Harvard Dominates Headlines, But Other Schools Are Quietly Battling Trump

Closed-door committees are forming to investigate whether public universities in North Carolina have fully eliminated diversity practices. Campuses in Utah are being held to neutrality pledges. Accreditation is changing across the Southeast as university systems join a new state-run scheme spearheaded by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. A major political struggle is being waged on university campuses, and faculty are struggling to keep up.

Higher education has been in the news regularly since the emergence of mass pro-Palestine protests on campuses after October 7, 2023, but much of the coverage has been dominated by the likes of elite private schools such as Harvard and Columbia. Right-wing attacks, however, have rocked campuses across the country, escalating with the Trump administration’s executive orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. These orders have been followed by Department of Justice or Department of Education investigations into whether there are any lingering practices of inclusivity. The playbook has been used at institution after institution as a form of pressure to withhold funds and secure concessions.

Attacks from the Trump administration are an acceleration of a situation that many campuses were already facing: Under pressure from state legislatures, campus leadership, or both, university faculty have been confronting a crisis created by deepening austerity regimes for decades. Now these crises are being supercharged by the federal government’s anti-intellectualism and hunger for authoritarian control.

Faculty are scrambling to meet these challenges head-on, planning teach-ins, recruiting members for unionization drives, and organizing lobbying days at the state legislature, all as new threats seemingly crop up by the day. Universities are not just a bastion of highly educated professionals; at their best, they’re a public good, offering opportunities for intellectual growth to the community, making scientific breakthroughs, and sharing technical expertise in local problems.

“Everybody in the state has a stake in how our universities fare, because it’s such a big part of who we are as farmers and researchers and biomedical researchers and people who work in the humanities and writers,” says Belle Boggs, professor of English at North Carolina State University and president of the North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

A Struggle on Steeply Hierarchical Terrain

The U.S. system of universities and colleges is tremendously diverse in terms of student and faculty population, needs, and structure, even among public institutions in a single state. Take Georgia, for example. Although the whole concept of “higher education” is under attack, Matthew Boedy, professor of rhetoric at University of North Georgia and president of the Georgia Conference of the AAUP, says the situation at Georgia Tech and University of Georgia is vastly different from the chilling effect that faculty experience at his school. “You have that sense that you don’t want to draw attention to yourself in the same manner that UGA or Georgia Tech could.”

It’s not as if everything is hunky-dory at flagship public institutions — they are facing attacks as well — but these schools, with beloved football teams, are well-known among the public in the state. Meanwhile, less prestigious schools like the five-campus University of North Georgia are easier for legislators to defund and hobble without much public backlash, so they have to fight harder for every dollar.

“That chilling effect that we’ve been seeing in states is going to happen nationwide.

At the same time, scholars working at less elite schools, like regional comprehensives, tend to hold less power and visibility within their academic disciplines and in the academy as a whole.

The schools where most faculty work are, as a result, more beleaguered and receive less media coverage. Faculty at these schools teach more classes per semester (four or five as opposed to one or two) and overall receive much less research funding. Very few of these schools were doing race-conscious admissions to start with because their overall acceptance rates are much higher.

Brianne Kramer, a professor of education and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) chapter president at Southern Utah University, has been lobbying the state legislature for both funding and to limit the damage of the harshest legislation against diversity practices. Kramer says the first step to lobbying is to make sure state legislators know what her and her colleagues do on a day-to-day basis as faculty at a regional university.

On Kramer’s campus, the onslaught did not begin this January with Trump. Statewide legislation in Utah, where a Republican supermajority controls politics, had already banned DEI on university campuses and forced campuses to commit to neutrality pledges, a vague set of guidelines indicating that educational institutions, or units within them, cannot take political positions. But now that similar moves are being made at the federal level, Kramer says, “I don’t know that there will be any institution that is untouched…. I don’t mean that Trump is going to come into every single, like, tiny little regional and take over. But I do think that what is going to happen is that chilling effect that we’ve been seeing in states is going to happen nationwide.”

“Hostage-Taking” in Research Institutions

Meanwhile, large research institutions (R1s) have been targeted by Department of Justice and Department of Education investigations that freeze federal funds. Driven originally by the hearings on campus antisemitism held by the House Committee on Education and Workforce, many of these Department of Education investigations began under the Biden administration in response to pro-Palestine protests on campuses. The process has expanded under Trump into what Tim Gibson, associate professor of communication and vice president of George Mason University AAUP, describes as a “hostage-taking” strategy of gaining top-down control of academic institutions.

“So much of this is stuff that university administrators have been chomping at the bit for.”

“It’s a collective action problem,” says Kathy Forde, co-founder of Stand Together for Higher Ed. High-level administrators are “being influenced by boards of trustees and by their commitments to try to keep as many faculty and staff employed.”

Stand Together for Higher Ed, formed in 2025, is an outgrowth of the Mutual Academic Defense Compacts(MADC), a movement that started among faculty of Big Ten universities to pressure university leadership to commit to solidarity with other similar campuses and refuse to capitulate to the administration’s demands. The idea is that each university administrator may be individually afraid of the consequences of standing up to the White House, but leadership across universities hold more power if they collectively agree to refuse the DOJ’s demands for curricular and intellectual concessions.

While Stand Together for Higher Ed includes and encourages the participation of administrators, the group is pivoting its work to empower small groups of faculty on campus nationwide to embrace the model as one more way to try to fight authoritarian overreach onto college campuses. Forde says “we want to build the largest big tent movement that we possibly can. … We still support [MADCs], but we’re pivoting away from that to say, look, build small stand together teams on your campuses so that we can work collectively.” Forde and her co-founder Jennifer Lundquist envision the group less as a political base for organizing public messaging campaigns, and more as a vehicle to defend higher education.

Some faculty are skeptical that upper-level administrators are in fact being forced by the Trump administration, noting that many of the concessions signed at major research universities so far are things that administrators have long desired. “So much of this is stuff that university administrators have been chomping at the bit for,” says Kramer.

Union? Maybe!

Unionization is one response strategy, and by all accounts 2025 has so far been a banner year for recruiting new faculty union members. AAUP, one of the major national unions on campuses, has a long history that predates the current crisis. The AAUP holds a dual orientation: It is a professional association that advocates for the profession as a whole, but many of its chapters are also collective bargaining units. With its affiliation with the AFT in 2022, the AAUP is more explicitly pushing for wall-to-wall unionization, or union efforts to organize all workers on campus without distinction between tenured faculty, adjunct faculty, staff, hourly workers, and so on.

Robert Cassanello, associate professor of history at University of Central Florida and president of United Faculty of Florida, says that as a new union president, he’s had to bridge the gap between the ideas of a “bread and butter” or “social activist” union. Cassanello says that previously, many UFF members felt that the union’s job was just to negotiate the contract and not worry too much about DEI or social issues. But over the last few years, the union has experienced a big change. Now, most members realize, he says, “we need a social activist. Because ‘bread and butter’ is not going to cut it in the climate that we have anymore…. I think people kind of expect the union to be out there, to be in the forefront, to fight, you know, to engage in a higher ed labor movement.”

Traditionally, the AAUP has focused on two key planks: academic freedom and shared governance. In the university context, shared governance means faculty’s right to co-govern the university with its senior leadership and governing board. Not everyone is on board with the turn toward explicit unionization.

In some states, public workers have no collective bargaining rights, or the certification process for a bargaining unit is extremely difficult. Faculty at private universities hold an ambiguous status with the National Labor Relations Board and face a difficult road to collective bargaining if the institution opposes them. Finally, many faculty are simply wary of calling themselves workers and do not see a union as something that applies to them.

“We are not organizing a union here,” says Boedy of the AAUP Georgia Conference. “There’s so many steps that have to happen to get that and we don’t have that type of interest yet from people across the campus.”

Boggs in North Carolina says that although she likes the union language, “we’re comfortable with however people want to think about it, as a professional organization or as a union.”

Some faculty that are already strongly unionized, like Jenna Chernega, president of Inter Faculty Organization in Minnesota and a professor of sociology at Winona State University, have joined with the coalition Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), a newer group focused on building coalitions of different types of workers on campus and working across the unions that represent higher ed workers. Chernega says that as a statewide union with a relatively safe local context, the Inter Faculty Organization was interested in finding an avenue to advocate on a federal or national level where threats are most likely to originate. As a national coalition, HELU provides that.

Saving the Institutions That Exist, But Organizing for Something Better

In the growing fascist context in the U.S., many people are being put in a position to defend flawed institutions and policies — and universities are no exception. At George Mason University in Virginia, faculty successfully rallied to the defense of university president Gregory Washington, who came under fire as the Trump administration opened four investigations into the school’s diversity practices. Gibson says although faculty in the AAUP chapter have had major differences with Washington, it’s “not okay to force out a president through these kind of tactics and to have a federal government tell us how to govern and run a state university.” It is important, Gibson says, for faculty to work together to stop the Trump administration and its cronies from installing “loyalists” to run their institutions.

Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, professor emeritus of politics and leadership at Whitman College and caucus co-chair with the Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE), says the U.S. university system is and always has been authoritarian; universities both public and private are governed by a board of external stakeholders with the power to overrule anyone inside the institution. While state takeover of governance boards is certainly worse in most cases than the status quo, Kaufman-Osborn says that shared governance is an already severely compromised ideal, and should not be the ultimate goal.

At the same time faculty are scrambling to “safeguard what we have not yet lost” — such as fighting expanded state control of governance boards and institutions — Kaufman-Osborn says it’s also important not to remain in a “defensive crouch” that leaves them unable to imagine anything better. While faculty like those at George Mason may need to organize to fight off a right-wing takeover of the university, Kaufman-Osborn is also working with those in CAHE to “nurture our collective capacity to imagine a very different university than the one we inhabit today.”

The situation seems dire and the odds of success for faculty at the moment seem low. Yet faculty are undeterred. The mood among faculty organizers is that you have to fight to win, but you still have to fight even if you can’t win.

Note: Opinions expressed by sources in this story are their own and do not express the views or opinions of their employers.