Charmaine Chua

Court Blocks Trump’s Attempt to Gain Leverage and Political Control Over University of California System - Democracy Forward

We won. Every union representing workers at the University of California sued the Trump administration in September. Today, judge Rita Lin issued a preliminary injunction barring Trump’s attempts to extort political leverage from public higher education. democracyforward.org/updates/cour...

Debt Trap Nation -- a very powerful book.

Come and see @kbrickell.bsky.social and Mel Nowicki discuss the book on the 22nd of October (4-6pm)

Dept of Geography, Cambridge

Bali also notes that while OCR cases often end in voluntary resolutions, it is ONLY in cases of shared ancestry around allegations of antisemitism that such resolutions include mandatory trainings (eg around the IHRA definition)& mandatory reporting by campus police abt such discrimination.

Bali notes the reputational harm that arises even when complaints are unfounded are hard to shake: individuals have no straightforward way to respond once it moves to the OCR level. These harms prevent contingent faculty from getting jobs, regardless of the strength of evidence in such complaints.

None such complaints of anti-semitism require a burden of evidence: in one case at Cornell, an investigation was filed on a single paragraph alleging that a professor “has spread so much hate & lies; he is literally brain washing students to hate & discriminate towards a certain religion-Jews.”

2) pro-Israel advocacy that naturalized the conflation of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism. In contrast, complaints around anti-Muslim discrimination were chilled. And indeed, often sharing an opinion emerging FROM one’s Muslim or ME identity was conflated with a form of anti-Semitic discrimination.

Bali notes that this increase in alleged cases of antisemitism discrimination is the result of 1) advocacy within the administration during the Obama and Biden years to incorporate anti-semitism into Title VI investigations through shared ancestry, and

The Rising Threat of Antisemitism Investigations 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…

An LPE blog post by Darryl Li reports on these findings here: lpeproject.org/blog/the-ris...

More antisemitism investigations were opened in the 2 months following Oct 7 2023 (25 in total) than ALL previous years COMBINED. In 2024 that figure climbed to 38 and 2025 promises another record breaking year.

MESA has been trying to take protective action By undertaking data collection to shed light on what they’ve been seeing in attacks on academic freedom across the country. Here’s what they’ve found:

Asli Bali speaks on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association and as a public international law scholar. MESA scholars have been in the cross hairs across the country — and OCR actions have undermined their academic freedom & freedom of speech.

Soucek notes that one fight faculty should and must have now is to seize the opportunity to insist on robust revisions to faculty disciplinary procedures— ones that go beyond and guarantee more protections that existing constitutional protections do.

But we also have to look inward at the UC itself. it is not beyond possibility that files containing complaints made against faculty about the content taught in classrooms can be used against faculty if the UC chooses to go against principles of academic freedom to dismiss university workers.

The lawsuits that @aaup.org and CUCFA have filed are crucial ways to take a proactive stance against the Trump administration. Lawsuits like AAUP v Rubio have been successful so far and are needed to stop the improper purposes that the Trump admin has been committing

Brian Soucek, constitutional law scholar, notes that we know for a fact that the UC released far more names than 160 at Berkeley - names were also released on many other UC campuses but did not choose to disclose this fact to their faculty, students and staff.

Releasing these names endangers members of the university community.The UC knows that, and Lhamon notes, “I would want the university to stand for justice”

The UC is aware that releasing PII could endanger faculty students and staff under current conditions - where non citizens have been deported as violations of their first amendment right.

Lhamon notes, however, that the UC requested to anonymized names, and the Trump administration denied this request. The UC chose not to contest this denial. “That choice reflects an assessment of litigation risk, not a decision to fulfill a mandatory legal requirement”

“The OCR cannot do its job of ensuring that universities are responding adequately to alleged discrimination without releasing this information to the federal government”

Lhamon notes that while none of this is comforting, it is the law. WRT the Berkeley situation, Lhamon notes that typically, OCR requests require the university to turn over active case files. The OCR is usually looking to see how the university responds to cases of alleged discrimination

FERPA also permits access to PII, and prior consent is not required to access this information. While at the OCR, Lhamon issued a note that the OCR does not generally disclose PII to other govt entities unless it relates to other civil rights violations.

The release of PII to the OCR is not unusual but is regular; Lhamon has seen many such investigations in her 8 years in office in order to investigate discrimination over national origin.

Catherine Lhamon served as the asst secretary of civil rights under the Biden and Obama administrations. The Office of Civil Rights, she notes, has a statutory and regulatory right and authority to receive personally identifying information (PII) from universities to investigate title vi violations

Because the UC has been negotiating behind closed doors, “It is by no means outside the realm of possibility that named individuals could get used as bargaining chips in these negotiations” and their release is imbricated in the attack on public higher education.

Zoe Hamsted, chair of legal affairs at the Council of UC Faculty Associations, begins by contextualizing the moment. No faculty at the UC has seen the demand letter the Trump admin sent to the UC regents; despite multiple PRRs, admin will not release the scope of demands made on the UC

The Berkeley Faculty Association is currently running an event featuring about the UC’s release of 160 names of faculty, staff and students to the Trump administration’s OCR. Three lawyers - Catherine E. Lhamon, Brian Soucek, and Asli Bali will speak. I’ll be live-tweeting key moments.

To inflict the worst pain imaginable on thousands of people, and then to tell us that we are wrong to feel outraged—it’s a murderous nihilism that shakes the moral foundation of the entire world. It’s unbearable.

Trump Cuts to Foreign Aid Leave Food Destined for Desperate Millions Rotting in Storage | Common Dreams Millions of lives hang in the balance as $98 million worth of food aid sits unused in warehouses, set to expire. Childre

66,000 tons of food are rotting away in USAID warehouses thanks to Trump and DOGE.

That's enough food to feed more than a million people in the world's poorest countries for three months — including over 480,000 kids.

In what world is starving children "efficient"?

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Back at you, David.