How the Right’s War on Academic Freedom Hides a Darker Mission

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Welcome to Assembly Required.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

The United States has long been a global leader in higher education.

Our universities, from Ivy League institutions to land-grant universities to HBCUs and HSIs, welcome students from all over the world and host paradigm-altering research that brings together the brightest minds.

For centuries, America's system of learning has fostered free thought, innovation, and economic opportunity.

However, the Trump administration and Republicans at the federal and state levels are waging an all-out assault on academic freedom, one that not only threatens our storied universities, but our very future, given the very critical role that education plays in building that future.

Now, we've seen this coming on multiple fronts, whether it's the attack on critical race theory and discrimination or the weaponization of anti-Semitism.

Entire boards of public universities have been culled by Republican governors seeking to eradicate DEI, and university presidents have been pilloried for trying to navigate the tumultuous issues that have stymied some seasoned diplomats.

Faculty members have been threatened with the loss of tenure, and recently, dozens of universities have come under federal investigation and had their public funding threatened for either the goals of trying to meet their mission of fostering intellectual growth and preparing young people for a broader world, or for the mere fact that they exist in this moment doing the right thing.

They're being vilified and threatened for allowing students and their institutions to exercise the freedoms of speech and assembly that are crucial elements of the First Amendment.

But this assault on higher education goes into even more dangerous attacks on our Constitution.

Today, campuses have become ground zero for Republicans' cruel tactics of targeting students with immigration enforcement, from the arrest of green card holder Mahmoud Khalil to the cancellation of hundreds of student visas and the deportations that have happened without due process.

And even science has been targeted, with Princeton University losing $4 million in funding for climate research because Republicans complained that it exposed students to, quote, climate anxiety by teaching them to understand realities like extreme weather events, climate migration, and threats to air quality.

But we cannot be distracted or fooled.

None of these actions are designed to protect our students or improve educational outcomes.

This is a campaign to censor, to control, and to shut down what the right wing has found so threatening about higher education for years.

That it leads to more open, inclusive thought, that it challenges our preconceived ideas with new ones, and that it is often an incubator for social progress.

Since these anti-intellectual campaigns began in the wake of George Floyd's murder and those national protests that followed, more than 30 universities have been pressured into altering their diversity programs and their inclusion programs according to Politico.

The pressure has been building from Republican state legislatures as much as the right-wing ecosystem that proudly pursues the freedom to discriminate again.

Joined now by the current White House and the federal members of the GOP.

The demands facing these schools aren't nothing.

Universities risk loss of their federal funding for what they teach, who they hire, and how students exercise their right to to protest.

For example, Columbia University was told it had to appoint a new senior provost to oversee Middle Eastern studies.

In essence, allowing the government to influence what they teach and how they teach it.

Harvard was the first university to publicly defy the Republicans last week when President Alan Garber declared, quote, the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.

So, in retaliation, the administration canceled $2.2 billion in federal grants and on Monday threatened to freeze another $1 billion and is reportedly looking into revoking the university's tax-exempt status.

Harvard holds the distinction of being not only the nation's oldest, but also its wealthiest university.

Yet so many other schools don't have the power or the endowments to weather the many threats.

And this facet of Trump's tyranny has no end in sight.

In fact, the administration has a task force of 20 people meeting on a weekly basis looking for ways to compel academic institutions to change into more conservative environments that only reflect a vision of the world they approve of.

States like Texas, Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan are leading or mimicking the efforts to shut down students and those commissioned to educate them.

So, how can we be courageous in the fight to protect academic freedom?

And what are the consequences for all of us if we don't?

This week on Assembly Required, we're talking to Wesleyan University President Michael Roth and Barnard College Professor Nara Milanich about what is at stake and what academics and their allies can do to push back.

Then we'll hear from student journalist and co-editor-in-chief of the Michigan Daily, Zane Yaman, on how students are weathering the storm and how you can be a patriot in this moment of trouble.

President Michael Roth, Professor Nara Milanich, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Great to be here.

Okay, so although the federal threats to funding have been front page news, we also know that state and federal politicians have launched an aggressive coordinated campaign against higher education, pressuring universities to fall in line with this conservative agenda that seems to seek to reverse academic norms.

From both of your vantage points, and I'm going to start first with you, Professor, and then come to you, President.

How have you been processing this moment?

Yeah, it has been dramatic times on campus, I have to say.

The vibe is, I would say, a mix of fear and anger, a lot of fear for our students,

fear because we literally have students who are disappearing from their dorms, right?

We're concerned that these attacks will continue

targeting international students, but also eventually, almost certainly citizen students.

We're fearful also for ourselves.

There is a lot of really vicious doxing going on, right?

And

publicizing of names of students and faculty on social media, et cetera, targeting them for persecution and harassment.

So a lot of what we're feeling is fear.

And the second thing I think we're feeling is anger.

Anger directed directed upwards at our university and college leaderships, anger at our administrations, at our trustees, because we feel that they have been silent, we feel they have capitulated, we feel that they have not stood up in a robust way for the values of the university, for what we represent, for who we are, and for our mission as colleges and universities.

Well, President Roth would love for you to talk about how you're seeing things and to talk about how you've approached the work that's happening at Westland.

Sure.

Well, I would echo many of the things that Nara just mentioned that

the assault on vulnerable students and employees by the federal government has meant to and has created an atmosphere of fear on university campuses.

And

I do think that this is a concerted effort to remake civil society in the United States so as to force those independent entities, be they universities or libraries or eventually it'll be churches and mosques and synagogues, to align with the leader.

And I think that this is a crucial moment when people who are asked to talk to a microphone, to use that microphone, to denounce this extraordinary overreach by the White House in trying to demand loyalty from areas of the country

that have certainly benefited from governmental support over the years and have in turn given back to the country in extraordinary ways, but have never had,

with a few very brief exceptions, to display loyalty to an individual and his creed of the moment.

And you just said something that I think is really important to lean into.

The nexus of academic freedom and civil society has not been one that this country has had to grapple with recently, although it's happened before, but never to this acute a level.

I'm going to start with you, Michael.

Can you talk about how we define academic freedom and what does that mean practically speaking?

Why is it so essential to institutions of higher education?

Well, academic freedom is simply the ability of people in their respective professional capacities to make judgments about how to teach and how to do research,

how and when to speak up about the things that they're trained to be thoughtful about, and to not have to suffer from the authorities of their schools, like people like me.

The presidents can't tell the anthropologists what to say

or by members of the government.

It's, in some ways, a subset of free speech doctrine, but the courts have recognized that there is a special area of expertise that exists on college and university campuses, and that the freedom to pursue one's research is a crucial part of the benefits of learning and disseminating knowledge.

And so, what we see here now is this attempt to control universities in ways that really are more like organized crime situations.

You have to show fealty.

I mean, it's not as if the Trump administration really cares about how you do molecular biology.

And other administrations have care, let's say, whether you stem cells or not in research.

This is not about that.

This is about the White House showing it has power over institutions.

that the government has supported over the last several decades.

And it's to deny the freedom of faculty and students to pursue research and learning is to make a mockery of higher education in this country.

Well, Nara, I would love for you to pick up this conversation and talk about the responsibility of being an educator in what should be an academically free environment, but also picking up the conversation of first principles.

What does this mean to be an educator in a civil society?

So,

what's your responsibility to your students and to your own academic obligations?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I think the world can exist, the country can continue to exist if Columbia University suddenly disappears, if Barnard College disappears tomorrow.

I hope that doesn't happen.

I don't think it is possible for the United States to continue to exist without colleges and universities writ large.

Higher education is part of the structure of democracy in this country.

And academic freedom is the bedrock, right?

We make all kinds of contributions to society and to democracy, I think.

We've heard a lot about, for example, medical and STEM research in the last several weeks and the important

contributions that universities make in terms of seeking out cures for cancer and diabetes, et cetera, et cetera.

But I want to suggest that our value to a democratic society goes well beyond those critical medical and scientific contributions.

Because at the end of the day, we are educating young people.

We are educating the next generation of citizens and workers.

And we are educating and preparing them both for the workforce,

of course, so that's an important economic function, but we're also preparing them to be citizens, citizens of their communities, of their country, and of their world.

We are preparing future citizens, right?

We are helping young people to think critically and engage critically and actively with the world around them.

And that is,

again, a really fundamental function, I think, that universities and colleges play in a democracy.

And it is precisely that activity that is, as Michael said, under attack right now by this administration.

For both of you, Anara, I'm going to stay with you for a second.

One of the arguments then is that this overreach is necessary, this restructuring is necessary because the universities and colleges that currently exist in the United States aren't being democratic because they suppress differing viewpoints.

It is

that we are not able to get a full education in our colleges and universities these days because conservative viewpoints are not permitted.

Can you both, from your vantage points, again, as professors and as administrators, talk about the validity of that argument and what's the rebuttal?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the arguments that has been made, of course, over the last year and more is an argument specifically about anti-Semitism

and that Jewish faculty and students are unsafe on college campuses and specifically on the Columbia College campus.

And as a Jewish faculty member, I and many of my colleagues have been making the argument for more than a year now

that there's something else going on here, that anti-Semitism is really being used as a cudgel, as a wedge to drive home a

kind of a right-wing agenda and takeover of education.

So there's a hostility to teaching things like the history of slavery or race or racism in the United States.

There's a hostility to teaching things like climate change or ideas about gender and sexuality, right?

And so we've been insisting for over a year now that these are critical issues that need to be discussed in universities from multiple vantage points, of course.

And so we really resist the idea that somehow this is all about anti-Semitism, right?

And I think there's something else going on behind these narratives.

And so there's a kind of irony here where there's, on the one hand, a insistence on viewpoint diversity, and yet also an insistence, for example, that Harvard

have litmus tests, ideological litmus tests for faculty.

On the one hand, we hear about intellectual diversity.

On the other hand, we are now faced with a situation at Columbia where the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies is being placed under an academic receivership.

So, you know, it really does call into question whether in fact

a diversity is ideological or intellectual or political diversity is in fact the end game of

these policies.

And Michael, you you wrote a very excellent opinion piece in the New York Times that hits on some of these themes.

I'd love for you to talk a bit about how you're thinking about this.

So thank you.

And I agree very much with Nara that the

use of anti-Semitism here is

cynical, really, that although there has been anti-Semitism at these schools,

there's more of it.

among the friends of the of those in the White House than there is on the Columbia faculty.

And I think it's very clear that

Trump is using anti-Semitism or anti-anti-Semitism as a vehicle to gain control.

On the other hand, I disagree with NARA about

the situation of intellectual diversity on campuses.

And I've been

for the last eight or nine years, been writing about how we need, especially the humanities and interpretive social sciences, to be less biased politically than we are.

And

it's very clear that the kind of people we hire at colleges, universities, especially selective ones in the Northeast,

we hire people whose politics replicates the people who are hiring them.

And I've raised this with my own faculty.

They say to me, well, we just hire the best, and they turn out to look a lot like us, which is exactly what those old white farts said, old farts said to me when we said have to hire more women or black people in the 70s.

They said, we would love to, but we hire the best.

But now, the best is that many of my departments would never entertain a conservative point of view or teach it.

Some of them do, but it's also very clear that

we have political biases.

And I think the Trump administration said, yeah, we know that, and we have ours, and we have power.

And whereas my faculty said to me two years ago, we have power, we're going to hire who we want to, our department's going to be the Department of Leftist Feminist Studies in this field.

The Trump administration said, yeah, well, not anymore.

And so I think we've met

a real obstacle here because of the Academy's failure to take ideas that are serious ideas that don't fit into the academic status quo.

And now the Trump administration is using that as a cudgel.

But it's a cudgel we made for them to use.

Yeah, can I just say something?

First of all, I love that we don't necessarily agree on everything, and I think we're modeling here precisely what goes on in university classrooms or what should go on.

So, you know, here we don't agree, right?

And I think that's fantastic, and we should have this conversation.

I also just want to take up this kind of stereotype that gets bandied around in the media of the sort of wild-eyed, radical, you know, professor that is now being, of course, weaponized by this administration that we're all radical Marxists.

You know, in my experience, there are, you know, a wide variety of ways of being in the world that my colleagues had, have.

I want to just give one example.

Last semester, I'm one of the organizers of the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, and we organized what we called a teach-in on academic freedom.

And I was walking down the hall and saw one of my colleagues and said, hey, you know, are you coming to the teach-in?

And he said, You know, I don't do teach-ins.

I don't like teach-ins.

I just don't feel comfortable in something called a teach-in.

And I respect that and said, great, I'll tell you what goes on.

I hope in the future maybe you'll want to participate, but it's fine, right?

So people have a lot of different ways of engaging with politics and not engaging with politics on campus.

And I do think that

there is a way that this kind of

radical Marxist woke leftist stereotype gets bandied around.

And it really obscures the fact that most of us just go to class each day and teach our students and grade our papers and advise students.

And so I just want to put that out there.

That's all true.

I completely agree with that.

But the statistics are also pretty obvious that

faculty in these fields hire people whose politics are much like their own and the courses they teach a drift in a certain direction.

not wild-eyed Marxists.

That's the caricature version of it.

But insular, closed-minded ideologues.

They don't have to be wild-eyed Marxists to be the AUP, but they're not going to accept a panel discussion at the teach-in about the rights of the unborn.

I think

the Trump administration has used this in a horrible way, but we have given them the stick they hit us with, as the old French expression, you know.

I mean, I've been having this conversation on campuses since 2017, I think,

and I don't see many wild-eyed radicals, but I do see very closed-minded, prejudiced people who don't understand that having 19 courses on empire and two courses on freedom sends a signal to the rest of the country of what counts as legitimate questions and how isolated we have become from much of the country.

And the Trump administration They are using this in a cynical way.

They don't want viewpoint diversity, as Nara said, they want to have an independent consultant monitoring the thoughts of our departments.

But I fear that we've given them this opportunity and we should take it back because academic freedom doesn't mean a damn thing if everybody has the same idea.

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Oh, Nara, I'm going to take us in a slightly different direction for a second, because you mentioned the fear that's pervasive for students because of the immigration angle that's also been lifted up.

You know, last week, reports emerged that federal agents have been quietly revoking student visas without notifying universities, and in some cases, without notifying the students themselves.

The Washington Post says it's still unknown how many have been affected and whether they were told they had to leave the country.

Can you talk about what you are hearing and what do you think about this tactic from the administration?

Yeah, there's a lot of fear on campus and a lot of misinformation, I think, floating around.

No one really knows what's going on and part of that is because we're really not hearing from our administrations.

We're not hearing a lot of guidance.

They're clearly scared to put things in writing.

They think that somehow perhaps they're protecting people by being quiet.

And I think that's actually a strategic miscalculation, miscalculation, a grievous miscalculation at this point.

I mean, Columbia University has yet to utter the names Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mamdani, the two students who

have most recently been picked up,

one of them in a Columbia University dorm, right, by ICE agents.

And that's really so distressing that we're not even hearing their names spoken in public.

I think there's also a real concern and a lot of confusion about whether universities are required to de-enroll students who have lost their visa status or have been removed from

international student databases.

It seems now that maybe they didn't need to disenroll students who disappeared from these databases, but they did so.

In the case of one Columbia student, for example, who fled to Canada after ICE came knocking on her dorm door.

So I think there's a real

sort of the initial reaction of the universities, certainly Columbia, has been one of anticipatory obedience, right?

Of sort of anticipating what is going to be required of them.

And so they're going to go for sort of the most extreme.

kind of policy, in this case, de-enrolling international students, thereby compounding their

obvious vulnerability, their obvious legal vulnerability.

In the case of the student who fled to Canada, for example, Ranjani Siravasan, they also kicked her out of campus housing almost immediately as well.

I mean, really?

Did you really need to do that?

There's this kind of fear of liability that is so deeply distressing

and that has characterized so much, unfortunately, of the administration's behavior and certainly their policies vis-à-vis

international students.

Oh, Michael, last Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam sent a letter to Harvard demanding, quote, relevant information on every student visa holder allegedly involved in, quote, known illegal or, quote, dangerous activity, which we know has been expanded to include political protest.

And if Harvard doesn't comply, the government may revoke its student in exchange visitor program or CVET program.

And I want to talk about international students.

I think, Nara, you led into it nicely.

You know, more than 1.1 million foreign students come to the U.S.

each year to study.

They contribute over $43 billion to the U.S.

economy.

I mean, we know know that a study found that 55% of America's 582 startup companies worth at least $1 billion were founded by students who came over to our country.

And so, Michael, beyond the obvious moral issue of denying students access to world-class education abroad,

What do you think about the ability to enroll international students at your university or other places?

What is its impact if the federal government can hold the CVAT program hostage?

It's a horror show.

The Trump administration, both the president and the vice president, have benefited in their personal lives and in their professional lives from having immigrants come to this country.

And the attack on immigrants is steeped in racism and a kind of ethno-nationalism that

is

just horrible to behold because it makes makes no economic sense, as you pointed out, Stacey, this program, what other place do we have the balance of trade like this?

I mean, where else do we have an exchange that so much benefits the United States as

the case with international students coming to study here and not just in the Northeast, but all over the country

and at all levels of education.

So one struggles to find a rationale for these activities, except to create a climate of fear.

It's so that people either engage in anticipatory compliance or they just profess loyalty because they're scared to death of the federal government's powers to sweep people away and put them in detention without any probable cause or any due process.

And so that That mission is being accomplished.

There is a sense of fear and

vulnerability.

People feel that suddenly their status in the United States has made them precarious.

And that was just not the case.

People came here because it was a place for freedom.

It was a place where they could spread their wings and learn the things they might not have been able to learn at home.

And now suddenly, this is a place that has become one of danger.

And we on our campus, we have about 13% of our students, undergraduates, are from outside of the U.S.

And they contribute enormously to every aspect of the school, from music and molecular biology to sports and theater.

I mean, it's just every aspect of the school is enriched, not just because those students get to learn, but because we Americans get to learn about the world through these citizens of other countries who come here to be in America and learn.

So it is

this weird Machiavellian

tactic in the administration to create fear by attacking someone who's vulnerable so the rest of us get in line.

Well, I want to talk for a moment about the intersection of ideas that most people don't see as being

of a piece.

And one of those ideas is diversity, equity, inclusion, or DEI, which I talk about a lot.

Because for so many of us, that is either an HR conversation or it's about black kids going to Harvard.

But what we have been able to see on full display under this administration, both at the federal level, but mimicked by state legislatures and governors, is that what's been lost in part of this is how integral DEI has become to colleges and universities because it is how we see research, innovation, economic growth, and employment pushed forward across the country.

I'm going to step off my soapbox and ask my question, which is:

how do you all think about DEI

and its real impact on on your ability to not only teach, but also prepare your students and your universities for improving the country?

And Nara, I'm going to start with you.

Yeah, I think you said that very well.

And I think the word that you used, vague, these vague ideas,

I don't think any government official should be criticizing

DEI or wokeness without explaining what they mean by

those terms because

they get bandied about in such sloppy ways.

Like, what exactly are you referring to when you refer to DEI?

It turns out it seems they're referring to a very big concept.

So, this is not just an HR issue, right?

It's a fundamental intellectual attack on how we see

everything from how we study and research and teach human health to how we study research and teach history.

And it's been really distressing to see how quickly our administration has really sort of capitulated.

The Columbia websites

scrubbed

mentions of DEI initiatives around the university within days of the various executive orders coming down.

And

it really makes you wonder how deep our commitment was to any of these ideas

in the first place,

that we're so willing to

scrub our websites so quickly.

What are our values?

And

this really captures, I think, a lot of the kind of profound alienation a lot of us feel with our institutions right now, which we thought we knew, but it turns out maybe we actually don't know them, that we're so willing to concede such fundamental values in the face of a menacing administration.

Michael?

Yeah, I think this is

the weaponization of DEI as a tool.

to demand control of all kinds of things has been one of the horror stories of the last few years.

I think there are people in the administration who are quite clear about what they mean, which is that they

have now the power, because they won the elections, to have a different civil rights regime, Christopher Ruffo says.

And what that means is they want a colorblind regime and not an anti-racist regime.

So I think that

buried in here, there is a actually a dispute about how to do civil rights, which people could disagree about.

But I think it has mushroomed into this idiocy of searching for a word like diversity.

And you have diverse bacteria,

that act gets axed.

And I think that it's not unusual to have somebody working for fascists who actually has an idea that you could discuss in the library.

But the fascists take that idea.

and they're not in the library anymore.

They're just with a chainsaw, to use Elon Musk's word, and they attack everything in their path.

That's what the Trump administration is counting on.

And what we can do as administrators and as faculty members is to say no, that the freedom of these institutions, which are the freedoms of our civil society, need to be protected against a all-powerful executive branch.

I really, you know, I wanted to pick up that last comment about pushback.

But I think that speaking out and pushing back is really critical.

I think that a lot of our leaders of our institutions, whether

our educational institutions or our law firms, et cetera, have embraced silence in the thinking that silence will somehow protect us.

And quite frankly,

that's a fair idea, right?

In January, we didn't really sort of know what was going to happen.

And it seemed like, okay,

maybe the idea is you just sort of, you crouch down a little bit and you kind of avoid the chaos.

I think it's been, if there's anything that we've learned in the last three months,

it is that silence doesn't work.

Silence does not protect you, right?

And that it is absolutely critical to speak out.

It's critical to articulate what our values are in public and to defend them and stand by them.

And I think that's really what we need our leaders to do in higher ed.

And, you know, Michael, I really appreciate all of the work that you have done on that front.

And we have some other, you know, great examples of folks that have spoken out.

And we need more of them.

We need more of them.

And we also need, I think, unity and kind of organizing

across campuses.

And that is something that just last week, for example, I saw in New York City when more than a dozen area universities ranging from yeshiva to New York Institute of Technology to the public CUNY system to Columbia to NYU, etc.

We all came together in Foley Square to stand up for academic freedom, to think through and talk about and

yell anger about these issues.

And I think that was, you know, I've been teaching teaching for Barnett for 20 years.

I've never seen that kind of coming together

across institutions.

And I'm really struck that it's, in that case, it's faculty and students who are doing,

who are looking for solidarity and looking for common cause.

So I think that that's, you know, that's our best hope right now.

Michael?

Yeah, I completely agree.

I think that it's our freedoms that are at stake.

I mean, I kicked myself in the butt because I took all these freedoms for for granted.

I did not expect that people would be asking me every day, how do you have the courage to speak up?

It's like, why do you need courage to speak up?

Just speak up, it's America.

But of course, these days, this is a situation where the government is trying to get as much power as possible at the expense of independent organizations.

universities today, churches, synagogues, and mosques tomorrow, newspapers right now,

all over the sphere of interconnected associations that have enjoyed autonomy, even if they are regulated or subsidized by the government.

We have to join together, academics,

religious leaders,

citizens in cities and in the countryside, to say we do not take our freedoms for granted.

You cannot push us around.

And I think if we stand together, we make it much less likely that this administration will be able to just push its weight around and take over things just for the sake of doing so, because there is no coherent agenda from the Trump administration.

This is really about

amassing personal power at the expense of the Constitution and at the expense of the traditions of this country.

Of course, different people have had different experiences of freedom and oppression.

Of course, of course, of course.

But right now, we can make a coalition to stand against this egregious overreach by the White House.

Michael Roth, Naram Olanich, thank you both so much for what you continue to do and for joining us here on Assembly Required.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns.

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Joining me now is the co-editor and chief of the Michigan Daily, Zane Yaman.

Zane, welcome to Assembly Required.

Hi.

Hi.

Nice to be here.

I'm really excited to speak with you.

Well, I appreciate it.

So I know that being a journalist is very tough right now, and I can only imagine how much harder it is as a student journalist, particularly given that both freedom of the press and now the very idea of free speech on campus are under attack.

And then there's this broader assault on universities themselves.

So I want to start here.

What is it like to navigate this moment, not just as a college student, but as the editor-in-chief of a student paper when academic freedom seems to not just be under attack, but under sort of existential threat?

Yeah, well, the word I would use probably is busy.

There's just so many things that we're trying to keep track of, so many moving parts at one time.

You know, it seems like every single day there's a new issue or a new facet of an issue sort of to be reported on, to be criticized, to be looked at.

So it's just a matter of keeping on track of all of those things and also, you know, keeping track of what's going on nationally and then kind of preempting how that national stuff is eventually going to maybe make its way to our campus.

And I will also say it is nice, especially with journalism, it's kind of funny that when things are kind of going bad, it also is when your work feels the most important.

So, I will say that it is sort of bittersweet in this moment that we can sort of feel like the work that we're doing is really important.

And you know, we've had people reach out to us and say, you know, thank you for reporting on this, or thank you for kind of getting this opinion out there and stuff.

But I would just say, generally, like, we are trying to make sure that we can capture this moment as effectively as possible and kind of understand how people are feeling in our community at all levels, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and making sure that we can capture this political moment, I guess, with as much transparency and with as much diligence as possible.

Well, one thing you just mentioned is a question that I've been getting since all of this started unfolding in January, which is prioritization.

How do you decide where to focus, what to pay attention to, what to

talk about, what not to talk about?

And what's the calculus that you would recommend to those listening?

So

I guess it's hard.

So we have an amazing team, and I work with an amazing team of news reporters, and also my other co-editor-in-chief, Mary.

So, it is very much a democratic decision that we all make.

And sort of, we all come together and we sort of all talk about what are sort of the most pressing issues.

And I would say, in terms of calculus, I think it really is sort of what is the pulse on campus.

And I know that's a little abstract and maybe hard to define, but it is sort of a matter of what does it feel like people need to hear the most on.

And also, in conjunction with that, what sort of information do we have or could we have that could be sort of maybe alleviating some people's, maybe not concerns, but maybe some people's sort of gaps in their understanding about how a certain issue is happening?

So, sort of the most pressing issues right now are obviously visa revocations for international students and also sort of the impending and also ongoing attack on DEI and the DEI cuts at the University of Michigan.

Well, you attend the University of Michigan, which is on the Department of Education's list of 60 universities that are under investigation.

And it's ostensibly for anti-Semitic discrimination, which I would argue is a pretext.

And

the important reason this comes up is that you've mentioned student visa revocation.

You know, we know Michigan has been central to protests from the pro-Palestinian anti-war protest after October 7th, and then recent demonstrations for Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil's release.

Can you talk a bit about how these protests have unfolded and

how students are processing the right to protest given what's happening?

And then the third piece of this is as a journalist, what are you seeing happen in tension between students and the administration as they think about their various roles?

There were a few things that sort of happened that were kind of a little bit of a pretext and I think sort of teed up how the current environment is on campus right now.

So I think in fall of 2023, there were two sort of student government ballot initiatives.

One was, you know, pretty much pro-Palestine and one was pretty much pro-Israel.

And the university administration, before that vote could even happen, kind of stepped in and said, hey, we're

canceling this vote and we're not letting people vote on that.

So that was sort of a glimpse of like, okay, obviously the administration is stepping in maybe when it shouldn't have, maybe when it should have.

At that point, it was still sort of debatable.

A lot of people have different opinions on that.

And then last summer, what we saw was sort of, you know, clearing the encampment.

There was a lot of sort of specifics with that that just basically, I think a lot of people's criticisms with that were a lack of transparency.

And then also amendments to the student statement of rights and responsibilities, which sort of happened under the cover of summer.

It happened, you know, in less than 30 seconds.

And that was sort of a huge, huge thing because what the student statement of rights and responsibilities is, is basically how students have rights if people complain against them or if the administration files a complaint against them.

So that was sort of consolidated to make the,

what our editorial board called, make the university sort of judge, jury, and executioner for someone who has a complaint against them.

pretty much in the context of pro-Palestine complaints.

And they sort of utilized that process to kick off or suspend our SJP chapter safe from the university.

So that happened in this January.

So broadly, we've seen like sort of a development of a lack of transparency on the university level.

And I think a lot of people are sort of feeling that lack of transparency and they feel distance between themselves and the university administration and then all of a sudden all of that stuff with pro-Palestine like in a pro-Palestine context sort of is now carrying over to the Trump administration specifically with the DEI cuts that were sort of a bridge to that and you know this past fall and fall of 2024 there was a New York Times piece that was written kind of criticizing DEI 2.0 at the University of Michigan and the university basically doubling down on DEI.

And

there are criticisms, right?

I think what a lot of people sort of

understand, at least at a university level, is that there's a lot of criticisms of DEI from both sides.

A lot of people feel like it's performative, or maybe that there are sort of actual things that maybe could be better with it.

And then, you know, some people on the right might say, hey, where's the viewpoint diversity?

So nobody was necessarily saying that DEI was perfect.

And I think a lot of people understood that it needed to be changed.

But I do think a vast majority of campus thought that at least some of the initiatives, when you think about like the LEED Scholars Program and like funding education for

minority students, like those things are

tangible good things, sort of maybe in a wash of sort of maybe some performative stuff.

So when the university cut DEI, there was a huge, huge community kind of pushback.

You know, we haven't seen such a large influx of op-eds and letters to the editor since October 7th.

And in my entire time here, we've never seen such a large influx of stuff related to specifically what the university administration is doing.

So people felt very strongly about that.

Sort of, a lot of people were saying, you know, why are we capitulating to the the Trump administration?

We know it won't stop here.

You know, is this the same university that sort of took affirmative action all the way to the Supreme Court?

You know, and just overall these lack of transparency things.

Well, speaking of how students are adjusting, we also know, again, because of what you've been reporting, you know, international students are a significant part of the population at the University of Michigan.

How are they reacting?

We touched on it earlier in the episode, but you have federal agents who are revoking visas without notifying universities.

You have ICE rates happening on campus.

What have you been hearing?

What are students feeling, both international students and their allies?

I think, honestly, I hate to say this, but I think a lot of people are scared.

You know, I think a lot of people are genuinely,

you know, I think the uncertainty is very scary.

And I think there's already enough uncertainty when you're a college student and you're trying to figure out what you're going to do for the rest of your life.

And compounded upon that is this sort of this idea of you can have your visa revoked for pretty much, you

nothing or pretty much like a little thing or unpaid parking ticket or something like that, right?

So I think for a lot of our international students, they feel scared and that actually has tangibly impacted the way that we do our work in the sense of, we have international students who have written op-eds, pro-Palestine op-eds or maybe stuff that's more critical of the Trump administration.

And those students are genuinely coming, they're coming to us and they're saying, hey, what is sort of the way that we can sort of approach this so I can continue my education and we can sort of minimize the amount of risk that I'm facing?

We've had international international students say, hey, can I take my name off of this op-ed?

Can I, you know, have this quote removed?

And those are things that we've had to sort of deal with way more than we've ever had to deal with them in the past.

And obviously we're taking those by a case-by-case basis

and we're trying to do our due diligence in balancing sort of the need for the public record and for these viewpoints to still be out here and also balancing the need that you know are understanding that when people wrote these op-eds or these pieces or gave these quotes that there was like a very different amount of stakes that they were sort of agreeing to and a very different set of political stakes that they were agreeing to.

And now that those stakes have changed, there is sort of merit to maybe re-look at or re-evaluate

some of their pieces or some of their quotes.

Well, look, as the face of or one of the faces of academic freedom, you've put yourself in a very specific position of

risk.

People know who you are and you are still a student.

Can you talk a bit about how you personally are navigating the challenge of being the voice for academic freedom and for so many others with your colleagues, but how you're also thinking about your future?

Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we're thinking about it is, you know, making sure that we're, one, dotting our I's and crossing our T's, that we're doing things that we have the right to do and that, you know, we will be protected to do.

And also in the face of, you know, when we're talking about the university administration, we are editorially independent.

We don't get any money from the university administration.

So that is one thing that that has sort of helped us keep our coverage fair, keep our coverage balanced, and help us not sort of suppress our own voices.

But for me personally,

I think it's just a matter of being able to call a spade a spade.

And

I think it's easy for us to get into sort of a mindset of suppressing our own views because of an existential threat.

And I think that there that is again a case-by-case thing, but in my opinion, I think we stand to lose a lot more by suppressing ourselves than

a potential idea of maybe a threat in the future.

But the calculus is different for everybody, but that's, I guess, my personal calculus.

I think that's an excellent calculus to use.

Zane, thank you so much for your time, and thanks for being here on Assembly Required.

Of course, thanks for having me.

As always on Assembly Required, we like to give our listeners actionable tools for facing the challenges of today.

So here's this week's toolkit in which we encourage you to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

First, be curious.

The strongest and most informative voices spotlighting what is happening on our college campuses are our student journalists.

Read student newspapers in your community or from your alma mater to stay connected to what is happening on the ground.

If you're part of a college community, whether you're a student, faculty member, staff, or a nearby resident, coming together to raise your voice about your concerns can make a world of difference and their strength in numbers.

As NARA told us, the more we create alliances across campuses to push back against the administration, the stronger our resistance will be.

And lastly,

do good.

Student journalists need your support weathering these tumultuous times, and hearing from their readers helps tremendously.

If you're enjoying their reporting, reach out and let them know.

I personally am incredibly grateful for the support and the encouragement from our listeners, but I'd like to reach even more people who are looking to better understand where we are and who want to pitch in as we fight for a fair America and the world we can dare to imagine.

So I'm asking you for your help.

Share an episode you like with someone who may not know what they're missing.

And please remember to subscribe to Assembly Required on all the places that carry our show.

Apple, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast.

If you like what you hear, rate the show and leave a comment.

And please continue to tell us what you've learned and solved or want to hear about next.

You can send an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

Remember, to fix what they're breaking, there will be some assembly required.

So I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Alona Minkowski, and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilius Vitopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Haringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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