UNLV interim president signs on to call for constructive engagement amid ‘government overreach'
The American Association of Colleges and Universities posted the statement titled, 'A Call for Constructive Engagement,' to its website on April 22 and has continued to accept signatures from current leaders of colleges, universities, and scholarly societies.
The statement was last updated Sunday at 3 p.m. ET with 514 signatures at the time of publication. The statement read in full:
As leaders of America's colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses. We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.
America's system of higher learning is as varied as the goals and dreams of the students it serves. It includes research universities and community colleges; comprehensive universities and liberal arts colleges; public institutions and private ones; freestanding and multi-site campuses. Some institutions are designed for all students, and others are dedicated to serving particular groups. Yet, American institutions of higher learning have in common the essential freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom. Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.
Because of these freedoms, American institutions of higher learning are essential to American prosperity and serve as productive partners with government in promoting the common good. Colleges and universities are engines of opportunity and mobility, anchor institutions that contribute to economic and cultural vitality regionally and in our local communities. They foster creativity and innovation, provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce, and are themselves major employers. They nurture the scholarly pursuits that ensure America's leadership in research, and many provide healthcare and other essential services. Most fundamentally, America's colleges and universities prepare an educated citizenry to sustain our democracy.
The price of abridging the defining freedoms of American higher education will be paid by our students and our society. On behalf of our current and future students, and all who work at and benefit from our institutions, we call for constructive engagement that improves our institutions and serves our republic.
Heavey's signature comes after federal immigration authorities revoked multiple UNLV international students' visas.
In March, the Education Department announced it is investigating more than 50 colleges — including UNLV — over what it called 'racial preferences' in academics or scholarships, a move that comes amid the Trump administration's wider crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. The department said 45 schools were under investigation for partnering with the Ph.D. project.
Three former UNLV professors — including Navarro Velez who died in the December 2023 shooting on UNLV's campus in which three faculty members died — participated in the program. UNLV, in a statement, acknowledged its professors' involvement in the Ph.D. project.
'UNLV is aware of the federal investigation,' the statement said. 'Three former UNLV professors were participants in the mentoring program known as the PHD Project.
The board of regents officially approved Heavey as UNLV interim president in an 11-to-one vote Thursday. Heavey stepped into the role as officer in charge after the sudden resignation of Former UNLV President Keith Whitfield in March.
University of Nevada, Reno President Brian Sandoval also signed the statement.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Cracker Barrel loses $94 million in a day after disastrous rebrand sparks MAGA outrage
Cracker Barrel lost $94 million in a day after a disastrous rebrand sparked outrage among President Donald Trump's 'Make America Great Again' base. The new logo for the Southern-themed restaurant chain has been blasted by Trump's MAGA base claiming the design is 'woke' and 'boring.' The logo, which formerly featured a seated man in overalls leaning on a barrel, now simply has the name 'Cracker Barrel' on it, with the classic gold background. That anger led to a drop in the stock value for the company. It finished Thursday at $54.80 a share, down about 7.15 percent on the day. The stock was able to rebound from a midday low where it was down about 15 percent. Cracker Barrel's stock drop led to the company losing about $94 million in value in just a day. CBS News' Money Watch reported in the early afternoon Cracker Barrel had lost nearly $200 million but it was able to make up some ground before the closing bell. Cracker Barrel said its new logo is 'now rooted even more closely to the iconic barrel shape and word mark that started it all.' The restaurant chain first opened its doors in 1969 and has gone through five logo redesigns. The previous logo design with the seated man was created in 1977. After nearly 50 years of the old logo, some MAGA figures have voiced their frustration, accusing Cracker Barrel of changing it as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. Congressman Byron Donalds of Florida, who at one point worked for Cracker Barrel, wrote on X, 'Their logo was iconic and their unique restaurants were a fixture of American culture. No one asked for this woke rebrand. It's time to Make Cracker Barrel Great Again.' Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh wrote: 'Yes let's remove everything charming and distinct from the logo and make it as generic and boring as we possibly can.' 'WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel ??!,' Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, wrote in response to a post by the Woke War Room account attacking the company's CEO Julie Felss Masino and her 'DEI regime.' Owen Shroyer, a right-wing pundit, told Cracker Barrel of its old logo, 'Yes, own the hilarious irony of using a racial slur against your main demographic. It will attract that younger crowd you're reaching for. Or serve better food.'
Yahoo
31 minutes ago
- Yahoo
It's been a confusing week - and Trump's been made to look weak
It's been a confusing week. The Monday gathering of European leaders and Ukraine's president with Donald Trump at the White House was highly significant. Ukraine latest: Trump changes tack The leaders went home buoyed in the knowledge that they'd finally convinced the American president not to abandon Europe. He had committed to provide American "security guarantees" to Ukraine. The details were sketchy, and sketched out only a little more through the week (we got some noise about American air cover), but regardless, the presidential commitment represented a clear shift from months of isolationist rhetoric on Ukraine - "it's Europe's problem" and all the rest of it. Yet it was always the case that, beyond that clear achievement for the Europeans, would have a problem with it. Trump's envoy's language last weekend - claiming that had agreed to Europe providing "Article 5-like" guarantees for Ukraine, essentially providing it with a NATO-like collective security blanket - was baffling. Russia gives two fingers to the president And throughout this week, Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly and predictably undermined the whole thing, pointing out that Russia would never accept any peace plan that involved any European or NATO troops in Ukraine. "The presence of foreign troops in Ukraine is completely unacceptable for Russia," he said yesterday, echoing similar statements stretching back years. Remember that NATO's "eastern encroachment" was the justification for Russia's "special military operation" - the invasion of Ukraine - in the first place. All this makes Trump look rather weak. It's two fingers to the president, though interestingly, the Russian language has been carefully calibrated not to poke Trump but to mock European leaders instead. That's telling. Read more on Ukraine: The bilateral meeting hailed by Trump on Monday as agreed and close - "within two weeks" - looks decidedly doubtful. Maybe that's why he went along with Putin's suggestion that there be a bilateral, not including Trump, first. It's easier for the American president to blame someone else if it's not his meeting, and it doesn't happen. NATO defence chiefs met on Wednesday to discuss the details of how the security guarantees - the ones Russia won't accept - will work. European sources at the meeting have told me it was all a great success. And to the comments by Lavrov, a source said: "It's not up to Lavrov to decide on security guarantees. Not up to the one doing the threatening to decide how to deter that threat!" The argument goes that it's not realistic for Russia to say from which countries Ukraine can and cannot host troops. Would Trump threaten force? The problem is that if Europe and the White House want Russia to sign up to some sort of peace deal, then it would require agreement from all sides on the security arrangements. The other way to get Russia to heel would be with an overwhelming threat of force. Something from Trump, like: "Vladimir - look what I did to Iran...". But, of course, isn't a nuclear power. Something else bothers me about all this. The core concept of a "security guarantee" is an ironclad obligation to defend Ukraine into the future. Future guarantees would require treaties, not just a loose promise. I don't see Trump's America truly signing up to anything that obliges them to do anything. A layered security guarantee which builds over time is an option, but from a Kremlin perspective, would probably only end up being a repeat of history and allow them another "justification" to push back. Read more from Sky News: Image and reality don't seem to match Among Trump's stream of social media posts this week was an image of him waving his finger at Putin in Alaska. It was one of the few non-effusive images from the summit. He posted it next to an image of former president Richard Nixon confronting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev - an image that came to reflect American dominance over the Soviet Union. That may be the image Trump wants to portray. But the events of the past week suggest image and reality just don't match. The past 24 hours in Ukraine have been among the most violent to date.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Stephen Miller is undercutting Trump's war on democracy
In the public imagination, Stephen Miller is the dark heart of the Trump administration — a pulsing mass of anti-immigrant hatred behind its most aggressively authoritarian moves. But what if there's a different story to be told — that Stephen Miller's obsession with deportations isn't helping President Donald Trump secure control over the country, but actively undermining it? Take Trump's militarization of Washington, DC, as an example. The move is puzzling, in that it's authoritarian in principle but ineffective in execution. While seemingly designed to expand Trump's ability to control the American public, the on-the-ground deployments are doing nothing to repress protest — in fact, they're assuredly generating far more resistance than they're suppressing. So what's going on? The best answer I've found is a recent piece from Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (and Vox alum). Looking granularly at the details of the operations in DC, Lind found they heavily focused on immigration enforcement — things like forcing DC police to cooperate with ICE and setting up checkpoints to try and trap people they think look like migrants. 'Every day since the federal takeover, DC residents have posted videos of federal agents — often with a mix of uniforms or no official badges at all — in patrols, staffing checkpoints, or going after people. And the people they've been going after have largely been (apparent) immigrants,' Lind writes. (Her findings are supported by recent on-the-ground reporting from the Wall Street Journal.) This is, I think, a viciously cruel policy (not to mention a waste of federal resources). But it is also a very ineffective policy when it comes to consolidating authoritarian control. Undocumented migrants do not vote, but the administration's ceaseless efforts to deport them en masse is galvanizing street protests and tanking GOP support among Latino voters. This is Miller's influence on policy made manifest: Obsessed with deportations, he has done everything he can to turn the federal government into a deportation machine. And it's actually hurting the overall Trumpist cause. Stephen Miller is doing authoritarianism wrong I wrote a book about how democracies become autocracies. One of my central findings is that, for would-be autocrats, it is exceptionally important to maintain democratic appearances. If you are too openly authoritarian before consolidating enough power, you're likely to galvanize a potent wave of popular resistance. The paradigmatic recent example is South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's attempted power grab in December. Instead of subtly chipping away at Korean democracy, Yoon simply declared martial law overnight and tried to arrest opposition leaders. The result was an immediate street uprising and a parliamentary vote nullifying the martial law declaration. Yoon was impeached and is currently on trial for insurrection, a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death. The paradigmatic counter-case is Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. After winning power in 2010, Orbán and his Fidesz party made a blizzard of confusing changes to Hungarian law designed to make elections less competitive and bring the courts to heel. They then spent years expanding their power, using financial and regulatory pressures to take control over the press and civil society. Today, the electoral deck is so stacked in the ruling party's favor that even a wildly popular opposition leader may not be able to win the 2026 elections. Yoon and Orbán represent poles we can use to evaluate the Trump administration's authoritarian effectiveness. The more Trump acts like Yoon, attempting to nakedly assert the powers of a police-state ruler in a democracy, the more likely he is to generate meaningful pushback. The more he acts like Orbán, hiding behind a legalistic veneer, the more insidious the threat becomes. By this metric, the most dangerous developments of the Trump administration have been his attacks on universities, his successful shakedown of CBS, his push to get Republican states to do pre-midterm gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court's willingness to bless his mass firings of federal employees (at least temporarily). All of those developments tangibly affect American democracy. Each chips away at a key institution — civil society, the free press, fair elections, and limits on executive power — that prevent authoritarian consolidation. Each moves Trump meaningfully closer toward building an Orbán-style regime (even if the United States is still pretty far off from the terminus). But the militarized immigration crackdown championed by Miller doesn't advance that goal in any meaningful way. It combines the optics of authoritarianism — sending masked, unidentified armed men into the streets of American cities — with a lack of actual repressive capacity. Look, for example, at this recent video of DC residents (in my old neighborhood) chasing off unidentified federal agents. The feds are armed and masked, but the protesters are totally fearless. Why? Because unlike an outright authoritarian state, where demonstrators are repressed with deadly force, Trump's guys aren't authorized to fire indiscriminately on crowds. Their show of force is just that — a show. And people on the ground, in DC and LA before it, are calling their bluff. Miller's crackdown is good at two things: deporting undocumented people and terrorizing the communities they live in. I find this abhorrent: He is hurting innocent people, and the US writ large, for no good reason. But the fact that Miller's policy is morally terrible does not mean it is contributing to Trump's broader authoritarian project. In fact, its naked cruelty and thuggishness are the best reasons to think it's counterproductive. Back in November 2019, Miller said in a meeting that deporting immigrants was his reason for living. 'This is all I care about,' he said, per the New Yorker. 'I don't have a family. I don't have anything else. This is my life.' That same month, Miller got engaged to his now-wife Katie. The level of monomania on display there, an obsession with immigration so total that it erased his own fiancée, has been even more vividly on display in this administration — where he has personally redirected ICE officers responsible for disrupting organized crime to arresting random construction workers at Home Depot. I don't think Miller is thinking carefully about whether his deportation campaign is contributing to Trump's authoritarian consolidation of power. I think he just wants to deport people, and the consequences be damned. Mostly, those consequences are horrific. But if there's any silver lining, it's this: Miller is helping awaken millions of Americans to the true nature of their current government.
