What Must Universities Become Today in Face of Trump?

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.