“President Trump has declared that this country’s leading universities are sites of ‘anti-American insanity.’ He has tried to cut their funding for scientific research. His administration has announced investigations into diversity programs and floated new taxes on university endowments. Brown and Columbia have had faculty members or former students detained and threatened with deportation. On Thursday the administration suspended $175 million of funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies on transgender athletes,” according an opinion essay published yesterday in The New York Times.

Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology (University of California, Merced), comments that “fearing sanction or retribution, universities have begun to placate the administration, banning diversity statements in faculty hiring or weighing whether to strip trigger words like “diverse” from their hospital systems’ websites. In doing so, they risk abandoning their roles as centers of free speech and critical debate in the name of appeasement.”

Eaton argues that “top universities must instead exercise the financial independence afforded by their endowments, which are commonly valued in the tens of billions. Their leaders should collectively declare they will not suppress lawful free speech, diversity programs or campus research to appease any president. The wealthiest universities, in particular, must pledge to use all available endowment funds as a backstop for any federal funding cuts to research, educational programs or student financial aid at their schools, barring any donor restrictions. Endowments could even fund legal defense for students and scholars who are threatened with deportation.”

“Thus far, university presidents have largely kept their heads down instead of uniting to oppose Mr. Trump’s assault. That is a mistake. A key authoritarian strategy is to single out prominent individuals or institutions for repression so that others, afraid, forgo legitimate criticism of the authoritarian leader. Often universities are some of the first institutions that authoritarians attack. Make no mistake: The Trump administration’s punitive cuts to federal research grants and detention of university students or faculty members, couched in the president’s grievances over diversity programs and campus protests, are early signs of this strategy at work in America.”

State universities and liberal arts colleges often have small endowments, so they do not have the same ability to resist federal government threats and defend academic freedom.

So, Charlie Eaton is correct that elite private universities and flagship state universities need to play a leadership role for higher education institutions in resisting the many unconstitutional and illegal actions instigated by the Trump administration and the so-called DOGE team.

Eaton, Charlie. “$15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President.” The New York Times (25 March 2025).