Last week, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) filed a lawsuit to “challenges the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented effort to overpower a university’s academic autonomy and control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students.”
The lawsuit names the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, the US General Services Administration, and various officials of these agencies as defendants.
The lawsuit was filed in the wake of the Trump administration putting an “existential gun to the head” of Columbia University, with its withdrawal of $400 million of federal funding for the university and its various demands on the university.
It says:
Although Defendants purport to be enforcing Title VI, the anti-discrimination law covering institutions that receive federal funds, their disregard for the statute’s requirements belie that claim. Under Title VI, the government may terminate funding for a recipient only after complying with specific statutory and regulatory requirements: making an effort to obtain voluntary compliance and determining that voluntary compliance is impossible; giving notice to both the university and Congress; providing a hearing for the university; and waiting a specified amount of time. These restrictions exist precisely because Congress recognized that in a system where institutions depend on federal funds, letting federal agencies withhold funding cavalierly would give them dangerously broad power.
Defendants did not follow any of these required steps here. Instead, Defendants summarily terminated $400 million in federal grants and contracts and is threatening to withhold billions more unless Columbia agrees to “play ball” by acceding to the Trump administration’s demands. Far from enforcing this civil rights statute, the Trump administration has instead weaponized Title VI, using the threat of massive and indiscriminate funding cuts as a cudgel to coerce universities into policing free speech and academic inquiry…
Robust debate and academic freedom are central to America’s exceptional success as both a democracy and a generator of useful ideas. Tolerating the Trump administration’s actions here risks transforming institutions of higher learning, private or public, into servile arms of the government, advancing only the political preferences of the latest president in order to secure federal funding. That is a dangerous proposition and one that Congress anticipated by limiting any administration’s ability to cancel funding for noncompliance with Title VI. Absent relief, Defendants’ actions will continue to damage AAUP, AFT, and their members and infringe on their free speech and academic freedom rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
You can read the whole lawsuit here.
