To Resist Trump’s Academic Purge, Campuses Must Unite With Each Other

The Trump administration’s attacks on institutions of higher education have just escalated dramatically. On Monday, Harvard announced that it would refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s orders, becoming the first university to openly defy Donald Trump. In their letter to the federal government, Harvard’s lawyers stated that the Trump administration’s demands contravene the First Amendment and invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.

Trump responded almost immediately, using the multiagency joint task force to combat antisemitism to freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and $60 million in multiyear contract value to Harvard. Back in March, the task force’s leader, Leo Terrell, a former Fox News commentator, promised that “We’re going to bankrupt these universities” if they do not “play ball.” Following this playbook, Trump tried to ratchet up the pressure on Harvard on Tuesday, saying on his Truth Social platform that “perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity.” Loss of tax-exempt status could cost Harvard billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, federal officials have begun contacting University of California (UC) faculty members for an antisemitism investigation after UC complied with a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking the personal information of around 900 faculty. Despite the fact that personal employee information is not required for Title VI investigations, the university turned over email addresses and other personal info of all faculty who signed two open letters about UC’s response following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. One of these letters expressed sympathy for both Israelis and the people of Gaza, while the other called for university leaders to do more to protect Jewish students and faculty. In response to the government probe, UC Council of Faculty Associations President Constance Penley urged faculty members to “resist the federal government’s McCarthyist divide-and-conquer tactics” and to refuse to participate in the investigations.

Taken together, these latest developments show the massive and unprecedented scale of the Trump administration’s attack on freedom of thought and higher education in the U.S. Thus far, Trump officials have warned 60 universities that they could face penalties from pending investigations into antisemitism, and the administration has now frozen or canceled more than $11 billion in funding from at least seven universities. At least 300 students, recent graduates, and postdoctoral students have had their visas and legal immigration statuses revoked as part of the governmental crackdown.

The Trump administration’s funding freezes to academic institutions like Columbia and Harvard have grabbed headlines, but the campaign to silence critical thought and protest in academia is not simply targeting elite Ivy League schools, which only educate 0.5 percent of undergraduates in the country. The plot to purge higher education is also an attack on perhaps the greatest engine of economic mobility in the U.S.: the thousands of public institutions of education embedded in communities across the nation.

We are in fact witnessing a combined and uneven purge that is ripping through and increasingly impacting all institutions of higher education in the country. This attack is affecting both wealthy private colleges and economically strapped public universities. It is unfolding in different ways and at varying speeds across and within these diverse institutions. It is imperiling both the humanities and also the scientific research capacity that fueled the U.S.’s global technological and economic rise. And it is menacing the entire academic community — not just the student and faculty activists protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The Far Right Purge Plan

Far right plans for the purging of higher education are no secret. In his 2024 book Unhumans, white supremacist provocateur Jack Posobiec takes direct aim at academics who have dared criticize inequities in U.S. society: “The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize. It is achievable but only with the resolve of [Spanish fascist leader Francisco] Franco and the thoroughness of [1950s anti-Communist purge-leader Senator Joseph] McCarthy.” In his use of terms such as “cultural Marxism” and “gender ideology,” an openly fascist ideologue such as Posobiec draws on the campaigns launched against universities in places like Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro.

While such attacks might be shrugged off as just another outrageous prank emerging from the darkest corners of the internet, Posobiec’s book has received fulsome endorsements from most of the Republican establishment, including former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson, Trump strategist Stephen Bannon and Vice President J.D. Vance. In his blurb for the book, Vance wrote, “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.”

The solution for such putative oppression of good, honest people, according to Vance? A purge. As Vance argued during a 2021 interview, “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. … We need like a de-Baathification program, but like a de-wokification program in the United States.”

The bitter irony of Vance’s allusion to the de-Baathification program in Iraq is increasingly clear as Trump takes a sledgehammer to the U.S.’s research universities. The program, a sweeping and indiscriminate effort to rid Iraq of the Baath party’s influence after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, is widely regarded as a complete debacle. The chaotic program led to the dismantling of many state functions in Iraq and to the intensification of the sectarian and political divisions that ultimately gave birth to ISIS (also known as Daesh). Perhaps inadvertently, Vance’s words give a glimpse of the collapse that the Trump administration is currently catalyzing.

Capitulation Will Not Save You

Columbia University has been the most publicly visible target of this purge. On March 21, the university agreed to all of the demands in a letter that legal scholar Katherine Franke called a “ransom note” from the Trump regime. Among the measures that Columbia Interim President Katrina Armstrong publicly assented to are the suspending or expulsion of students who protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza; the centralization of disciplinary power in the university president’s hands; increases in the power of campus police; banning the wearing of masks on campus; and putting the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) under “academic receivership,” a measure that strips academic departments of self-control, typically because of internal dysfunction but in this case transparently because MESAAS has not been sufficiently pro-Israel in the eyes of the Trump administration.

The putsch against Columbia is emblematic of the much broader effort to dismantle academic freedom at universities in the U.S. Other institutions, such as Harvard, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania are being subjected to similar tactics as Columbia. As these threats suggest, Ivy League institutions are effectively a laboratory where the extreme right is testing how far and by what means its purge strategy can best be implemented.

Subsequent weeks have shown that capitulation will not ward off the purge. In fact, Armstrong was forced out of office only days after agreeing to the Trump ransom note, after she held an emergency meeting in which she sought to reassure faculty that academic freedom and departmental autonomy would continue to be respected at Columbia. Claire Shipman, a member of Columbia’s board of trustees, is now “acting” president, underlining where ultimate responsibility for the purge of the university lies.

Columbia’s board of trustees is essentially a private club, almost none of whose members have ever led a classroom discussion, run a lab, or had their ideas subjected to rigorous peer review. They are accountable to no one — not to students, not to faculty, and certainly not to the general public. It is clear that Columbia’s board is quite content to see critical thought and antiwar protest banned from the university; indeed, the crackdown was described by the now-departed president as “Columbia-driven.” As university trustees shred the remaining vestiges of shared governance and academic freedom, the deeply feudal structure of U.S. academia has been harshly revealed.

The Putsch Against Public Education

While attacks on elite institutions have drawn much media attention, the right-wing assault on public universities has been equally severe. The blueprint for this purge of higher education is the takeover of the progressive New College of Florida engineered by Gov. Ron DeSantis. But New College was just the beginning. Republican politicians in Florida have gone on to gut critical humanities curricula at the state’s second-tier public universities. Since the passage of the “Stop WOKE Act” in 2022, all offerings related to diversity, equity and inclusion have been ordered removed from departments like sociology and women’s studies at institutions like Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University and Florida Gulf Coast University.

The Florida legislature is currently considering a bill that, as part of the DeSantis mini-DOGE effort, would assess the “revenue potential” of individual majors, with the intent of determining which programs ought to be cut. The legislature’s original proposed comparison was between accounting and gender studies; it doesn’t take a math whiz to understand the intent of this benchmarking exercise.

The Florida legislature has also passed bills stripping general education credits from courses that refer to words like “justice,” “global” and “climate change.” This indirect purge strategy ensures that courses that even touch on such topics will be under-enrolled and hence eventually cancelled. DeSantis has also imposed his political cronies on public universities, rigging the selection process of college presidents in a manner that would be immediately recognizable to authoritarian leaders around the world.

Florida is hardly alone in its efforts to purge critical thought in public education. In spring 2024, for example, a Republican supermajority in Indiana passed a law that effectively abolishes tenure by subjecting tenured faculty members to five-year reviews. Under the new review process, faculty can be denied promotion or tenure if they do not “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and ‘ideological diversity.’” Diversity here is right-wing code for conservative ideas, as Indiana State Sen. Spencer Deery made clear when he defended the bill by arguing that “the current system fails to adequately recruit, retain, and cultivate conservative scholars who are then empowered to foster robust, unretaliated debate.”

And it’s not just women’s studies and climate change curricula that are on the chopping block. The Trump regime is also menacing federally funded Pell Grants and student loan programs that constitute the country’s major investment in expanding access to higher education. Billions of dollars of federal grants for essential medical research have been frozen as part of the purge of higher education. Anyone who has seen Elon Musk brandishing his chainsaw cannot seriously believe that the people carrying out this purge are really interested in the public good.

The strategies pursued by the U.S. far right in its attack on academia bear a striking resemblance to similar purge efforts in other nations. Indeed, the direction in which these attacks are going is clear from policies implemented at universities in authoritarian nations, such as Turkey, India and Iran. In Turkey, for instance, university administrators were asked to compile “to be expelled” lists in response to a 2016 petition by the Academics for Peace Initiative, which urged a resumption of peace talks with the Kurdish movement and criticized human rights violations by Turkish security forces during fighting in Kurdish cities in the country’s southeast. In subsequent years, thousands of professors lost their jobs, 15 universities were shut down and tens of thousands of students were forced to transfer to other institutions. Dismissals were carried out in a chaotic and arbitrary manner with no judicial oversight. The few universities where massive firings did not take place were those that did not submit “to be expelled” lists, but most university leaders created such lists with great eagerness to ingratiate themselves with the government. Worse still, over 400 Turkish academics were charged with “terrorist propaganda,” and the government instituted a new “security clearance” procedure to ensure that all future academic appointees hewed to the government’s ideological agenda.

How to Fight Back

Now is the time to stand up and protest the purge. But we need to think very carefully about what solidarity looks like in the current repressive context. For instance, over 1,800 academics have signed a letter pledging to boycott Columbia and Barnard over their administrations’ collaboration with the Trump regime. The sentiments driving this boycott are understandable and honorable, but the danger is that it will most adversely impact precisely the departments and programs that have been most active in challenging the crackdown.

So what forms of organizing and solidarity should we build? Members of university communities and the public in general must demand that university leaders cease appeasing the far right’s project to dismantle higher education. Academic leadership ought to mean defending the institution that you are charged with stewarding, not shamelessly caving in to the extremist purge. After a year and a half of going along with hypocritical attacks by right-wingers like Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose dog whistles signal sympathy with white nationalists, university leaders seem to finally be realizing that sniveling self-abasement and outrageously draconian clampdowns on campus free speech will only intensify the Trump regime’s bullying. Indeed, Harvard’s President Alan Garber issued a letter Monday saying that, “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” Thus far, Harvard is relatively isolated in its open defiance, although 876 faculty members at Yale published an open letter on Tuesday urging their administration to stand up to Trump. Harvard must not be left alone to defy the purge.

The combined and uneven character of the building purge of U.S. higher education can make it hard to see commonalities across different institutions. Indeed, one of the most shocking aspects of what has happened since the Trump regime began launching its attack has been the disunity of both universities and faculty members. To fight the purge of academia, we need to overcome our differences and form a common front that unites students, faculty, alumni, staff and advocates of academic freedom and freedom of speech. This united front must extend from community colleges to public universities like my own, all of which have suffered from decades of bipartisan budget cuts that amount to an undeclared war on higher education. And, yes, of course it must also include elite research institutions like Columbia.

An Academic Mutual Defense Compact

The lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other protected First Amendment activities is a good start: it unites the national AAUP, chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and NYU, and the Middle East Studies Association. But we need to build much more extensive bonds of solidarity to challenge the Trump regime’s extortionate divide-and-conquer tactics. Four faculty senate bodies — at Rutgers University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the Indiana University at Bloomington, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — have passed resolutions calling for the creation of “mutual-defense pacts” to guard against the Trump purge. A much broader united front needs to be built across the hundreds of universities now under attack.

We must push university leaders across the country to formally endorse and help establish an academic Mutual Defense Compact among all members of the Association of American Universities. We must insist that boards of trustees and other academic leaders use every legal means at their disposal to challenge the federal government’s termination, or threatened termination, of grants to their institutions. They must initiate and join existing legal actions against the federal government’s egregious rights violations, including detention and attempted deportation of students and faculty by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as visa cancellations by federal agencies. And, of course, they must recommit to basic principles of defense of academic freedom, institutional integrity and independent research.

University leaders must also fight back against the purge by publicly supporting faculty under attack; by committing not to report on community members (students, staff and faculty) whose political speech may make them targets for governmental discipline; by reaffirming the sufficiency of existing disciplinary processes as well as hiring and promotion criteria, and rejecting new processes that bypass democratic shared governance; by refusing overly broad definitions of antisemitism; and, perhaps most importantly, by refusing to engage in anticipatory obedience — which I like to call preemptive bootlicking.

Beyond such essential but fundamentally defensive measures, we need to learn from the dramatic democratic deficit that the current purge has revealed in universities. What would a university that is not run by oligarchic boards of trustees look like? How can we go beyond ideas such as academic freedom and shared governance, which are critical to the functioning of universities but, we now know, can all too easily be dumped into the ashcan of history by autocratic strongmen like Trump? What would truly autonomous universities look like?

Now more than ever, we need to go beyond merely defending universities. Instead let’s ask: How can we rebuild them so that they diminish rather than exacerbate inequalities? How can our universities foster critical thought across the sciences and humanities? How might they further the public good at a time when our collective survival is more imperiled than ever before?