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What Must Universities Become Today in Face of Trump?
In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
Jun 08, 2025
Universities face vitriolic attacks today from the Trump regime. Several could even go under. When you keep in mind that he also targets other institutions of civil society—such as law firms, labor unions, the media, assorted churches, and the like—it becomes woefully clear what is going on.
The Trump regime seeks to force all independent sources of news, truth, and judgment to their knees, doing so to rapidly impose a fascist oligopoly that limits and demeans every orientation and viewpoint except his own. His is a recipe most autocratic regimes introduce early in the day. As M. Gessen has reminded us in a superb piece in the New York Times, the silencing of diverse centers of judgment and opinion marks the early stages of an authoritarian movement. I quote from her experience in Russia during the middle stages of the Putin takeover:
"I was shaken when Russian invaded Georgia in 2008. My world change when three young women were sentenced to jail for a protest in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn't breathe when Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was posoned in 2020, arrested in 2021, and almost killed in prison in 2024. And when Russian invaded Ukraine in 2022." (NYT, June 1, 2025, p B4).
The Gessen message is that it is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life. If Trump has not yet made the same moves as Putin, his Big Lies, pardons of hundreds of convicted insurrectionists, attacks on independent centers of civil society, and extra-legal exportation of people to concentration camps in other countries are well on the way. We are shocked at each new round and then tend to forget how shocking such events were.
It is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life.
So, the first thing universities and colleges must do today is to join hands with other institutions of civil society which are—or are about to—face the same sort of massive pressures, pressures often backed by militia threats to the livelihoods and safety of people in those same institutions. That is exactly why Trump, very early, pardoned the militias who joined him in drives to deny and violently overturn the results of the 2020 election. He may well need them in the future. "Stand back and stand by." It is also why Inspector Generals were immediately removed from key institutions in the government and why Elon Musk was given free rein to wreak havoc on government institutions focused on health for the poor, medical studies, and new scientific research.
The 'Viewpoint Diversity' Fraud
It must be emphasized from the start, too, how fraudulent new movements are within several universities—led, I fear, by the one in which I have worked—to "pluralize" intellectual perspectives within their schools. It is now called "Viewpoint Diversity." Those are attempts to move universities toward the right of the current distribution of power and opinion while the right itself holds bankrupt views about future dangers and possibilities. The fraudulence of this movement is easy to expose: If you campaign to move university faculty to the right in the name of institutional pluralism, why not—with the same vociferousness—call for greater economic and ideological diversity among university trustees, university presidents, corporate boardrooms, right wing think tanks, silicon valley entrepreneurs, the Claremont Institute, and Fox News reporting? For surely, these institutions on the right could use more diversity. The reason is that the so carefully selected calls for diversity within universities alone are designed to draw university culture—as one of the precarious holdouts against an autocratic regime—more securely into the orbit of that regime. Greater faculty "diversity," neoliberal university administrations, and external pressure will do the job.
Neoliberal university presidents and trustees may not love aspects of the Trump agenda, but too many show by their deeds that they prefer it to a university in which faculty control the curriculum, bloated administrative staffs are reduced, students express political opinions freely, and peaceful protests are treated as welcome aspects of university life that can educate wider publics about things many had failed heretofore to grasp. There have been valuable university challenges to public opinion to reconsider the Vietnam War, to resist the Iraq War, to ignite civil rights, to challenge Israeli genocide in Gaza, and to come to terms with an emerging period of climate wreckage that corporate/state institutions now try to ignore, downplay, or cover up.
The University As New Beacon
So, what should universities and colleges be doing today, then? Well, first, we must relieve our decades long great dependence on the state by curtailing military research. Faculties, students, and parents must also band together to demand a pluralization of boards of trustees, as we pull back the autocratic powers too many university and college presidents have assumed in recent years. More than that, faculties, students, and ecologists must demand that more teaching and research resources be devoted to studying the dangers radical climate wreckage poses to life in so many regimes today. (I note that this has never been one of the "signature" initiatives pursued by the president of my university, though he loves AI research).
As it becomes clear how current hurricane and tornado surges, wildfires, faster glacier melts, ocean rises, and a slowing ocean conveyor are harbingers of worst to come unless radical transformations are undertaken, university humanists, earth scientists, and social scientists must find new ways to work together. While some schools lead the way in this regard, many others are populated by faculties and students who would also give climate wreckage their highest teaching and research priority if only their trustees, provosts, and presidents would stop discouraging and marginalizing these activities. Too many of the latter are too close for comfort to Trump in this regard
The Risks and the Stakes
These are all big and risky moves. They will incite further Trump attacks as they focus on an accelerating condition he calls "climate crap." And yet, much more is needed, too. Universities must make themselves into living eco-egalitarian beacons today, doing so to encourage other institutions of civil society to follow suit. Most faculty know that today university presidents, deans, and college coaches too often pull down extravagant salaries and benefits. Those perks often draw their lifestyles and thinking closer to big neoliberal donors who increasingly see themselves inhabiting a different world from people in everyday life. This encourages college presidents to mimic the lifestyles of the donor class and to downplay the educational needs of the poor, racial minorities, and future high school teachers. The current structure of the university is exquisitely designed to foment working-class resentments among those who know their kids need to go to college but can't afford the exorbitant bill to do so.
Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being.
So, let's work to usher into being student/faculty/parent/movements to demand that the highest paid members of a university make, say, no more than eight times as much as the lowest paid members—the food staff, the janitors, the support staff, the groundskeepers, etc. Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being. One immediate effect will be to lower the cost of admission for working-class students.
These egalitarian practices must be joined to a variety of ecological practices, practices which enact in college organization what ecologists know are urgently needed in the wider society too. The university will now become a center in which fossil fuels are a thing of the past, replaced by solar and wind power. Its new buildings—hopefully now emphasizing the classroom buildings that are sorely needed—will also be constructed to conform to the most advanced ecological designs. Such redesigns can draw upon faculty and students from multiple fields to participate in their perfection.
A Utopian Agenda and Expose
Of course, it will be announced immediately that these are all utopian proposals. They are sooo unrealistic. They are indeed. In being utopian they not only expose how right-wing, anti-egalitarian, and anti-ecological the Trump regime is today. They also show how too many university presidents and trustees have lost their way as well, adopting modes of realism woefully inadequate to the risks faced today by universities and the larger society. University leaders often assume they can float above the inequalities and climate wreckage of today, and they too often support a university matrix that is desperately unattuned to the most urgent needs of the larger society in which they are nested. In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
Under a new, or revivified, university regime, presidents, provosts and deans--albeit a much smaller cohort than the number which currently bloats these schools—will propose agendas to the faculty rather than imposing them from above and waiting for laggards to buy into their problematic neoliberal image of the world. They will enact democratic processes rather than putting the squeeze on faculty, students, and parents from every side.
When it comes to Harvard against Trump and Musk, the faculty must always side with Harvard. When it comes to the current authoritarianism of too many university presidents, provosts, deans, and trustees, more faculty members must call upon a new generation of students, faculty and parents to repair the damage collaborating university regimes have wrought both in their internal organization and in the public face they present to society. We must speak more vociferously to a wider public about the real situation the United States faces, as its autocratic leaders attack democracy, affirm racism, accelerate inequality, flirt with economic disaster, ignore climate wreckage, and refuse to acknowledge how their own climate policies help to promote the escalating migrations from south to north they so cruelly use to foment fascist energies at home. The odds, of course, are against those who seek to make the university a new center of egalitarian creativity and ecological awareness. But since the most likely alternative to that is disaster, those are the odds we must face and strive to overcome.
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The Palestine Exception, Right-Wing Elite Capture, and New Student Visa Rules
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking.
May 30, 2025
People in the United States of America continue to allow the normalization of very dangerous measures solidifying authoritarian government, and the administration of President Donald Trump continues to escalate each measure. The latest measure arrived on May 27 when Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended all embassy reviews of applications for student and exchange visas from foreign nationals, stating that a new policy including social media vetting will be announced soon. Rubio also suspended scheduling any new interviews for three types of visas that enable foreign nationals to participate in U.S. institutions: F (for students at academic institutions), M (for students in vocational or non-academic schools), and J (for teaching and research exchange visitors). The new policy has not been revealed yet.
Here is yet another case that should break the people of the U.S.—if not the feckless supposed opposition party, the Democrats—from their political paralysis. The Trump administration inherited a largely informal apparatus of campus repression relying on the defamation, arrest, and suspension of students and faculty members who opposed the U.S. role in supporting what the Israeli government now openly admits is a campaign of deliberate starvation and full land dispossession of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump’s administration seized upon the zeitgeist already brewed by university leaders and fueled by a coalition of Zionist and far-right organizations, and seized it with an aim far more expansive than simply punishing pro-Palestinian activism and speech.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state.
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking. The “Palestine exception” has proven to be a useful proxy as its enforcers are not simply the usual MAGA suspects, but include many liberal Democrats and cultural custodians who spent the last few years warning of Trump’s dangers while gladly serving as the handmaids of a repression whose contours they foolishly believed they could limit to one supposedly justified cause. The collaboration with only nominal opponents of antisemitism was a clever move by the MAGA right, as it bound them to silence in a pivotal early phase.
Now the later phase of the Trumpian war on free speech and free thought in higher education is unleashed, and the sorts of powers that Rubio will soon wield over student and researcher visas will allow for the state to pick and choose who enters the halls of academe—and who will be punished for eventually transgressing servitude to the ruling ideology.
Some people are mistakenly calling Trump’s higher education measures an “attack on universities.” Trump’s agenda is far from an attack—it is a right-wing elite capture, in which the current liberal managerial keepers of institutions either are replaced with MAGA counterparts or the current keepers break down and comply (and some already have). Jokes abound about the possible mismatch of some poorly-educated MAGA bootlicker running Harvard or Yale, but Trump’s administration and its congressional lackeys are mostly Ivy Leaguers themselves. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the most strident congressional Inquisitor of college presidents, is a Yale graduate like Vice President JD Vance. Trump went to Penn. Steve Bannon went to Harvard, like Pete Hegseth.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state. He has tried the same at Columbia University, and his administration states that the University of California system is next. The Task Force on Antisemitism led by gadfly former television commentator Leo Terrell functions as a spear tip of moralistic outrage masking the shakedown that Trump’s gangster presidency is actually waging. Trump and his collaborators don’t want to shut down Harvard, Columbia, or any institution of higher education whose trustees will turn over the keys to the MAGA regime. As the DOGE “cuts” demonstrate, the Trump administration understands how to effect ideological capture using traditional but empty Republican rhetoric about balancing budgets and preventing “waste.” The goal is to claim the spoils of the state, and use all state organs to assault private institutions that harbor resistance to the state.
Of course, this ideological capture is far from abstract as it brutally impacts the lives of foreign students lawfully studying and exerting their First Amendment rights (which apply to everyone on our soil, contrary to the Trump doctrine’s insistence otherwise) in the United States. Before both the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in May, Rubio reiterated his servile liturgy on the pro-Palestinian students targeted by the Trump administration, sometimes at the behest of Zionist organizations like Betar.
“I will continue to revoke student visas,” Rubio stated, while also repeating an argument ad hominem that the targeted students occupied and damaged campus buildings and threatened other students. When asked about the case of the now-released Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Özturk, who was arrested and disappeared to Louisiana for the mere act of co-signing a student newspaper editorial, Rubio reset to the same defamatory lines about breaking campus rules and a visa not being a right but a privilege.
Georgetown University postdoctoral researcher Badar Khan Suri, baselessly accused by the Department of Homeland Security of spreading Hamas propaganda, was chained at the ankles and wrists during his detention at Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, where he was housed from his March arrest until a federal judge ordered his release in May. Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who actually holds a green card and not a visa, remains incarcerated in Louisiana and missed the birth of his child and his graduation ceremony.
While the ultimate goal of the Trump administration is a right-wing elite capture of higher education, especially its most prestigious institutions, the weaponization of the Palestine exception will not be dissipating any time soon. In the wake of federal judges freeing some of the students disappeared for their speech, Trump ally U.S. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) declared that “Palestinianism”—by which he means all recognition of Palestinian people as human beings—is terrorism that should not be allowed in U.S. Fine also endorsed dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza to murder its entire remaining population. After the terrible murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim outside of the Capitol Jewish Museum by a purported pro-Palestine activist, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that even stating “Free Palestine” is equivalent to saying “Heil Hitler.” Hate speech that keeps possible opponents of authoritarianism divided—and causes real harm—tragically is one of the main currencies of Trump’s MAGA movement.
No one should expect any consistency even on the question of antisemitism, because Trump is only committed to hegemonic power for his state and its collaborators. There is no moral principles held categorically, which is why moralistic opposition politics have largely done nothing to stop Trump’s hold on power tightening. While Rubio is railing against pro-Palestine students, Trump’s white nationalist supporters were cheering the admission into the U.S. of 49 Afrikaaner farmers from South Africa, including one who had called Jewish people “dangerous” and “untrustworthy.” Again, Trump wants immigration just like he wants Harvard—just in forms that extend his ideological capture and venerate his broadly racist, patriarchal nationalism.
As international students comprise 5.9% of U.S. university admissions, they represent a mighty financial cudgel. In 2023-4, 25% of international students in the U.S. were studying math or computer science and 20% were studying engineering, they may be less likely to engage in political activism than their domestic counterparts and even before Trump more likely to keep a low profile to their host government (not to mention governments back home). Trump’s coalition includes a lot of people who are genuine extremist Zionists, so expect him to offer up more international students and for the State Department’s new policies to include social media scans of pro-Palestine content. Yet also expect Trump to be ready to make deals with any and all institutions of higher education who will cave to his demands for controlling allowable teaching and expression—and any nations who pledge that their students will arrive obedient. And, tragically, expect a lot of U.S. universities and colleges to fall in line.
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Staring Down the Abyss of 2025: A Reprise
We should do our best to accept that we are confronting a major collapse of a way of living that we had taken for granted.
May 26, 2025
In early January Common Dreamspublished my forecast of consequential developments in 2025, ones that would affect the way we’re governed and how we live our lives day-to-day. Now that the year is nearing the halfway point, and in the spirit of Memorial Day, it is instructive to review the list, which included the following:
- Democratic institutions will continue to crumble, with focus on the erosion of the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere;
- Long-standing norms governing public affairs, such as a bar to prosecuting political opponents, will loosen their grip on behavior;
- Countless species, especially among birds and insects, will go extinct;
- “Unnatural” disasters attributable to climate change, like wildfires and floods, will devastate wondrous landscapes and settled communities;
- Politically or environmentally induced mass migration, as experienced now in various parts of the world, will become more pervasive;
- Income inequality between the top .01% and the lowest 50% will increase; and
- economic stability, as in the historic world-wide acceptance of the U.S. Dollar, will wane.
I added the following as caveats to this grim list: uncertainties regarding the targets, timing, locales, extent of severity, and designation of victims.
Broadly speaking the forecast has been accurate. My purpose in conducting this initial review now, however, is not to gloat. Others may have been equally, if not more on target. Furthermore, most of what was predicted was in the wind before the year began. It would be useful at this point to reflect critically, focusing on the caveats noted above, and to address two important questions: “So what?” and “Now What?”
Most telling about what has happened to date in 2025 is the severity, acceleration, and chaos attending several of the enumerated elements, especially those relating to our form of governance and our economic well-being. Even more tragic than the qualifiers just noted is the countless number of innocent victims that have been swept up through indiscriminate governmental action. While the current administration in this country has led the way against those whose main “infraction” has been to exercise their right of free speech, allies like Israel have taken to maiming, starving, and murdering an entire people.
Yes, we should be prepared in the months ahead for even greater severity, continuing acceleration, and unbridled chaos. We should also expect that there will be more victims whose rights are trampled, or lives impaired or destroyed. The strategy of the administration is clear: Do as much as one can as fast as one can, causing as much pandemonium as possible.
So what and now what? What are the implications for those of us who seek to contain a wildfire threatening our political, social, cultural, and economic base? As many others have argued, a more radical, broad-based and well-coordinated disaster relief effort is warranted, involving all those who seek to perpetuate our constitutional republic. “All” here includes notables, leaders of major institutions—judicial, educational, occupational, journalistic, bolstered by millions of ordinary citizens of all ages and backgrounds. This wildfire is barely 5% contained, having engulfed our public life. The stakes are the upholding of a political framework grounded in a set of moral values that has remained largely intact for 250 years.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that individual minds and hearts—yours and mine—are deeply affected by this wildfire. We have been the beneficiaries of this experiment in nationhood, and we are on the verge of becoming its victims. What shall we do with our AMs and PMs beyond joining the “bucket brigade” of mass resistance? What mindset and emotional posture might sustain us going forward?
First and foremost, we must do what we can to quell our fears about the rampant destruction taking place, destruction that is well beyond our control as individuals. Fear breeds a turning inward, a defensive grasping for a way of being that will no longer be available to us. Things will never return to the state they were in before the wildfire broke out. It is better to accept that a large-scale transformation is afoot, one that beckons a personal transformation that we have the capacity to shape.
Essential for countering fear are an ongoing attachment to individual right action, compassionate outreach to others, bearing witness to what is happening around us through conversation or writing, and blessing moral action by others. We can endeavor to heal relationships, both familial and neighborly, and we can seek joy in the most intrinsic pleasures.
Much of what unfolds in the years ahead will cause us to grieve. We should do our best to accept that we are confronting a major collapse of a way of living that we had taken for granted. In place of denial and nostalgia, let’s look for opportunities amid inevitable personal transformation—for durable hope, serendipitous grace, the beauty of human kindness, and the practice of compassion.
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