What’s a College President to Do in the Trump Era?Not going on bended knee to Washington would be a good start.
Michael S. Roth
Oct 13, 2025
(Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
LEADERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION face some difficult choices these days. The federal government has long been a partner for colleges and universities, providing funding for basic science and helping needy students afford college through Pell Grants and, more problematically, loan guarantees. This constructive engagement between politicians of various stripes and educators eager to expand the impact of their work has been growing steadily since the 1950s. It is now under great pressure from President Donald Trump who, by all appearances, has been trying to wrest control of the culture from those parts of civil society he describes as “woke”: law firms, journalism, schools, entertainment. In the process, Trump has extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from institutions that are then required to align their own priorities with his political agenda. All this flies in the face of American traditions of decentralized power, closely resembling the moves of authoritarians and kleptocrats of the past
Many in higher education are looking for ways to get along in this new regime of corruption and abuse of power. What else are they to do? As a university president myself, I understand their dilemma. The federal government has supported research at a scale far beyond the means of other grantmakers. Especially in the sciences, there is no substitute for Uncle Sam.
Threats to reduce such funding are no less effective for being irrational: Compromising research-based discovery and innovation in favor of short-term corruption and anti-intellectualism will only make America a second-class power. It will undermine economic growth and the health of our citizens. It’s a man-made disaster. Given the stakes, it’s not surprising to see responsible people trying to get along in this cowardly new world.
Share
Colleges and universities have seen this kind of thing before. Although he had many other things on his agenda, Adolf Hitler insisted that professors take an oath of loyalty when he came to power in 1933. There was little resistance in universities when the faculty pledged their” allegiance to Hitler. There was more opposition in Norway during the occupation by the Nazis, when Vidkun Quisling insisted that universities be reformed, and that only those who were loyal to his regime should be entrusted with the task of teaching the country’s youth. (It is, of course, from Nazi-abetting Quisling that we get the word quisling, meaning a traitor or collaborationist.) In the Soviet Union, Trofim Lysenko was applauded by the Stalin regime for rejecting bourgeois pseudoscience and embracing a Marxist approach to agriculture. Lysenko accumulated followers who turned a blind eye to his preposterous claims. Once proud researchers, artists, and teachers were forced to do whatever it took to reflect the values of the Communist leadership.
But we don’t have to look to other countries for sorry tales of oppression; American history offers us examples of how this might work. In the decade or so after the end of the Second World War, higher education leaders across the country collaborated with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s effort to rid the land of Communists. For example, the president of the University of California, Robert Sproul, underscored that there was no constitutional right to a job, and if faculty wanted to exercise free speech by aligning with America’s enemies, they would be fired. If you wanted to teach, you signed a loyalty oath.
Join
TODAY, DONALD TRUMP’S WHITE HOUSE is floating a similar idea in its Compact for Excellence in Higher Education. As in so many other areas of life, the government is telling us that if you want preferential funding treatment, you join the Loyalty Club.
Many academic organizations and even some university presidents have come out strongly against this effort to exert control over universities. Writing in the New York Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, insisted “that the future of higher education in America requires that everyuniversity reject it.” There is a core constitutional principle involved: “that the government cannot condition a benefit on a recipient having to give up a constitutional right.” The editorial board of the Wall Street journal found much to like in the White House’s counterweight to the leftist tilt of many campuses, but even this reliably compliant team found the compact’s rules “overbearing” and observed that “the rub comes over how to use coercive power to drive wholesale academic reform.”
Yes, that’s the rub, alright, because the enormous power of the federal government is being deployed in the service of establishing loyalty to the leader in Washington. The assault on higher education is part of a broader campaign against institutions in civil society whose legitimacy has not depended on the White House. Over the last nine months, Trump has insisted that news organizations and law firms, cultural organizations and technology companies all express their fealty to his regime. It has nothing to do with them being antisemitic, woke, or with them having any particular ideology at all. It is about making sure these institutions acknowledge that they need the president and say they are grateful for whatever favors he chooses to bestow upon them.
Share
For generations, conservatives have criticized programs that offer favors to people in ways that increase their dependence on the government. Now we have a president who wraps himself in the cloak of conservatism while insisting on obedience from those institutions and their leaders who depend on his largesse. “Bending the knee” has become the most popular Washington exercise because obsequiousness promises to improve the health of your bottom line. Whether you’re a trustee at the University of Texas or the CEO of a major tech firm, you are now engaged in servility cross-training. When my students read Machiavelli’s The Prince last week, they easily recognized the maneuver. “A wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.”
Conservative commentators on Machiavelli have noted that the great Italian thinker ushered in new and dangerous notions to the pursuit of truth. Truth is what the leader can make work; truth is whatever a powerful person forces you to embrace. Harvey Mansfield noted that Machiavelli “was the first to teach openly and without apology that morality should be interpreted ‘according to the times’ so that if the times are corrupt, one is compelled to live and behave corruptly and therefore morally excused for doing so.”
The conservative Mansfield wrote that about sixty years ago, and so it is in our time, as we see leaders of law firms, universities, and even ethics institutes, talk about the “opportunities” of working with a president who is undermining the rule of law and the Constitution while endangering some of the most vulnerable people in the land.
It doesn’t have to be this way. American civil society has been the guardian of liberty for generations. While we still enjoy freedom of speech, leaders in civil society must not stay silent when confronted by lawlessness and fearmongering from Washington. We must be steadfast in opposition to extortion under the guise of dealmaking, and we must create alliances rooted in a common devotion to freedom of inquiry, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Such alliances do not require agreement on all areas of policy, just a commitment to protecting the traditions of liberty now under assault. We have rejected tyranny before, and we can do it again. |
