Trump is coming for the universities, and they are failing to fight back

The vast majority of college and university presidents have retreated into silence or vague abstractions in the face of the Trump administration’s edicts. This is the wrong lesson for educators to impart.

President Trump and his top lieutenants, Vice President JD Vance and tech mogul Elon Musk, have mounted a multi-front attack on higher education and academic research.

They have sought to kill billions of dollars in federal support for biomedical and other scientific research, freeze a wide range of grants and loans, gain access to sensitive student personal and financial data and shut down campus programs promoting racial diversity and inclusion.

Vance captured the spirit behind this offensive in a keynote address he delivered at a conservative political conference in 2021 titled, “The Universities Are the Enemy.” The Ohio State and Yale Law School graduate did not call for merely reducing so-called woke culture or nurturing right-leaning perspectives. Rather, Vance, at the time a candidate for Senate, demanded destruction.

“If any of us want to do the things we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” he said.

Having now done just that, the Trump administration has encountered little in the way of open pushback from the most prominent universities or their leaders. Schools and educational associations have filed lawsuits seeking to reverse funding cuts and preserve diversity initiatives, so far with mixed results.

The legal battles will play out in the courts over the coming months and possibly years, with the very real danger that the administration will defy judicial orders it doesn’t like.

Already, officials at the National Institutes of Health are refusing to obey a federal court order as they continue to block scientific funding to ensure compliance with Trump’s executive orders banning “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs and “woke gender ideology.”

Meanwhile, university leaders are largely failing to articulate publicly and in plain language the reasons it’s so dangerous for the government to imperil life-saving research and punish institutions of higher education that seek to broaden opportunities for members of vulnerable populations.

One of the leading exceptions to this cowardly tendency, Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, forthrightly called the Trump administration and its supporters’ animosity toward higher ed “un-American” and “McCarthyite” during a Zoom interview with me.

Echoing a recent piece he wrote for Slate and an interview with The Washington Post, Roth said that some Trump rhetoric has been “authoritarian” and that the administration’s policies are “eroding free speech” and “undermining science.”

While some other universities are scrubbing their websites of references to DEI, Roth defended his school’s diversity initiatives and spoke strongly in support of immigrants and transgender students. “As educators,” he added, “we need to say what we believe in.”

Roth argued that leaders of many prestigious schools are hiding behind an exaggerated version of “institutional neutrality,” a doctrine championed by the University of Chicago and based in part on the premise that, by refraining from speaking out on politics themselves, university presidents will encourage more free speech on campus.

Roth, an intellectual historian, notes that there is no empirical evidence to back this notion. While he doesn’t advocate that he and his peers become partisan pugilists, weighing in on every passing political debate, Roth told me that when their core mission is threatened, educational leaders must forcefully defend their prerogatives.

Controversy in 2024 over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has influenced many university leaders to assume a defensive crouch, he explained. Called on by pro-Palestinian students to take a position on the war, campus presidents invoked institutional neutrality. Now that response has carried over to the challenge of responding to Trump.

“It’s a way of staying out of the crossfire,” he said.

The news outlet Inside Higher Ed recently reported that it had contacted 10 universities with institutional neutrality policies, “all among the wealthiest in the nation, with multibillion-dollar endowments.”

Only one, Yale, provided a statement to the outlet, though some others shared prior messages from their presidents to their campus communities regarding the federal funding freeze and Trump attacks on DEI. Inside Higher Ed added, “Of those messages, none directly connected their concerns to the Trump administration or said what was driving federal actions.”

Yale said in its statement that it “remains committed to the mission, to the principles of free expression and academic excellence and to supporting the community.”

Roth, who is 67 and has been president of Wesleyan for an unusually long 17 years, emphasized that he’s no firebrand. Smiling, he said that many students on his generally liberal campus view him as a conservative.

He has long acknowledged that elite universities need to cultivate more conservative perspectives. But that doesn’t make these schools “the enemy” or legitimate an attempt to destroy them.

It is past time for other university presidents to emulate Roth and summon the courage to justify, in strong terms, what they do for a living

Paul M. Barrett is the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

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