It’s a scary time for universities. The battle between the Trump administration and higher education is coming to a head.
In a whirlwind of events this past month, the administration has cut $400 million of Columbia University’s federal funding and froze $175 million of the University of Pennsylvania’s funding and is threatening to do the same with $510 million of Brown University funds. If they don’t comply with the list of demands the Trump administration sent them, Harvard University could lose the $9 billion in funding that is currently “under review.” As of April 15, Harvard refused to meet the administration’s demands.
However, Columbia, which had also received a list similar to Harvard’s, agreed to meet the administration’s demands in a desperate attempt to regain their $400 million of federal funding. As a result, the university will hire 36 “special officers” with the authority to remove or arrest people from campus, will ban students from wearing face masks to conceal their identity and will overturn its protest policies.
But above all, this agreement sends the signal that Trump’s plan to completely rewrite the government’s relationship with education is working, at least at some universities.
At an institutional level, I’ve found that many universities have not responded with outrage, but have rather retreated into their shells. It’s disappointing — and, in my opinion, no different at Colgate University.
It’s not like Colgate hasn’t done anything. After the Department of Education under the Trump Administration put out a “Dear Colleague” letter berating any university’s encouragement of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, our administration took action. L. Hazel Jack, vice president and chief of staff to the president at Colgate, sent a university-wide email on March 6 stating how Trump’s interference will not hinder their commitment to “access and all types of diversity.” President Brian W. Casey has also previously talked with the Maroon-News about how he is in constant communication with other university presidents, board trustees and state officials in order to uphold “our commitment to academic freedom and academic discourse and the care of our students, faculty and staff.”
But in the fall of 2024 Casey formed a “Task Force on Institutional Voice” to help choose when Colgate should issue statements about world events. The group concluded that the University should only speak up when the events directly affect Colgate itself. I think this is the wrong conclusion.
It’s true, the stakes are high. For any institution, speaking out against the Trump administration could mean losing the millions of dollars that students depend on for education and faculty depend on for research. It could mean cutting jobs and shrinking university-funded programs.
But what are the consequences of not speaking out? People might keep their jobs, but for how long? Trump’s plans to dismantle government organizations that fund federal programs threaten job availability and security everywhere, especially at universities.
To clarify, when I say “speak out,” I’m thinking of what Wesleyan University’s President Michael S. Roth has been doing. He writes constantly about his stance on current events, unafraid to chastise universities’ deference to neutrality.
I know speaking out in this way is easy for me to ask for because I wouldn’t be the one doing it. But it is my education. It’s also the education of thousands at Colgate and millions across America. And that is why I feel the need to say something.
Even though there is a lot to lose, there is also so much to fight for. To me, the potential elimination of a university’s strive for academic exploration and truth is what is really at stake in this battle between higher education and Trump’s will. Columbia is already in the palm of the president’s hand. Its values are nothing next to power. Doesn’t that strike you as wrong? Shouldn’t we do something more than just talk amongst ourselves?
I acknowledge that there have been many Colgate-sponsored events about Trump since he took office, ones in which speakers aren’t afraid to be critical. These are good at creating a space for intellectual conversations among a group of elite college students and academics, but what’s missing is some kind of outward stance that results from this internal discussion.
One response to my critique of higher education’s reaction to Trump’s policies is that it will isolate certain political groups, and is actually a departure from the intellectual diversity that I believe decisiveness would be protecting. But I think it’s easy to confuse, or Trump likes to make it easy to confuse, the effect of protests on tolerance and equality. Sometimes people think that in stating your opinion, you’re disrespecting other beliefs. But this is not the case in this situation — I don’t think that standing up against populist authoritarianism is the same as disregarding political diversity.
Colgate is not known for its campus activism, and to me, this isn’t something to be proud of. Political inactivity doesn’t send the message that we as a student body have learned how to solve all political differences and can find common ground on any issue. It sends the message that we don’t have opinions, or at least ones not strong enough to stand up for, and that we are fine with submitting to the threats put our way. But this isn’t true. We, as an institution and as students, have beliefs in democracy and faith in morality, and we want to see them both upheld. We care, and at Colgate, we should be less reluctant to show it.
