As the Trump administration attempts to suppress critical inquiry and operate outside of conventional legal boundaries, the work of LPE scholars, organizers, and practitioners has never been more important. Join us in building the Association of Law and Political Economy (ALPE), a new membership-based organization for LPE work.
In the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the Trump administration included a brilliant bit of faux-populism: a five-year tuition freeze. The proposal creates the illusion that the right is taking decisive action to address affordability, while obfuscating its larger plan to abandon higher education as a public good. To prevent MAGA from outflanking and corrupting a popular left position, we must embrace ambitious solutions that will actually address the high cost of attending college.
While legal clinics have long been vulnerable to pressure from outside forces, recent attacks by the federal government represent an alarming new level of interference. Protecting clinical work now requires not only legal and institutional defenses, but collective preparation and solidarity across the profession.
Even as the Trump administration seeks to dismantle DEI in the name of “merit,” the law it distorts still harbors possibilities for resistance. Title VII prohibits retaliation against employees who oppose discrimination, and workers purged for their past DEI efforts should consider pursuing retaliation claims against their employers. Such lawsuits would raise the costs of anticipatory capitulation, while also providing some measure of relief to workers already harmed.
By weaponizing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Trump administration is using antidiscrimination law to protect privilege and entrench inequality. Yet rather than uniting to resist these sham investigations, college and university leaders have acted in isolation, allowing fear and fragmentation to erode the principles at the heart of higher education.
Recent authoritarian attacks on higher education mark a significant shift from the neoliberal era, which celebrated institutional independence from the state, the role of education in boosting worker productivity, and the value of research in driving profitable innovation. However, there are key continuities between the two periods. The neoliberal era laid the groundwork for today’s authoritarian turn by making public institutions increasingly reliant on federal funding, dismantling independent state planning boards, and deepening inequality within the higher education system.
In the fall of 2023, the Department of Education launched more antisemitism investigations into colleges and universities than in all previous years combined. This record was surpassed in 2024 and is on track to be broken again in 2025. While the Biden administration wielded these investigations as a cudgel to crush student-led protests in support of Palestine, Trump has turned them into a battering ram in his attempt to remake American higher education.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Today, however, it has become one of the most powerful forces against desegregation. How did this vertigo-inducing inversion come about? And how might we prevent similar civil rights perversions in the future?
Despite a recent surge in campus organizing, tenured faculty at private universities haven’t unionized. Why is this? The conventional answer is that the Supreme Court said they can’t. Fortunately, the conventional answer is wrong.
According to President Trump, Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore.” Nor are Jewish Americans who vote for the Democratic Party. Nor are Jewish college students who oppose the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza. In making these claims, Trump and his administration are attempting to reshape the contours of Jewish identity, dividing “real Jews” and “good Jews” from “Un-Jews” and “bad Jews.” And they are increasingly using law and economic power to materialize these distinctions.
Thomas Emerson is often remembered as a leading scholar of the First Amendment, but his deeper legacy lies in his defiant stand against political repression during the Second Red Scare. Looking back on his life, we can see valuable lessons about how to navigate the treacherous waters of political persecution and rising authoritarianism.
In September 2024, an anonymous donor gifted $100 million to the University of Chicago to promote free speech. A closer look at dark money’s role in manufacturing campus free speech crises reminds us to be highly skeptical of understandings of campus speech funded by elite interests, especially when they replace institutional deliberation with a legalistic absolutism that leaves hierarchies of wealth and power unchallenged.
Universities’ decisions in dealing with the 2008 financial crisis laid the foundation for the current financial and social crisis in higher education.
When students, staff, or faculty are accused of being associated or “aligned” with terrorist organizations, universities may be pressed to take immediate and harsh action, if only to quell media attention and appear compliant with this lawless Administration’s wishes. Universities must prepare for this possibility, learn about the underlying legal frameworks, and refuse to operate on the basis of fear rather than legal necessity or moral principle.
Recent executive orders have targeted federal grant funding, trans students, non-citizen students, DEI efforts, and pro-Palestinian activism. Eight legal experts explain what these orders purport to require, analyze what they actually require, and assess how colleges and universities ought to respond.
