I write after the Trump Administration has abducted our beloved student Rumeyza Öztürk (please read the profile of her by her department) for contributing a well-reasoned op-ed to our campus discussion.

Many of us are familiar with a framework in which the university is a powerful institution with resources and discretion. For example, it decides whom to admit to the middle (or upper) class and what to teach them along the way. A university may be complicit with other institutions, investing in South Africa in the 1980s or fossil fuels today. It is an “it”–potentially a target of our pressure–not a “we” whose actions reflect us.

Naturally, then, the activist’s toolkit prominently includes tactics like insisting that the institution speak on the issues of the day, occupying the administration building, or demanding that the college divest from certain companies or industries.

Some of this script has become almost automatic, and I hear it right now. But the traditional framework and toolkit do not necessarily apply when the federal government is making college students and employees and the institutions themselves into targets and victims.

Christopher Rufo has disclosed his goal of putting “universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets …. in a way that puts them in an existential terror.” Before we occupy administration buildings, we might want to think about whether Rufo would be glad to hear about that extra pressure. Indeed, the eerie quiet on many campuses probably reflects a realization that the usual toolkit won’t work.

A university is not the enemy. It is not alien to us. To a considerable extent, it is a victim, and resistance should be directed at those who bully it. We should also recognize genuine limitations that confront administrators and other official representatives of universities.

First, they must negotiate with–and litigate against–a hostile federal government. When you negotiate or litigate, you don’t disclose your strengths and weaknesses or your strategy.

Second, the administration can target colleges one by one and pick on any that are especially bold. As my friend Archon Fung says, “If you’re just considering Harvard University or Columbia University all by itself, maybe it is organizationally rational to try to get the best deal that you can … But that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.” The most effective actors may not be individual institutions but coalitions (like the Mutual Academic Defense Compact proposed for Big Ten Academic Alliance) or independent actors like the ACLU.

Third, administrative positions are not tenured. Of course, resigning can be the right thing to do. But the problem is not that individuals may lose their jobs; it is rather that an institution can be held responsible for what each administrator says.

These are reasons to give each university’s administration a bit of grace. On the other hand, their business is our business. As members of a university community, we have the right and obligation to debate what it should do and to express our views about that question.

Although universities are not democracies, they must have public spheres. As Hannah Arendt writes, tyrants “all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while only the ruler should attend to public affairs” (The Human Condition, p. 221). According to Eric Calvin and Calvin Woodward, Trump recently “marveled” that universities are “bending and saying ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.’” That “sir” is yet another indication that we are renouncing republican virtues of self-respect and honesty as we slide into tyranny. It is like the sudden doffing of hats to aristocrats that marked the end of the Florentine republic.

So what does it mean to make the the business of the university our business? For one thing, we must discuss how it should respond to existential threats.

I am just back from a quick visit to Columbia University, and I suspect that Maya Sulkin’s article entitled “Columbia President Says One Thing to Trump Admin—and Another in Private” gives a pretty good flavor of the way things have played out there. President Armstrong, who resigned on the day I visited, negotiated a deal with the Trump Administration and then reportedly tried to manage “the depth of the faculty’s frustration” with the arrangement by telling them that she would not fully comply with it. This is not exactly an accountable and public process.

Much is happening under the surface. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Belkin writes, “Columbia University is fighting two wars at once. One rages publicly against President Trump, whose administration in recent days ordered the arrest of a student protester and canceled federal funds to the Ivy League school over allegations of antisemitism. The second conflict simmers behind the scenes: a faculty civil war that pits medical doctors and engineers against political scientists and humanities scholars.”

This conflict began last year, when Columbia’s STEM professional school faculty were (in general) more likely to oppose the anti-Israel protests than liberal-arts faculty were. The conflict has intensified now that the Trump administration is holding Columbia’s STEM funds hostage in return for actions against the protesters and their faculty allies. Such intramural conflicts will intensify when any university must make deep cuts as a result of federal actions.

Looking beyond Columbia, Ian Bogost reports that he’s “spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.” It would come, basically, in the form of drastic cuts in federal grants, overhead funds, and financial aid that would destroy the current business model.

As they say in community organizing, power corrupts, but so does powerlessness. It is a mark of powerlessness to be satisfied with expressing the opinion that a university should refuse the Trump administration’s demands. Are you sure that would be the right thing to do? Do you know the costs and risks? Do you have the information that you would need to decide? Should you have the information, or would secrecy better serve the university’s interests in negotiations? Meanwhile, what are you doing to weaken the government’s side in the conflict?

As Columbia’s crisis unfolded, I would have wanted to know: How likely would the university be to prevail in our actual federal courts if it refused to comply? Would a First Amendment (or statute-based) lawsuit win? Further, what else could the Trump Administration do if the university fought back in court? For instance, revoke all visas of foreign-citizen students and employees? Cancel the university’s nonprofit status so that it would have to pay corporate taxes? How likely would the university be to prevail in lawsuits against those actions?

Next, what would happen financially if the university lost its federal funding? Columbia has an endowment worth more than $14 billion, but most of that is permanently earmarked for specific purposes; it can’t be used to replace canceled federal contracts. How much is available for flexible purposes? Could the university borrow against the endowment, and on what terms?

What would it look like to fire the employees who had been covered by federal funds, versus retaining many of those people and cutting others? How would the internal politics of the university play out if the budget were dramatically cut? Would the STEM fields or the liberal arts prevail? Would the university cut early-stage faculty without tenure or could it compel senior faculty to retire? On the other hand, could the institution gain–for example, reputationally–if it went into full revolt?

I suspect these questions are quite hard. I am sympathetic to many current campus leaders–although not all, because some appear to be cowards. But their business is our business, and we need to shoulder it.

As we respond, we must acknowledge the full extent of the threat and contemplate radical responses, including restructuring our institutions to survive. But we must not yield to fatalism. Ian Bogost’s fine article might suggest–although he doesn’t say so explicitly–that the DOGE cuts (and more that will come) are permanent. On the contrary, Trump’s actions can be reversed. His successor would not even need congressional approval, because support for higher education is already required by federal law. And colleges have powerful constituencies distributed across the country.

In short, the battle is joined, but it is by no means lost. The antagonist is not in your campus administration’s building but in the White House. Individual universities may make good or bad choices; so can each of us. A robust debate is essential; consensus is impossible and probably undesirable. We must be citizens, not spectators; sober but not demoralized; realistic and also idealistic as we struggle to make our institutions better than they were before.

---

See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; civility as equality; time again for civic courage.