Chapter Update: Sept 30, 2025

This is the second post of The AAUPdate! If you are a member of our chapter, you’ll get these updates regularly in your inbox. If you’re not a member, you are invited to subscribe to receive these updates by email. Please also feel free to forward this along to colleagues!

AAUP@CU Chapter Committee Activities:

★ The Advocacy Committee has been working on the following projects and initiatives:

★ The Communications Committee is working with the Organizing Committee to establish a network of departmental liaisons who will forward news about AAUP events and the work of the chapter, as well as news items of particular significance to the campus, to faculty who are not AAUP members. The goal is to forge connections and solidarity among faculty across departments, divisions, and schools. The Communications Committee is now publishing The AAUPdate on a biweekly basis, and this will be a major source of items to be shared with non-AAUP faculty members.

★ In recent weeks, the Organizing Committee has continued organizing support for our chapter’s Syllabus Pledge for Academic Freedom, which now has over 115 signatories.  A recent Columbia Spectator article highlighted how faculty across our campuses are including the AAUP’s statement on academic freedom in their syllabi to define and affirm protections for teachers, students, and researchers to pursue free inquiry and address controversial topics without fear of censorship or retaliation. If you have not yet participated in the Syllabus Pledge, we encourage you to do so today! It remains especially relevant for faculty teaching fall courses who can update syllabi on CourseWorks, Principal Investigators running research labs, and instructors preparing spring course syllabi.

Alongside the Communications Committee, the Organizing Committee is working to build a structure of departmental liaisons to help expand awareness of AAUP actions and resources, and to grow our organizational power. If you'd like to get involved as a liaison for your department, please contact us at [email protected]. 

★ The University Senate Committee invites all chapter members to register for and attend Friday’s first plenary of the year (October 3). Please also add the following Fall dates for Senate plenaries to your calendar: October 24, November 21, and December 12. 

★ The Coalitions Committee invites you to please save the following date: October 28, 6:30-8:30pm. Our chapter is a founding member of the NY Metro Coalition for Higher Ed. Most of the member organizations are NY regional higher education unions – PSC (AFT), AAUP, and UAW locals and chapters.  We are convening a forum and workshop called “Hands Off Higher Ed: Building Power to Defend our Research, Community, and Freedoms.” Speakers will focus on the struggles on and off our campuses to defend education, students and faculty in these perilous times. There will be ample time for breakouts and conversation. This will be an excellent opportunity to meet activist faculty from other universities in the Metro area. The location is NYU’s Cantor Center, 36 E. 8th St (2nd floor).

★ The Events Committee organized an immensely inspiring and energizing faculty forum on September 19th: “Our Transformed University.” The full remarks of all speakers, while excellent, would be too long to include in this newsletter. So, we include just some short “highlight” sentences from each of the speakers, appended at the bottom of this communication below.

Relevant News & Links:

Olinto announces new faculty committees focused on academic freedom and ‘regional review’ (Spectator)

Anonymous graduate student worker group files unfair labor practice charge against SWC-UAW (Spectator)

Federal judge orders 500 health science grants at UCLA restored, rebuffing Trump’s suspensions (Cal Matters)

Struggles for free speech on campus (NY Times)

A federal judge rules in the case of AAUP v. Rubio (Knight Institute)

Upcoming Events:

Monday October 27, 6:30pm: Please join the Organizing Committee for a screening of American Agitators at the Lee Bollinger Forum (corner of 125th and Broadway). The documentary traces the enduring legacy of Fred Ross, one of the most successful organizers of his generation, who mentored the legendary leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta as they built the United Farm Workers. Get your free tickets here

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Highlights from “OUR TRANSFORMED UNIVERSITY: Academic Freedom and Shared Governance at Columbia. Taking Stock and Next Steps” (September 19, 2025). A highlights video will be made available to chapter members soon – details to follow in the next AAUPdate.

Selections from Rosalind Morris:

“Our title, ‘Our Transformed University,’ indexes the profound changes that have occurred over the last two years, in rapid succession, often without full disclosure or explanation.  They are the result of decisions taken and policies implemented at the highest level of our institution—by the Board of Trustees and the Office of the President or the Provost—in response to various governmental and eternal social pressures, but with little representative input on the part of our faculty. Listening sessions with appointed individuals, sometimes bound by confidentiality have increasingly come to substitute for accountable and representative faculty participation in governance.

A recent survey of Columbia AAUP’s members indicates that more than 73% of responding faculty have felt compelled to alter their speech or classroom practice over the last 18 months.  At the same time, many people feel they do not know what it is they are supposed to refrain from doing, and a cloak of self-censorship has fallen upon us.

Each time an institution bends or bows, a principle of democratic life is surrendered, a community excluded, a domain of knowledge shuttered.  If this continues, the mission of the university will be transformed from the site of independent research, teaching, and learning into an ideological vehicle of a centralizing state at war against immigrants, the homeless, and the poor of the world, against the climate and our shared planet.” 

Selections from Joseph Slaughter:

“I want to highlight recent statutory changes enacted quietly and unilaterally by the Board of Trustees. These revisions, while largely unannounced, carry broad implications for shared governance and for the protection of free speech at Columbia. Writing and revising Rules is laborious. It requires months of debate and discussion within the Rules committee; multiple town halls; surveys and other feedback mechanisms; proposals brought to the full Senate; deliberation at two separate plenary sessions; a Senate vote; and finally, approval by the Trustees.

It should be obvious that this community-based process is not how recent changes to the Statues by the Trustees were made.

The Board of Trustees has now unilaterally rewritten portions of the Statutes—without community deliberation and debate. 

Their changes are substantive. Among other things, they:

1.      Obviate the Senate Rules Committee.

2.      Narrow the University’s long-standing commitment to free speech and inquiry, and

3.      Severely weaken the statutory authority of the Senate as both an institutional partner and an embodiment of shared governance.”

Selections from David Pozen:

Dave Pozen spoke on the legal and institutional implications of recent decisions by the university leadership. He noted that "For all the recent criticism of both DEI and administrative bloat at universities, it is rather striking that no one driving the deal with the federal government seems to have objected to the Office of Institutional Equity's rapid rise into a bureaucratic leviathan." He also compared  "Top-down changes to the disciplinary process at Columbia” to “democratic democratic backsliding in the broader polity” and expressed concern about the rise of "surveillance culture" on campus.

Selections from Marianne Hirsch:

Marianne Hirsch spoke on the university leadership’s endorsement of the narrative that Columbia is a hotbed of antisemitism and reviewed the series of measures taken in response to this claim. She highlighted the decision, in March  2025, to incorporate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism as “guidance to determine evidence of discriminatory intent by the Office of Institutional Equity.” This expansive yet vague IHRA definition, she argued, “conflates antisemitism, as anti-Jewish hatred, with criticism of the state of Israel and its action.” She noted  that “Among 11 examples included with the IHRA definition, 7 mention Israel in ways that gives it a kind of airtight immunity from critique—what the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir has called “Israel’s discursive iron dome.” As possible actions to combat the fear and negative public image created by vague accusations of antisemitism, she proposed a letter to Claire Shipman calling for the abandonment of the IHRA definition, the adoption of an alternate definition, and the abandonment of  trainings specifically focused on antisemitism rather than all forms of discrimination.

Selections from Joachim Frank:

“My outrage about daily irrational and lawless executive orders from the president and the extraordinary viciousness and cruelty of his regime is mixed with disappointment at the failure of people in prominent positions to stand up, with bewilderment at the normalization of lawlessness by the media, with anger at the complicity, gross opportunism and short-sightedness of business leaders, and with sadness to see the wholesale caving of institutions I have held in high respect.

Specifically, as a scientist working at Columbia Medical Center in the biomedical field since 2008, who has benefited from consistent generous funding by NIH and NSF over decades, I’m alarmed by the severe funding cuts, and the elimination of entire programs, such as cancer research and infectious diseases, vital to human health.

And, talking about programs and initiatives outside of the biomedical field, it is an absolute tragedy that the actions of the Trump regime will have very long-lasting effects on this planet as all efforts to deal with the most pressing problems – global warming, the threat to biodiversity, and pollution of land, the oceans and our atmosphere – are being dismantled.

I conclude by saying on a more positive note that fascism, as all totalitarian regimes, is made possible not by decrees and threats of the potentates but by fear, opportunism and a succession of capitulations by their subjects.  Each capitulation we can avoid or stop is a gain toward the recovery of a sane world.”

Selections from Shana Redmond:

“Today, fear is rampant, resources have disappeared, and the culture is toxic. Even DEI—an anemic form of amends that was never up to the task of repair or redistribution—has now been vanquished for the sake of political expediency and in service of a long civilizational project. By their own admission, this is what the administration has long endeavored to realize and the federal government has given them plenty of incentive and cover to follow through. It’s clear that the university is not following the White House—it is walking beside it, hand in hand.

This may cause some bit of crisis for those who’ve otherwise identified with this institution—those who have been honored by the structure and comfortable in its elite milieu. For me and so many others, this is not a new crisis but rather the reorganization of terrifyingly familiar systems of extraction, dispossession, and ferocious violence. This moment is not simply another second red scare in which the authoritarian government and its universities seek to bring thought and dissent to heel (though it is that); it is also another summer of 1919, another depression, another COINTELPRO, another Soweto.

The university administration has not told us to change our syllabi but has removed courses from offer and threatened faculty with discipline for having taught certain books or authors; they have not told us to change our speech in class but have said, in so many words, that extemporaneous thought relating to current issues should be avoided. One wonders how close to the ground these administrators are when they request that their faculty and students abandon their mandate to live and think in the world. Who have they been sent to serve?”