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Hundreds of colleges, universities and scholarly societies in the U.S. have pledged to resist the Trump administration’s “unprecedented” all-out attacks on higher education as the president targets universities with massive funding revocations and other retribution.
Over 200 institutions have signed a statement, published Tuesday, calling for leaders in higher education to rise to the moment and commit to protecting the field, their staff and their students against the administration’s sweeping crackdown.
“As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” the group said.
The statement was signed by the heads of numerous prominent universities, including Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, and more.
Columbia University was absent from the list until after it was released to the public, with acting President Claire Shipman signing after reporters and advocates pointed out the university’s absence.
Columbia’s signature is significant, as the university has been capitulating to the Trump administration’s demands and even seemingly going beyond the written demands by ignoring pleas for help from Columbia student activists like Mohsen Mahdawi, who wrote to university administrators for months asking for protection before being abducted by immigration agents.
Notably, the statement calls for institutions to resist many of the very moves that Columbia administrators have made or facilitated, like the Trump administration’s deportation and attempted visa revocations of students who have advocated for Palestinian rights.
“Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation,” the statement says. “Most fundamentally, America’s colleges and universities prepare an educated citizenry to sustain our democracy.”
Other signatories have violated the spirit of the letter in recent months, especially in relation to last year’s wave of campus protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza; Harvard, for instance, was one of the many institutions that suspended students over their participation in the encampments.
However, Harvard has also been the first prominent university to loudly stand against the Trump administration. The Trump administration sent the university a list of overtly right-wing demands earlier this month, including ending any practices promoting diversity, equity and inclusion and auditing departments involving human rights and Middle Eastern studies. Along with the demands, the administration froze $2 billion in funding and threatened more cuts, as well as a revocation of the university’s nonprofit status.
In response, the university put out a lengthy statement saying that it will not acquiesce to the demands, and on Monday, sued the administration over the funding revocation. Other universities, like Stanford, have said that they support Harvard’s refusal to comply.
“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government,” Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
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