A handful of college presidents emerge as leaders of burgeoning resistance movement against Trump
While the Harvard community anxiously awaits the school’s response to demands from the Trump administration, the heads of several other elite universities are emerging as leaders of a burgeoning resistance to the president’s attacks on higher education.
For now, most of that resistance has come in the form of public comments rather than in a direct confrontation with the administration, such as refusing to implement changes or face the loss of federal funding.
The schools include Princeton, Brown, Wesleyan, and Mount Holyoke College, where president Danielle Holley said in an interview that higher education faces an “existential crisis” that requires college leaders to speak out because “the very values that higher education is built upon are under attack.”
As a small liberal arts school, Mount Holyoke doesn’t have as much federal funding on the line as major research universities. Nonetheless, Holley has previously said the women’s school in South Hadley would rather forgo federal contracts than abolish DEI practices, as President Trump has demanded of higher education institutions.
“If we don’t speak up and fight back about what our core values are, there won’t be anything left for us,” she added.
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Staff, faculty, prominent alumni call for Harvard to stand against Trump’s threats to academic freedomWhat will Harvard do? Trump demands would affect DEI, academic departments, international students.Trump is threatening Harvard with funding cuts in the billions. But what does he want the university to do?Trump administration will ‘review’ billions in funding tied to HarvardHolley’s comments make her an outlier so far among most university leaders, many of whom have largely adopted a more muted response to the Trump administration’s pressure campaign. In recent weeks, the government has paused or threatened to freeze billions in federal funding at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn and Princeton universities as federal officials investigate elite universities for what they say are potential civil rights violations.
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The administration has accused some schools of tolerating antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Gaza war, alleged they engage in racial discrimination through their diversity programs, and taken aim at policies allowing transgender women to participate in women’s sports.
But faculty members, students, and prominent alumni have called on leading institutions to take a stronger stand against what many see as a crackdown on academic freedom and political speech by the Trump administration.
There are signs some are heeding those calls.
The president of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber, encouraged his peers to oppose what he views as threats to academic freedom.
“It is a crisis,” Eisgruber said in an episode of The New York Times podcast “The Daily” on Wednesday. “The funding that is essential to the quality of American research and America’s universities is under threat. That’s a crisis for universities and it is a crisis for our country.”
The Trump administration has put millions in research funding at Princeton on hold, but so far has not issued a series of demands as it had to Harvard and Columbia.
Nonetheless, Eisgruber said Princeton will not “make concessions,” even if it risks losing federal funding. He told the Times the university would contest in court any directives to put an academic department under a form of receivership, as the government directed Columbia to do.
“I believe it is essential for us to protect academic freedom,” Eisgruber said.
Brown University president Christina Paxson recently issued a full-throated commitment to preserving academic freedom and said a “troubling picture is taking shape regarding the enormity of what’s at stake for Brown and other institutions.” (Her message came before the White House announced plans to pause $510 million of federal funding.)
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Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents about 1,600 colleges and universities, said he is working to circulate an open letter among industry associations and leaders of individual schools that would emphasize the need to preserve academic freedom and US research preeminence.
Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, has also spoken out in interviews and authored pointed op-eds.
“Appeasement right now is a disastrous policy,” Roth said in a recent Globe interview. “What’s at stake here is freedom. If you give up your freedoms to someone who wants more power, they’re going to take more of your freedom.”
The Trump administration has made it hard for university presidents to push back by presenting their funding threats as a crackdown on antisemitism, Mitchell said.
“It’s hard to pull those apart because presidents don’t want to be perceived as saying, ‘We don’t think we need to do better to protect our Jewish students,‘ ” Mitchell said. “Every college president I know agrees with the point that we need to do a better job protecting our Jewish students, period. Don’t hold research hostage to the solution to that problem.”
Eisgruber, the Princeton leader, said fighting antisemitism is “a fundamental responsibility for any university president,” and is something schools should work on in partnership with the government.
But, he added, the government “should be observing the due process that our law provides” for civil rights investigations, including allowing universities to “respond and offer their side of the story.” Due process, he added, was not observed in the case of Columbia.
Even so, Eisgruber, who is Jewish, also pushed back against the government’s argument that antisemitism is rampant on elite campuses. He personally received at least two antisemitic messages last year, which he said is “unacceptable,” but added such incidents at Princeton were “marginal.”
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Mitchell said Eisgruber, Paxson, and Roth are better positioned than most to speak out because they have been in their roles longer than most college presidents.
“They have created credibility with their peers, they have credibility with the donor community, and with government agencies,” Mitchell said. “I’m eager to see how many other people join.”
Meanwhile, Harvard, Columbia, and UPenn have all had turnover at the top amid the turmoil over the handling of campus protests and allegations of antisemitism. In March, Columbia replaced interim president Katrina Armstrong amid negotiations with the Trump administration.
At Harvard, school leaders are being importuned by students, alumni, and faculty members to take a strong stance after the administration demanded numerous changes and began reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal funding the university and its affiliated institutions receive.
The government has a similar inquiry at Columbia. There the Trump administration placed $5 billion of funding under review, paused $400 million of research funding, and then sent the school a list of demands. Columbia’s leaders acquiesced to nearly all of the directives.
Harvard, for its part, has not said how it will respond to the Trump administration’s demands, which include ending diversity programs, implementing “merit-based” admissions and hiring practices, cooperating with federal immigration authorities, and changing student disciplinary procedures. On Monday, the university gave the first public indication it’s anticipating losing federal funding by borrowing $750 million, which spokesperson Jason Newton described as preparing “for a range of financial circumstances.”
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The Trump administration has deployed various strategies to target funding at elite universities. An antisemitism task force from several federal agencies announced reviews of funding at Harvard and Columbia and then sent specific demands, which critics saw as an extraordinary infringement on universities’ independence. The task force directed Columbia to place a Middle East studies department under new oversight, and told Harvard to close diversity offices and cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security, which has arrested and attempted to deport international students at several universities.
At other schools, including Brown, the White House, not the task force, has led the communications, but so far provided fewer details. Although a White House spokesperson confirmed last week that the government plans to pause $510 million of funding for Brown, the university still has “not heard from the federal government,” spokesperson Brian Clark said Wednesday.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns. Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.