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David French
New York Times
Excerpt: Columbia University is now the epicenter of the American culture war. The Trump administration is targeting a former Columbia student — and the university itself — as a test case for its new authoritarian regime.
The story of Columbia isn’t simply about Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student in international affairs there who was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests that burst into view almost immediately after the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. But when federal immigration officials showed up at his apartment building last weekend and whisked him away to a facility in Louisiana to begin deportation proceedings, they brought the malice and incompetence of the Trump administration into stark relief.
Tyler Tone
FIRE
Excerpt: “A cold wind just blew through every newsroom this morning.” These were the words of my colleague Bob Corn-Revere upon hearing that Paramount Global had agreed to settle President Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes lawsuit — to the tune of $16 million.
Trump filed the lawsuit in November, demanding $10 billion over what he alleged was the “deceptive editing” of a 60 Minutes interview featuring then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The lawsuit claimed CBS’s “substantial news distortion” was calculated to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of last year’s election in her favor. But despite legal experts widely labeling the lawsuit baseless, Paramount opted to settle. Why?
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: More than three months after a federal court struck down an Education Department directive that barred any practices that consider race at colleges across the country, the Department of Justice declared Wednesday that diversity, equity and inclusion practices are unlawful and “discriminatory.”
But the agency’s memo goes even further than ED’s guidance, suggesting that programs that rely on what they describe as stand-ins for race, like recruitment efforts that focus on majority-minority geographic areas, could violate federal civil rights laws. The directive applies to any organization that receives federal funds, and DOJ officials warned that engaging in potentially unlawful practices could lead to a loss in grant funding.
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Before James Ryan stepped down as president of the University of Virginia last month, the Department of Justice accused him and other leaders of actively attempting to “defy and evade federal antidiscrimination laws.” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights division, said that needed to change.
In a series of seven letters obtained by Inside Higher Ed via an open records request, Dhillon and other Department of Justice officials laid out their increasingly aggressive case that the university was at risk of losing federal funding, just as Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Columbia Universities had in the months prior for allegations of antisemitism.
