The Point: They Are All Our Students

3/13/2025

This week’s Point was written by Jeff Melnick, Professor of American Studies and former FSU VP

Greetings, Colleagues:

I am sure we all come to this moment differently—the realization that because (as the young people say) you live in a society, you have to accept that you are responsible for supporting people younger, more vulnerable, less skilled and/or resourced than you are.  My moment came the first time I accompanied my older kid on a school field trip and it hit me (duh): they all have runny noses! All of their shoes have come untied!  Of course not all role-defining moments come with such clear instructions about what to do next—Wipe the noses! Tie the shoes!  But I want to encourage us all to think about what responsibility we feel to students around the country right now—our own and those on (or around) other campuses. 

Some of you have probably figured out already that I have recently graduated Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil on my mind.

If you haven’t heard already, Mahmoud Khalil was disappeared from his Columbia-owned apartment by ICE agents.  He was a leader of the student-protest movement on his campus last year at Columbia and (important for our purposes) a member of the UAW local representing graduate workers.  Nobody is accusing Khalil of a crime: under a rarely applied provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (which used to mostly be applied to radical Jews in the 1950s), Khalil was kidnapped under this provision that allows the Secretary of State to directly order the deportation of individuals whose actions carry “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”  Marco Rubio himself signed the order to detain this former student activist who by most available accounts is just the sort of calm, rational (and unmasked) leader that protest groups are constantly being told by outside commentators to center in their movements. 

This is why we need to care about Khalil, and all of our students, and act.  We are witnessing a well-funded and well-organized attack on free speech and academic freedom that threatens every student at every college and university across the country, and has frightening implications for our basic mission as scholars, teachers, and colleagues.  That consequential reality has been joined in recent days by a whole slew of top-down efforts to dictate what we can teach, research, and even say in our workplaces. In its willy-nilly attack on what it codenames “DEI” (but really is a straight-up racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic attack on civil rights gains of the past 50 years), the Trump administration has literally issued lists of words to avoid.  Our students are being arrested, our colleagues are being silenced and fired, our curricula are being surveilled.  The time is long past due—the silence of our own campus administrators notwithstanding—to speak up as a community for our basic principles of free speech and academic freedom.  This is basic union solidarity stuff. 

In the short term you can join the thousands and thousands of people who are organizing to support Mahmoud Khalil.  Here is a place to sign and here is a place to donate with respect to Khalil’s detention. But going forward we all need to think of all kinds of ways to protect the basic premises of what we do and the basic premises of where we do it (and that means keeping ICE off campus, among many other things).  Please write us at fsu@umb.edu with your ideas about how the union can help protect free speech and academic freedom in these fraught times.