Michigan faculty and students call for University to stand up to Trump

Apr 04, 2025

In yesterday’s New York Times, in an article headlined “Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews,” J. David Goodman writes:

Across the country, American Jews have watched with alarm or enthusiasm as an effort to address campus unrest over the war in Gaza has transformed into a campaign to deny elite universities billions of dollars in funding, to press major law firms into pro bono work on “antisemitism” and to deport foreign students even tangentially involved in the protests last spring.

Put me in the “alarmed” category. Which is why I am so very pleased that over 300 Jewish faculty at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, wrote a letter last week to the school’s president, Santa Ono, to call on the University to “resist the Trump administration’s weaponization of anti-Semitism.” The full letter (a compelling and concise read) can be found here, along with a petition for Jewish alums to support the faculty. A second letter was signed by 100 current students. The petition and faculty letter will be published as an advertisement in the Michigan Daily.

I hope other university communities will use the Michigan letters as a model to influence their own school administrations. No one college or law firm or school district or health department or not-for-profit or country (or any other institution targeted by Trump and Musk for any number of nefarious purposes) can stand up to the onslaught alone. Only collective action will succeed.

I am hoping President Ono takes the requests in the letters seriously, though I’m struggling to muster optimism in that regard. I sent him a related letter last summer, which began:

We are writing to express our dismay about the University of Michigan’s recent dismantling of the Gaza solidarity encampment on the Diag. We the undersigned are all former students and faculty of the University of Michigan who participated in campus activism during our time in Ann Arbor. We see the encampment as a continuation of that venerable and necessary tradition, and deem the university’s Division of Public Safety and Security’s manhandling, tear-gassing, and arrest of student protestors on May 21 to be unworthy of our university community.

It was signed by 52 of of us, and sent via snail mail and email to Ono, his chief of staff, and two U-M VPs. We did not receive a single reply.

A couple other items did give me some optimism yesterday, though.

I attended a webinar moderated by my dear friend Dan Montgomery: The American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs’ Amy Spitalnick discussed how Trump and his cheerleaders in Congress are exploiting fears of antisemitism in order to undermine civil liberties, democracy, and the rule of law. Sure, it’s just a webinar, but this kind of partnership – a national union and a Jewish organization focused on civil rights – is an example of the kind of collective strategizing we will need.
Tufts University filed a declaration in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts calling for the immediate release of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts graduate student who was seized on the street last week by plain-clothes ICE agents. While ICE has provided no rationale for seizing her/revoking her visa/whisking her to an immigration detention center in Louisiana, she was apparently targeted for an op-ed critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which she had co-authored in the student paper a year ago.

Trump has made it clear that any such resistance to his cruel and autocratic agenda will be met with severe consequences, as has already been seen with his sanctions and threatened sanctions against Columbia, Brown, Penn, Princeton, and Harvard. So efforts to protect and defend students against Trump’s brazen extra-legal renditions — as Tufts has done here — should be celebrated.

In the comments, please let me know about other actions being taken, by colleges or other institutions, to — as the U-M faculty letter says — “resist the Trump administration’s weaponization of anti-Semitism.”