [People’s Republic of China].”

    Although the appellate panel was correct that the Act should be subject to the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny, it failed to actually hold the government to its burden of proof, and deferred too readily to unsupported assertions of a national security threat.

    Congress has not met the heavy constitutional burden the First Amendment demands when regulating speech, let alone banning an entire expressive platform. No published legislative findings or other official public records attempt to explain or substantiate why the Act’s severe encroachment on millions of Americans’ right to speak and to receive information is necessary to address a real and serious problem. Nor was there any showing the ban would effectively address the asserted risks.

    The proffered evidence of the law’s purpose reveals illegitimate intent to suppress disfavored speech and generalized concerns about data privacy and national security. These concerns fall far short of satisfying strict scrutiny, and the court’s extreme deference to governmental conjecture is unwarranted, misguided, and dangerous. Nor is the Act narrowly tailored to any compelling or substantial government interest, as the First Amendment requires.

    Constitutional intrusions of this unprecedented magnitude demand this Court’s full consideration before they take effect. This Court should grant Petitioners’ emergency application for an injunction pending review.

    Source link