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Rutgers Senate Proposes Big Ten 'Mutual Defense Compact' to Block Trump's Campus Attacks
Universities "should be embodying the values of democracy," said one supporter. "And it really becomes clear in times like this how important that is."
Mar 31, 2025
A resolution passed by the Rutgers University Senate in response to the Trump administration's crackdown on First Amendment rights is "exactly the kind of model" needed in higher education, said one professor on Sunday as word spread of the document—which was approved amid outcry over other universities' capitulation to the White House's attacks.
"The public is crying out for leadership from somewhere," said Michael Yarbrough, a professor of law and society at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Higher ed can provide that and catalyze something bigger. And in the process, we can remind everyone of our true value, something we desperately need to do."
The step toward leadership came in the form of a resolution to form a "mutual defense compact" with other schools that, along with Rutgers, make up the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Under the compact, the schools would "commit meaningful funding to a shared or distributed defense fund" that would provide "immediate and strategic support to any member institution under direct political or legal infringement."
The Rutgers Senate, which includes faculty, students, staff, and alumni, called on the New Jersey institution's president to "take a leading role in convening a summit of Big Ten academic and legal leadership to initiate the implementation of this compact."
The resolution, passed on March 28, was agreed to days after the Rutgers faculty union filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration to block its efforts to abduct, detain, and deport international students for expressing support for Palestinian rights, criticism of Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza and the West Bank, and taking part in pro-Palestinian campus protests over the past year.
Under Trump's executive orders to stop what it classifies as "antisemitism" and to deport foreign nationals who "espouse hateful ideology," immigration agents in recent weeks have detained people including Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student who led negotiations last year calling on the school to divest from companies that profit from Israel's policies; Tufts University Ph.D. candidate Rumeysa Ozturk, who co-wrote an op-ed calling for her school's divestment; and Georgetown University academic Badar Khan Suri, who was detained because "the government suspects that he and his wife oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Israel," according to his lawyers.
"We've all been trying to figure out how to solve this collective action problem. This seems like a very positive big step in the right direction."
"The First Amendment means the government can't arrest, detain, or deport people for lawful political expression—it's as simple as that," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which is representing the Rutgers union and other faculty organizations in the lawsuit. "This practice is one we'd ordinarily associate with the most repressive political regimes, and it should have no place in our democracy."
Under the Rutgers resolution, members of the senate called on participating institutions to "make available, at the request of the
institution under direct political infringement, the services of their legal counsel, governance experts, and public affairs offices to coordinate a unified and vigorous response."
The response could include legal representation, countersuit actions, amicus briefs, legislative advocacy, and "coalition-building," according to the resolution.
"We've all been trying to figure out how to solve this collective action problem," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a professor at University of Minnesota—another member of the Big Ten alliance. "This seems like a very positive big step in the right direction."
A Rutgers Senate member who asked to remain anonymous told Common Dreams on Tuesday that members of the university community have expressed "relief" and "joy" at the news that the body is taking a leadership role in fighting the Trump administration's attacks on higher education.
"People are just feeling like there's something they can hang their hats on that's hopeful," said the member, who was involved in pushing the resolution forward. "Individuals who are concerned about higher education, who are involved in it or connected to it—we're looking to something like this from a big university who can step out and say, 'Let's get something going here to blockade against these attacks.'"
Trump's assault on First Amendment rights are understood to be "existential" by many on university campuses like Rutgers, said the member.
"Proud to be a Rutgers faculty member today," said Michal Raucher, a professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, regarding the passage of the resolution.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, chair of the joint program in English and education at University of Michigan—another member of the Big Ten alliance—expressed support for the Rutgers Senate's leadership.
"I greatly admired our Rutgers colleagues' actions of solidarity during the recent waves of campus strikes," said Thomas. "My admiration has increased tenfold."
Last May, about 100 Rutgers faculty members prepared to form a protective circle around students' Palestinian solidarity encampment at the school's New Brunswick, New Jersey campus as a deadline set by administrators approached and officials threatened the students with arrest.
"We are an extremely diverse community," said the Rutgers Senate member. "And I think that we prize that about our community and about our state, because we know that we are elevated by it from the standpoint of having so many different perspectives, weighing on different kinds of issues."
"As the largest public university in the state, as the major land grant university, we take our commitment to the people of New Jersey and to the enterprise of public higher education very seriously," they added. "And we see these kinds of attacks for what they are."
In contrast to the resolution, Columbia administrators have faced harsh rebukes from First Amendment rights advocates for agreeing to the Trump administration's demands when the White House said it was canceling $400 million in government grants and contracts over the school's alleged "continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."
In response, Columbia—which allowed New York City police to drag students out of a school building and arrest more than 100 people last year during the pro-Palestinian protests—suspended, expelled, and revoked the degrees of some students who had participated in the demonstrations and increased law enforcement presence on campus, among other steps.
The Rutgers Senate member said the body's chair is planning to meet with the university president, Jonathan Holloway, who is set to step down in June, to ask him to sign on to the resolution.
"I think he can make the choice to essentially become legendary in the field and take a strong stand like this and organize his colleagues," said the senate member.
Yarbrough said that Trump's crackdown on protesters, and the capitulation of some institutions, illustrates how education "is really crucial to democracy and to a healthy democracy."
"We should be embodying the values of democracy," said Yarbrough. "And it really becomes clear in times like this how important that is."
While some university administrators are "caving to the Trump administration," he said, "what I think of as the real university of faculty, staff, and students are actually pushing back. And I think that mirrors what we're seeing in the United States more broadly, where most elected leaders and officials are not pushing back the way we would like. But all kinds of people on the ground really are."
"That's what it takes to push back [against] these kinds of authorities and threats," said Yarbrough. "It comes back to the people."
Editor's note: This piece has been updated with additional comments from Michael Yarbrough and a Rutgers Senate member.
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Thousands Protest ICE Abduction of Tufts Student as Trump Attacks at Universities Intensify
"She was abducted by armed agents of the state because she dared take a stand against genocide," said one supporter of Rumeysa Ozturk.
Mar 27, 2025
As reports surfaced Wednesday that Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University Ph.D. student who was abducted by immigration agents off a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, had been taken to a detention center in Louisiana, thousands of people assembled in the Boston-area city to demand Ozturk's release.
Ozturk was transferred to the South Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing center despite a court order barring immigration officials from moving her out-of-state without prior notice, and her lawyers shared a statement at Powder House Park saying they hadn't been notified about the Turkish student's exact whereabouts. They also said her F-1 student visa had been terminated.
Organizers wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Palestinian scarf, said Ozturk is the victim of "state-sanctioned political kidnapping"—targeted by ICE and the Trump administration for co-authoring an op-ed that criticized Tufts administrators for their "inadequate and dismissive" response to a student demand that the university divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Ozturk co-wrote the letter last March, weeks before students at Columbia University led a nationwide campus protest movement against the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on Gaza, which at the time had killed more than 30,000 Palestinians—the majority of whom were civilians despite repeated claims by the U.S. and Israel that the operation was targeting Hamas.
Since then, the Gaza death toll has surged past 50,000, and the Trump administration has cracked down on international students and organizers who participated in anti-Israel protests.
"She was abducted by armed agents of the state because she dared take a stand against genocide," said Lea Kayali of the Palestinian Youth Movement at the rally in Somerville. "And even though she may not consider herself an activist, she has more courage in the hand she wrote that article with than all of [President Donald] Trump's cronies combined."
As organizers noted that 370 people have been arrested in the Boston area by ICE in the last week—with officials calling some "collateral" in Trump's mass deportation campaign—demonstrators chanted, "Free Rumeysa, free them all!" and, "Come for one, face us all!"
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called Ozturk's detention "the latest in an alarming pattern to stifle civil liberties."
"The Trump administration is targeting students with legal status and ripping people out of their communities without due process," said Warren. "This is an attack on our Constitution and basic freedoms—and we will push back."
Organizers urged attendees to focus on "community building," not just rallies, in response to ICE's repeated abductions.
"I don't need you to come to any more rallies. I need you to know your neighbors," said Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the Muslim Justice League. "There is no more time for these rallies and these marches where you say these things and you go home and you wait for another social media post to tell you to come here. You have to get organized."
Later Wednesday evening, AL.comreported that ICE's hunt for international students had reached the University of Alabama (UA). As the student-run newspaper, The Crimson White, reported, Iranian mechanical engineering doctoral student Alireza Doroudi was arrested early Tuesday morning by ICE agents. He was issued an F-1 student visa in January 2023 but had it revoked six months after he arrived in the U.S.
"After receiving the revocation notice, Alireza immediately contacted ISSS [International Student and Scholar Service] at University of Alabama," read a message sent in a group chat including Iranian students, according to The Crimson White. "ISSS replied with confidence, stating that his case was not unusual or problematic and that he could remain in the U.S. legally as long as he maintained his student status."
The University of Alabama Democrats said in response to Doroudi's abduction and detention in an undisclosed location, "Our fears have come to pass."
"Donald Trump, [border czar] Tom Homan, and ICE have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA's international community," the group said. "As far as we know right now, ICE is yet to provide any justification for their actions, so we are not sure if this persecution is politically motivated, as has been seen in other universities around the country."
The targeting of foreign students at Columbia, Tufts, Georgetown, and other universities in recent weeks has led to outcry among academics, particularly as the ICE abductions have taken place alongside threats from the Trump administration to pull funding from schools for not sufficiently cracking down on alleged antisemitism on campus—which the White House has conflated with calls for Palestinian liberation and opposition to Israel's U.S.-backed attacks.
More than 600 members of the Harvard University faculty signed a letter to the school's governing board Wednesday warning that "ongoing attacks on American universities threaten bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and inquiry." The faculty called on administrators to defy any orders that threaten academic freedom.
Nearly 1,400 academics have also called for a boycott of Columbia over its refusal to defend and protect students against Trump's attacks on pro-Palestinian protesters.
"We are appalled that Columbia's leadership has colluded with the authoritarian suppression of its students by fully capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump administration for the release of $400 million in grants withdrawn on March 7, and that it did so against the warning issued by constitutional law scholars that this course of action 'creates a dangerous precedent for every recipient of federal financial assistance,'" reads a letter from supporters of the academic boycott.
Former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil remains in detention in Louisiana after being abducted by plainclothes immigration agents earlier this month for leading negotiations with Columbia regarding divestment from Israel, while Ph.D. candidate Ranjani Srinivasan fled the country after her visa was revoked and Columbia unenrolled her. Columbia also expelled Grant Miner, a Jewish student and labor leader who occupied a campus building last spring, and revoked degrees from some student protesters.
"Universities cannot pretend to hold higher education sacred while repressing students and faculty, undermining free speech and academic freedom, and prohibiting dissent," reads the letter. "Every such act of craven suppression and compliance only further undermines the university and emboldens the reactionary forces intent on destroying it."
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The Verdict Against Greenpeace Is an Attack on Us All
It is critical for Greenpeace and its allies to lean into the verdict and issue a call to action to the entire environmental movement and broader civil society organizations.
Mar 26, 2025
The stunning jury verdict in North Dakota of a $667 million judgement against Greenpeace is a direct attack on the climate movement, Indigenous peoples, and the First Amendment. This case is so deeply flawed—at core the trial was about crushing dissent—that I believe there is a good chance it will be reversed on appeal and ultimately backfire against the Energy Transfer pipeline company.
I was part of an independent trial monitoring team of nine attorneys and four prominent human rights advocates that sat through every minute of the three-week trial, held in a nondescript courthouse in rural North Dakota. Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace for alleged damages it claimed derived from the historic Indigenous-led Standing Rock protests in 2016 against the Dakota Access pipeline. Our presence in court was essential given that the company was able to shroud the trial in secrecy. There was no court reporter, and there still is no public transcript or recording of the proceedings.
What we observed was shocking. Greenpeace lost the trial not because it did something wrong, but because it was denied a fair trial.
If the theory of the case stands, pretty much anyone in the United States can face ruin for exercising their constitutional right to speak on an issue of public importance—even adherents of conservative causes.
The legendary human rights attorney Marty Garbus, a member of our team who has practiced law for more than six decades and who represented Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, said it was the most unfair trial he had ever witnessed. This is precisely why many of us on the monitoring team believe there is a good chance Greenpeace will not pay the first dollar of the judgement and might actually recoup significant damages from EnergyTransfer in a separate case in Europe. That case, currently being heard in Dutch courts, would entitle Greenpeace to compensation based on a finding that the North Dakota case is an illegitimate attempt to squelch free speech.
This case against Greenpeace is widely regarded by legal observers and First Amendment scholars as a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) harassment lawsuit. SLAPPs are designed not to resolve legitimate legal claims but to use courts to intimidate, silence, and even bankrupt an adversary. SLAPP suits by their very nature violate the U.S. Constitution because they trespass on the First Amendment right to speech. Allowing these cases to proceed almost always saddles the target with backbreaking legal expenses that can silence even the most resilient leaders and organizations.
This clearly was Energy Transfer’s plan for Greenpeace, but the case was never just about Greenpeace. It was about using Greenpeace as a proxy to attack the Standing Rock Sioux’s autonomy, leadership, and sovereignty as well as the broader climate justice movement, which is trying mightily to transition our country to a clean energy economy. The protests and the climate movement’s goals are a direct threat to Energy Transfer’s business model.
That might explain why Kelcy Warren, the founder and CEO of Energy Transfer, said the main purpose of the lawsuit against Greenpeace was to “send a message” rather than to collect money. A major Trump supporter and the mastermind of the lawsuit, Warren once gave an interview in which he said activists “should be removed from the gene pool.” After he made a major contribution to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017, the Trump administration quickly approved a key easement for the North Dakota pipeline that had been denied by former President Barack Obama.
The case against Greenpeace in North Dakota had all the telltale signs of an illegitimate SLAPP—so much so that it was originally thrown out of federal court in 2019. In that case, Energy Transfer openly claimed Greenpeace had engaged in a racketeering conspiracy and “terrorism,” by speaking out against the pipeline and by doing training at the site in nonviolent direct action. The company quickly refiled the case days later in the more friendly confines of state court. Literally every single judge in the judicial district where it was filed recused themselves because of conflicts of interest.
Here are some of the more fundamental problems we observed that clearly violated the fair trial rights of Greenpeace:
- The jury—the most sacred due process protection available to a defendant—was patently biased in favor of the company. Seven of the 11 people seated had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Some had admitted they could not be fair, but the judge seated them anyway. There was no Native American or person of color on the jury even though issues of Indigenous rights were central to the trial.
- Morton County, where the trial was held and where many of the protests took place, voted 75% for Donald Trump in the last election and has extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a pre-trial survey, 97% of residents in the county said they could not be fair to Greenpeace. Yet the judge refused repeated requests by Greenpeace to move the case.
- Energy Transfer ran a major television and online advertising campaign in the county lauding itself in the weeks leading up to the trial. The company also sent a fake newspaper (called the Central North Dakota News) with pro-industry propaganda to households in the county. The court refused to allow Greenpeace to take discovery to determine how this unethical campaign to taint the jury pool happened.
- Adding to the absurdity, Greenpeace was blamed for the entire protest movement even though it played only a minimal role. The protests were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on whose ancestral land the Dakota Access pipeline was being built. In fact, only 6 of the 100,000 people who came to the protests were from Greenpeace—yet Energy Transfer was able to convince the jury to hold the organization responsible for every dollar of supposed damages that occurred over seven months of protests.
- Secrecy pervaded the proceedings. The court repeatedly refused to open a livestream to the public or to create and release transcripts. A request by media organizations (including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times) to access the livestream was denied. Thousands of key documents were sealed and thus hidden from public scrutiny.
- The judge, James Gion, made evidentiary decisions that systematically gutted Greenpeace’s ability to mount a defense. For example, a major expert report showed that the pipeline had leaked roughly 1 million gallons of drilling fluids into drinking water sources used by millions of people. Greenpeace lawyers needed the document to debunk the argument that the pipeline was safe, but the judge refused to let them use it.
- The 35-page verdict form was confusing, and the results seemed to prove the jury was in fact confused. It appears the exorbitant damages number was calculated by pulling numbers out of thin air—including millions for public relations expenses, private security costs which were being paid anyway, and refinancing costs due to various banks withdrawing from the project once they learned about the protests. (Lobbying banks is also constitutionally protected advocacy.)
The inability of Judge Gion to manage the case such that Greenpeace’s fair trial rights were respected was evident. It was almost excruciating to watch. It felt more like a choreographed show than an adversarial proceeding. Greenpeace was consistently—and in our opinion, falsely—portrayed by Energy Transfer lawyer Trey Cox as a criminal enterprise that exploited Indigenous peoples for its own gain. He used words like “mafia” and “coded language” to describe the group’s operations. (Cox works for the same law firm Chevron used to orchestrate my 993-day detention after I helped Amazon communities win the $10 billion Ecuador pollution case.)
The verdict represents more than a financial blow against Greenpeace. It has huge and very troubling implications for free speech across the nation. The result threatens the rights of religious groups and political organizations. It implicates the rights of churches and charities. If the theory of the case stands, pretty much anyone in the United States can face ruin for exercising their constitutional right to speak on an issue of public importance—even adherents of conservative causes. It’s really a corporate playbook that started with Chevron’s legal attacks on me and the Amazon communities in 2009, and continues with the assault on Greenpeace. It’s being carried out by the same law firm (Gibson Dunn & Crutcher) that markets the playbook to its corporate clients.
This case also highlights the Trump administration’s broader attack on progressive activism. From proposed legislation that would allow the Treasury Department to unilaterally revoke the nonprofit status of organizations deemed "terrorism-supporting" to the FBI’s reported plans to criminally prosecute climate groups, the goal is clear: suppress dissent. Greenpeace is in the crosshairs because its brand is global and its success in fighting polluters over the last several decades is outstanding.
This is why it is critical for Greenpeace and its allies to lean into the verdict and issue a call to action to the entire environmental movement and broader civil society organizations. Greenpeace is without question the world’s largest environmental activist group with chapters in 25 countries. It gave birth to the non-Indigenous part of the modern environmental movement in the early 1970s and captured the imagination of the world by engaging in spectacular and creative actions to save whales in the North Pacific and to stop nuclear testing. Greenpeace needs to be protected in this critical moment.
There is more than a glimmer of hope. A hearing is scheduled for July in Amsterdam on the Greenpeace lawsuit against Energy Transfer. If Greenpeace prevails on appeal in North Dakota and wins in Europe, it might be Energy Transfer paying substantial sums to Greenpeace rather than the other way around. This judgement is not nearly as dismal as many in the media are making it appear.
There are realistic scenarios where Greenpeace emerges from this experience strongerthan ever. The key is to keep grinding and calling out this abuse loudly and publicly. The world will respond.
This piece was also published on Steven Donziger’s Substack.
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