Acting Now to Protect the Future

We should not be curious about the Trump higher ed "compact."

When I signed on to be an inaugural CDAF fellow I thought I’d mostly be writing forceful, but respectful pieces engaging in the debate over how we should consider academic freedom to draw a contrast with other organizations like FIRE and Heterodox Academy.

Instead, we’re trying to beat back an authoritarian threat to higher education and the country as a whole.

This is not the fight I signed up for, but it’s the one we have, so we’d better have it.

The latest front in this battle is represented by the “higher ed compact” proposed by the Trump administration, singling out a handful of universities for potential favorable treatment when it comes to access to federal funding. Last week, we published

Brendan Cantwell

’s unpacking of why this would be a disaster of a “deal.”

This week, there have been some signs of people being at least compact “curious,” wondering if there isn’t some way to thread the needle of the Trump demands to secure money that may be existential when it comes to university operations.

In his newsletter, Union College physics professor

Chad Orzel

acknowledges that the Trump demands are “essentially gangster-ish” but also points out what he believes to be the rock and hard place that institutional leaders find themselves between.

Refusing federal funds isn’t just “hard” or even “hard”, it’s existential. It is quite literally not possible to do cutting-edge scientific research without those funds; it’s barely possible to do trailing-edge scientific research without external grants. This isn’t a coordination problem requiring clever leadership, it’s an extinction event: whole departments would need to be essentially shut down, huge numbers of people let go.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Danielle Allen says explicitly that colleges should not sign the compact, but sees the “opportunity” for a “new framework” that will bring colleges and universities back into a position where they are better aligned with the “American social contract.” She urges some of the leaders of the institutions who have been singled out by the administration to use this opportunity to negotiate some kind of agreement with Congress (on an apparent bipartisan basis).

I think Orzel is correct that refusing to cave to Trump’s demands may mean the cessation of some longstanding activities at some institutions. We’ve already seen significant interruptions along these lines. I also bow to no one when it comes to the belief that higher education institutions need to reorient around their missions while moving away from “operations,” which are primarily focused on realizing revenue.

(In fact, I wrote a whole book about it.)

But at this time, despite the pain and hardship of the kind that Orzel describes is happening, despite the fact that institutions do need change and renewal, there can be no deal with either this administration or a Congress controlled by his Republican enablers. For now, the only mission is to resist the attempts to control our free institutions through authoritarian strong-arming. The failure to do this is beyond existential.

Johns Hopkins University professor of democracy and international affairs Henry Farrell writing at The New York Times lays bare the mechanism Trump and his cronies are trying to deploy.

The struggle over regime change is about whether the aspiring authoritarians can subdue civil society. Their strategy is to play divide and conquer, rewarding friends and brutally punishing opponents. They win when society cracks, creating a self-enforcing set of expectations, in which everyone shuts up and complies because everyone expects everyone else to shut up and comply, too.

Farrell argues that the manner in which Trump is attempting this strong-arming is actually a signal of great weakness. By announcing a public plan and invitation to a handful of “favored” institutions, he’s hoping to create a kind of prisoner’s dilemma where a handful break off, starting a cascade.

The alternative to this, as Farrell argues, and as should be obvious, is “solidarity among groups who disagree ferociously on many questions, but who agree on the need to keep America democratic and rebuild institutions and social connections to make democracy more robust.”

The only reason for an institution to sign on to the compact, or in my view, to even consider negotiating terms, is if they do not ultimately share this belief in our need to make democracy more robust and the unique potential of higher education to play a role in this renewal.

Something I would add in these considerations is to consider the need to act in solidarity with the future inhabitants of our universities. The limits of my career in higher education - a series of contingent positions that could ultimately no longer sustain me economically - were sealed years before I even started teaching by prioritizing a particular part of higher education and particular groups of laborers in order to preserve their capacity to do their work.

None of this was necessarily nefarious or ill-intended, but over time, these collective decisions and others that moved institutions away from the mission orientation are what helped make schools vulnerable to these present attacks.

While the potential losses Orzel is concerned over would be real and impactful, how do we measure the loss of future generations of researchers who can only carry out their work if it meets the explicit approval of a governmental regime? This is another threat we’re already living through via Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attacks on vaccine research. Keeping researchers employed now by acceding to the compact may prevent far more research from even happening in the future.

At some point, you have to take a stand, and when the stakes are high, taking a stand will inevitably come with costs, but the costs of not taking a stand are innumerably higher.

What Trump has shown above everything else is that our democratic institutions must be significantly hardened to resist these deep existential attacks. Making a deal with those imposing the threat means we’ll never even be able to start on this journey of reclamation.

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The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.