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Higher Education

FSU Students Crash President McCullough’s Ice Cream Social

April 6, 2025 Fight Back! News. , , ,
Tallahassee, FL – On Thursday, April 3, Students for a Democratic Society crashed the FSU president’s ice cream social, demanding answers about the university's subservience to President Trump’s and Governor Desantis’ attacks on DEI initiatives and free speech. Four members of SDS approached President Richard McCullough with a banner reading “Fight Trump and the GOP agenda! Stand with Palestine! Stop attacks on immigrants! Defend women’s and LGBTQ+ rights!” After waiting in line for ice cream, SDS member JJ Glueck was refused service by McCullough. The president hid behind student volunteers upon seeing SDS.

Student Debtors Under Attack, Organize For Free Education For All

April 1, 2025 Debt Collective, Popular Resistance. , , ,
In recent days, the Trump administration issued an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. Legally, this cannot be done without Congress, but in practice, this means most of the staff was simply fired. We talked a little bit about what that means for student debtors in this Twitter thread. In short, this makes the student debt crisis much worse. Shortly after that, Trump ordered the entire federal student debt portfolio — all $1.7 trillion — to be moved from the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration (SBA). The Small Business Administration is another agency within the federal government.

The Urgency Of Fighting For Our Rights While We Can

March 31, 2025 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , , , , ,
The repression of people who show support for Palestinian liberation has escalated. The Trump administration is using an antiquated immigration law and executive orders to target student activists, threatening them with deportation, and has gone so far as to kidnap students and professors. Clearing the FOG speaks with a Cornell University PhD student, Sriram Parasurama, who was suspended for participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations and is currently a plaintiff in a case challenging two of President Trump's executive orders and with Chip Gibbons, a lawyer with Defending Rights and Dissent and the author of an upcoming book on the FBI, surveillance and the national security state. Both explain the urgency of fighting violations of our Constitutional rights and how to do that, as well as the implications of not taking action.

Tufts Student Targeted By DHS Wrote Suspiciously Pro-Humanity Op-Ed

March 29, 2025 Ari Paul, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , , , ,
The journalism world has been reeling from news that a BBC correspondent was deported from Turkey, after he was “covering the antigovernment protests in the country” and was “detained and labeled ‘a threat to public order’” (New York Times, 3/27/25). Turkey has an abysmal reputation for press freedom (CPJ, 2/13/24; European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, 10/5/23), placing 158th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders index, so as distressing as this news is, it’s in character for a country many think of as illiberal and authoritarian (Guardian, 6/9/13; HRW, 1/29/15). Journalists have been arrested in the latest unrest in Turkey (AP, 3/24/25).

Explainer: The Lawsuits Aiming To Stop Trump’s Assault On Free Speech

March 28, 2025 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
According to a tracker developed by Just Security, there have been at least 146 legal challenges to Trump administration actions since he took office. Several of those have dealt with the White House’s war on Palestine activists. In recent weeks, students, faculty, and legal organizations have launched multiple lawsuits aimed at halting the Trump administration’s draconian crackdown on Palestinian protesters and holding universities accountable for their complicity. Here are some of the legal efforts that we’ve seen so far.

What We Know About The Tufts University Student Kidnapped By ICE

March 27, 2025 Alysha Palumbo, NBC Boston. , , , , ,
A Tufts University student is being held at an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, and there are growing questions about how she was taken into custody and the timeline of sending her out of state. One major issue is whether federal authorities defied the court order to keep Rumeysa Ozturk in Massachusetts, as it was issued just hours after her arrest Tuesday night. Video shows Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student from Turkey, screaming as plain-clothes agents surrounded her and grabbed her on a Somerville sidewalk just off campus before taking her away.

Swarthmore Students Punished For Gaza Protests

March 27, 2025 Betsey Piette, Workers World. , , , , , , ,
Swarthmore College issued sanctions on March 6 against 15 students for participating in anti-genocide activism for Palestinians in Gaza. Their peaceful demonstrations of solidarity with Gaza occurred between October 2023 and March 2024. The college in Media, Pennsylvania, is located outside of Philadelphia. The most extreme sanctions are aimed against one graduating senior who was suspended, nine who received one-semester probation and one who received a two-semester probation. The second-semester senior set to graduate was suspended on the charge of “assault” for the use of a megaphone indoors.

Chris Hedges: Surrendering To Authoritarianism

March 25, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , ,
I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

The Chris Hedges Report: America’s Constitutional Crisis

March 20, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , , , ,
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and detention in a Louisiana ICE facility is a harbinger for a new authoritarian era of the United States. Khalil’s arrest, the capitulation of Columbia University against dissent and protest by its own students and the Trump administration’s threat of stripping the university of $400 million in grants if it does not meet its requests is just one place where the tentacles of fascism tighten their grip. Katherine Franke, a former law school professor at Columbia, is on the front lines of this assault. Her support for student protests and her condemnation of the university for not addressing the harassment of pro-Palestinian students has earned what she called, “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.”

Right To Free Speech Curtailed On Cornell Campus

March 19, 2025 Katie Church, Danny Creamer and Josh Dolan, Popular Resistance. , , , , ,
On March 10, we as members of the Ithaca community joined with Cornell students and allies to exercise our First Amendment right to protest on behalf of the Palestinians in Gaza, who are the victims of genocide at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces. We and multiple students were arrested on the orders of Cornell’s president, self-proclaimed 1st Amendment champion Michael Kotlikoff. His office had invited a panel comprised of war criminals and genocide enablers from the US and Israeli government, with a token former Palestinian government official who had a <25% approval rating by Palestinians, under the guise of discussing "pathways to peace".

Brown University Professor Deported To Lebanon

March 18, 2025 News Desk, The Cradle. , , , , ,
Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese physician and assistant professor at Brown University in the US, was deported to Lebanon over the weekend despite holding a valid US work visa and a federal judge’s order temporarily blocking her removal. Her detention began Thursday at Boston Logan International Airport following a trip to Lebanon. Alawieh, 34, had traveled to Lebanon for a family visit, spending two weeks with her parents. Upon returning to the US on 13 March 2025, she was surprised to be detained by immigration authorities at Boston Logan International Airport.

Columbia Student Workers Rally Against Expulsions And Arrests

March 16, 2025 Olivia Wood, Left Voice. , , , , , ,
It’s been an intense and infuriating couple of weeks at Columbia University. Students expelled. Visas revoked. $400 million in funding held hostage by the federal government. An escalation, when Mahmoud Khalil was told his green card was suspended before being arrested by government agents from the lobby of his apartment building in the middle of the night. And most recently, Thursday night, the announcement that 22 students and recent graduates had been suspended, expelled, or had their diplomas revoked. One of the expelled students is Grant Miner, the president of the Student Workers of Columbia.

Suspended For Pro-Palestine Speech

March 14, 2025 Helyeh Doutaghi, Mondoweiss. , , , ,
My name is Helyeh Doutaghi. I am a scholar of international law and geopolitical economy. My research engages with Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), postcolonial critiques of law, and the global political economy of sanctions. I have specifically examined the mechanisms and consequences of economic warfare on Iran, as well as the forms of knowledge produced in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to obscure and shield U.S. military operations from accountability. On October 1, 2023, I was appointed Deputy Director of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project and joined the team.

60 Universities Under Investigation Over Pro-Palestine Sentiments

March 13, 2025 Press TV, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , , , ,
The US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) said it is investigating 60 universities for anti-Semitism, and that they are receiving warnings due to allegedly not protecting Jewish students during mass anti-Israel rallies in American universities and colleges. “The Department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless anti-Semitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year. University leaders must do better,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Columbia University’s Nazi Tradition

March 10, 2025 David Swanson, World Beyond War. , , , , , , , ,
According to Columbia Magazine, published by Columbia University’s Office of Alumni and Development, but ultimately named for a brutal imperialist mercenary, in 1933 while Nazis in Germany were burning books by Jews, Columbia’s president — and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient — Nicholas Murray Butler “welcomed Hans Luther, the German ambassador to the United States, to Morningside Heights, insisting that he be accorded ‘the greatest courtesy and respect.'” Columbia’s Daily Spectator newspaper “denounced what it saw as Butler’s courtship of the German government and its universities.”
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