Despite discouraging federal policy developments, unions remain well-positioned to protect workers and beat back Trumpism.
Trump’s recent attacks on the judiciary are best understood as an effort to lay the groundwork for a gradual shift in public opinion — to normalize the idea that defying court orders is not only acceptable but maybe even expected among his base.
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.
If endowments are fundamentally creatures of restriction, they are also in smaller measure creatures of interpretation and discretion. Universities should use what flexibility they do have to stand up for their programs, employees, and students – for the core constituents in a mission-driven environment – in this time of unprecedented assault.
In attempting to fill the policy voids created by recent federal retreat, local governments face a significant constraint: the increasing use of state and federal preemption. To confront this challenge, local elected officials and municipal attorneys need to adopt a movement-oriented approach to governing and municipal law.
The online targeting and harassment of the LPE Project’s Deputy Director, Helyeh Doutaghi, is part of a broader environment of speech repression, particularly of anti-war and pro-Palestinian views.
Federal courts have an important role to play in enforcing laws against powerful figures who defy them. But the options available to federal courts are simultaneously too limited, weak, and dangerous for us to rely on them to the exclusion of everything else.
Given the anti-democratic corporate form of all private and many public universities, appeals to “shared governance” cannot succeed in wresting power from the academy’s autocrats. Instead, American universities must be reincorporated in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism.
When it’s time to rebuild from the wreckage of the Trump-Musk rampage, the left may have the opportunity to implement a truly transformative agenda. However, unless we have relatively detailed proposals ready in advance, we will lose out to those who merely want to reproduce what came before.
The Trump coalition is no monolith. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Lindsay Owens, David Austin Walsh, Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Todd Tucker, and Dessie Zagorcheva reflect on the possibility of exploiting fissures on the right.
Trumpist unity is largely a fiction conjured by the Democratic Party in a naïve attempt at “defending democracy.” A robust opposition must seek and target wedges within the Trump coalition, pitting conservatism’s component parts against one another.
Tenant unions, unlike labor unions, operate without extensive federal, state, or local legislative schemes governing their form and behavior. This does not mean, however, that they are unaffected by the law. By looking at tenant unions at work in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York City, we can see the different ways in which law influences their form, tactics, and strategies to scale advocacy.
An increasing number of universities want to restrict their leaders from speaking about issues of public concern. This push for “neutrality” is a key piece of a broader conservative campaign to suppress speech that conservatives don’t like. It also offers a lesson about what we can expect of powerful institutions in the second Trump era.
Landlords wield significant power over tenants — including the power to set prices, surveil, neglect, harass, and evict — while legal processes offer little to tenants in terms of protection or means of redress when their rights are violated. Withholding rent in response to mistreatment is one righteous way of resisting such domination.
Far from posing a threat to academic freedom, DEI Statements offer a common-sense tool to obtain information intrinsic to faculty merit.
