The Professors Suing Trump For Free Speech
Labor lawyer Veena Dubal was hoping to spend the next few years researching staffing issues at universities. Instead, she's helping lead a union fight against the Trump administration.
UC Irvine law professor Veena Dubal has spent most of her career looking at the ways that tech products have undercut working conditions for people on the margins.
When she took a second role last year as general counsel of the American Association of University Professors, a labor union and professional organization that represents 45,000 educators across the country, she thought she’d be able to focus on automation and the growth of contingent faculty in higher education — adjuncts and other non-tenure-track professors — in the age of A.I.
But then Trump was elected. And his administration quickly initiated a series of attacks on universities that continues today — threatening their financial stability by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants under a series of demands. Suffice it to say that Dubal’s mission at the AAUP shifted, quickly.
Dubal’s work first came across my radar when I was reporting on labor and technology at The Washington Post. She was a pioneer in exposing the precarity of gig work and how this supposedly new labor model, at companies like Lyft and Uber, was really not all that different from the exploitative employment practices of the past.
I had been wondering what she was up to recently. Last month, when a broad coalition of faculty and student groups across the University of California system represented by the AAUP filed a major lawsuit against the Trump administration, she was front and center, calling the administration’s actions “authoritarian attacks,” at the news conference announcing the lawsuit. The complaint alleges that the administration’s threats to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in funding is a blatant and unconstitutional suppression of free speech.
In a world where so many leaders and institutions have been complacent and even conciliatory in the face of unprecedented attacks — universities, law firms, private companies and more — the AAUP has taken a different tack: fighting back. The UC action is one of nine lawsuits the group is involved in to challenge the Trump administration’s broadsides against higher education. A few weeks ago, the group earned a major win in federal court when Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee, ruled that the administration was violating the First Amendment by using the threat of deportation to silence noncitizens who had protested in support of Palestinians.
I reached out to Dubal to discuss the UC lawsuit, what it means for universities across the country, and why it’s fallen to a group of professors and faculty to challenge the Trump administration, instead of the UC itself. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation is below.
Hard Reset: Hi, thanks for joining us. What is the climate like in higher education right now?
Veena Dubal: Soon after the Trump administration came into power, they created a task force to combat antisemitism [that] focused on higher education. What we have seen is this is not a genuine effort to actually combat actual antisemitism … It’s really an effort to use civil rights laws as a cudgel to reshape higher education in the image of the far-right. It’s important to say that no one could have predicted that this is what they would’ve done or how they would’ve gone about it. The nature of the attacks against universities, faculty, students, staff are so unprecedented. [They] reveal an extraordinary disregard for the Constitution, for free speech, for all of these principles that are central to not just the United States, but the higher education sector.
HR: Tell me about discussions that led to the UC faculty’s lawsuit against the administration. Where did it originate?
VD: The UC system is a public institution, unlike Columbia and Harvard. It’s an economic engine for California. And it’s a way for immigrant families to achieve economic mobility. It’s a different place than the kind of elite institutions [Trump] had been attacking.
In July, he started with UCLA and wrote a demand letter that we couldn’t see, it wasn’t public, unlike in the other instances. And so conversations began then.
The LA Times reported the contents of the demand letter — what the Trump administration was trying to do. This was maybe a month ago. And so the AAUP mobilized. Alongside the Council of UC Faculty Associations [CUCFA], we started reaching out to all of the different unions within the UC system to see if they wanted to sue.
All of these issues affected their members, just as they affected our members. And not just in terms of funding, but in terms of care — one of the demands is around banning gender affirming care and we all have our healthcare through the UC system. Another demand was around banning overnight demonstrations. Well, this is how unions do pickets all the time.
And also just generally everyone’s free speech rights. If the UC had to say there were two genders, or if the UC had to deprioritize or wasn’t even able to consider diversity more broadly, not even just racially but other forms of diversity in personnel decisions — they were going to remake the university in an image that’s antithetical to the kind of world we want to create.
HR: The LA Times reported that the letter from the DOJ to UCLA included demands like yearly $200 million payments from UCLA to the federal government, the regular disclosure of student racial and GPA information, and handing over access to the data for “all UCLA staff, employees facilities, documents and data related to the agreement.” Pretty significant. But nobody published the actual letter. That’s pretty surprising, no?
VD: We filed a public records request and [the UC] denied it on pretty flimsy grounds. And the day before we filed the coalition lawsuit, the CUCFA folks filed a lawsuit against the UC to get the letter. We still don’t have it in hand, but we knew that there were various reporters who had [it] at CNN, the New York Times, and the LA Times.
HR: And any idea why the UC wouldn’t release it?
VD: It’s a public institution, so more so than the Columbia or Harvard administration, they have an obligation to reveal the contents of this letter to faculty and staff. My belief is that they are being told that they could not release the letter publicly [and] that if they did release the letter publicly, then it would make things difficult in the course of their negotiations.
These are just guesses, but part of what this did was make it harder to sue, because we didn’t know what the exact demands were.
HR: UC Berkeley handed over the names of 160 students and faculty to the Trump administration’s so-called antisemitism investigation. UCLA settled with three Jewish students and a professor for a lawsuit over protests last year for more than $6 million, which is incredible amount of money. What do you think about the UC’s response to these aggressive attacks so far?
VD: It was kind of remarkable that UCLA didn’t fight that lawsuit at all … My understanding is actually that all 10 UC’s likely received the same kind of information [request] as UC Berkeley did. And with UC Berkeley, my best guess is that they alerted the faculty, students and staff whose names were released because they didn’t want to do it. And so it gave faculty, staff and students an opportunity to create uproar about it.
…My fear is that these two things together, the settlement without ever even challenging the clear lack of allegations, and the release of all of these names likely across the UC system, that this is indicative of a very fearful UC administration. They’re very worried about what is going to happen in the coming months and year, what kind of broad impacts these attacks are going to have on what is the second-largest employer in California.
HR: Do you think that playing polite is the right response?
VD: The UC has standing here to sue. I think it’s very clear that the Trump administration is acting unlawfully. I don’t think he can find a serious First Amendment scholar in this country who can tell you, who would tell you that this is lawful in any way…
What is so remarkable about this wall-to-wall lawsuit [the faculty and students filed] is that we’re standing up to say that we are the university. But I remain hopeful that the UC Regents will decide to take a similar and more aggressive position with an administration [that] has shown itself to be relentless in their attacks.
Brown and Penn were among the two universities that have already settled — they have already signed these unlawful agreements with the Trump administration, and they are again being attacked with the introduction of the compact.
…It’s not like this is an administration that you negotiate with and then they go away, They’re just going to keep [on.] None of this is about civil rights law — it’s all about reshaping what is said at universities, who is in universities and a big part of it, the attack on science is ultimately about the privatization of research.
HR: Have there been talks between the AAUP and universities about a more robust pushback?
VD: We have not yet had face-to-face conversations, but it’s something that we remain hopeful about. It has been disappointing across the board in the US that more universities have not, for example, formed mutual defense pacts, especially these universities that have large endowments, these large private elite universities.
They could have and still could engage in collective actions such that these kinds of things would be harder for the Trump administration to do. Some have had a stronger backbone. There are select presidents, George Mason’s president and the Wesleyan president, who have been more forwardly defending their institutions and academic freedom.
But nationally it’s been a really eye-opening disappointment to see universities just kind of roll over out of fear. I don’t think that we’re going to get out of this moment with that kind of approach.
HR: I was on UC Berkeley’s campus for weeks last year to cover the protests about the Gaza war, as well as the concerns about antisemitism, for the SF Chronicle. The protesters’ encampment was relatively calm; and it was hard to find a ton of students who were worried about antisemitism. I remember feeling like media had played a role in hyping up the tensions on campus. Given that concerns antisemitism are being used as the pretext for these threats and demands, are groups of Jewish students or faculty involved in this lawsuit?
VD: There are organized groups of Jewish faculty that exist across the political spectrum right now that are opposing what the Trump administration is doing to universities. And so those people have been integral to the discussions around whether or not we file a lawsuit. They’ve been supportive of the lawsuit. And I think as we move along, they’re going to be filing amicus briefs, et cetera.
Erwin Chemerinsky, who is the dean of the law school wrote all kinds of op-eds [about antisemitism] during that time period…His view then and his view now has been that this is what the administration is doing is fundamentally unlawful. He is in fact co-counsel in a related case. There’s a whole group of, they call themselves the Concerned Jewish Faculty [and Staff] who again, have various views on the war in Gaza, remarkably even now, who don’t see this as about antisemitism. I think that it is clear to everyone that whether or not ICE is in our hospitals is not about antisemitism.
HR: Many conservatives have staked out free speech as an important issue to their cause for some years now. What do you make of that commitment, given the way that speech is now being dealt with at universities right now?
VD: I would never in my lifetime have expected to see the state of censorship and the clamping down of dissent at the level we are seeing right now, not just in universities, but more broadly … We’ve had 40 faculty members [across the US] many tenured faculty members fired because of their statements [after Charlie Kirk’s death]. Some very banal.
HR: Do you have any sense how this will play out in court?
VD: A big concern right now is that we’re going to get a far-right Ninth Circuit panel, or we’re going to ultimately be in front of a more conservative Supreme Court than we’ve ever had in my lifetime….[But] you don’t have to be a lawyer to see that these things are, what the Trump administration is doing is a violation of the terms of Title VI, violation of the First Amendment, a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. You actually don’t have to know very much about the law to see that clearly. But there is a lot of uncertainty about the judiciary.
HR: Thank you.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
Hot off the presses: Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education: How conservatives learned to stop worrying and love federal power. (The New Yorker)
Dave Weigel on how the electricity used by data centers, particularly as it manifests in higher prices for everyday consumers, is becoming a major issue in local politics across the country. (Semafor)
A review of Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage, about what drove Silicon Valley titans to the right. I appreciate the simple prognosis Silverman apparently offers. Sometimes things are not that complicated. His answer, at least according to this review? Greed.
On that note, I recommend this Substack essay from Cy Canterel, a self-described “feral scholar” who has pretty sharp, erudite takes on internet culture in a newsletter and on TikTok. In this piece, she unpacks Peter Thiel’s antichrist obsession, and tech’s general rightward turn, as a symptom of late-stage “hoarder capitalism.”
Philosopher John Gray’s work on millenarianism reveals how apocalyptic thinking functions as a kind of signed permission slip for behaviors that would otherwise be indefensible. As Gray notes, “Christianity injected eschatology into the heart of Western civilization,” and this millennial thinking thoroughly shapes American utopianism, including the ostensibly secular mythos of Silicon Valley. The idea of linear progress, of orderly and desirable plodding to a glorious culmination, is a bedrock of the American worldview. However, “theories of progress are not scientific hypotheses,” Gray observes. “They are myths that answer the human need for meaning.”
Meanwhile, the number of Americans with a positive view of capitalism fell last month to the lowest level Gallup had ever recorded: 54 percent.
The A.I. is / isn’t a bubble debate continues to churn. Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings, two of Biden’s economic advisors, argue in the NYT that the growth around the industry mirrors previous bubbles, including the 2001 dot-com bust and the housing crisis in 2008, in what they say will be the third bubble of the century.
Take a look at the price-to-earnings ratio — a common measure of how much the future profits of a company are valued over current ones — of the stocks of companies heavily invested in A.I. They are at levels not seen since the dot-com bubble of 2000. Shares of the A.I. chipmaker Nvidia are trading at roughly 55 times earnings, nearly double what they were a decade ago. And by our own estimates, the share of the economy devoted to A.I. investment is nearly a third greater than the share of the economy devoted to internet-related investments back then. All this points to one conclusion: Should lackluster A.I. performance or sluggish adoption cause investors to doubt these lofty profit expectations, this probably-a-bubble will pop. And a lot of people, not just wealthy investors, will get hurt. Adoption, both by firms and individuals, is clearly growing, but whether this adoption is generating massive productivity benefits or profits remains to be seen.
Meta removed an anti-ICE Facebook page after pressure from the Justice Department. (CNBC)
In his Substack “Off Message,” Brian Beutler introduced me to a new phrase: “vice-signaling” in this piece on the aesthetics and tone of Republican politics, on the heels of the Young Republicans’ racist texting mess.
The AFL-CIO launched a “Workers First Initiative on AI” to ensure workers are protected from — and have a voice — as companies employ the technology.
See you all next week.