Capitulation or Complicity? Universities and the Trump Administration

On March 7th the Trump administration announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in government grants and contracts to Columbia University. Less than a week later, his administration followed up with a letter to Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, outlining the steps the university would have to take before negotiations to restore funding could even begin.

Although largely without precedent, Trump’s demands are entirely in line with an evolving authoritarianism that seeks to destroy possible sites of political opposition. The demands included suspending or expelling some of those who participated in pro-Palestinian protests; centralizing disciplinary power within the hands of the university president; banning mask wearing on campus; increasing the numbers and powers of campus police; and putting the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” (a rare move that places a department under external/administrative control, typically because it has become dysfunctional, but in this case because it was not sufficiently pro-Israel).

On March 21st, Columbia’s interim president agreed to the demands. Columbia would not put up a fight. Armstrong’s actions were widely condemned by advocates of higher education, academic freedom, and free speech—most of whom seemed genuinely surprised, even shocked, by Columbia’s decision to simply accept Trump’s terms. On March 28th Armstrong lost her job.

Trump is coming for us because so much of the best that university faculty, staff, and students represent—science, education, reason, knowledge, and informed political engagement—poses a real threat to his project.

It is tempting, as most commentators have, to understand the quick, total, and passive submission of Columbia and other university administrations to Trump’s assault through the lens of “capitulation,” “caving,” or “appeasement.” I get the impulse. Surely liberal institutions of higher learning, with time-honored commitments to free speech and academic freedom, would not possibly agree to Trump’s outrageous demands unless they had a financial gun pointed directly at them? Campus leaders must—so the logic goes—be churning on the inside, desperately wanting to fight back even as they reluctantly recognize that capitulation is the only alternative. Fighting back poses too great a risk.

Capitulation as an explanation, however, is far too generous and rests on the false premise that—when faced with a profound threat to democracy—core institutions such as universities have, currently are, or will fight to protect our basic political norms.

The question we should be asking ourselves—especially those of us who live in academia and should know better—is why would we expect universities, or more accurately the administrators who run them, to protect free speech, academic freedom, and dissent at all, especially during moments of crisis when doing so entails taking real risks? University administrations, from the 1960s through the present, have a very thin track record of doing so. The reality is that most have worked overtime, often at the behest of the trustees that control them, to limit or crush our freedoms with such consistency, and over such a long period of time, that it is baffling that anyone would expect anything different as we race towards authoritarianism.

Complicity gets us far closer to a useful explanation of recent actions by campus leaders than capitulation. We need only listen to Columbia’s interim president. In explaining the university’s acceptance of the Trump administration’s demands for restoring the flow of federal dollars, Armstrong noted in an open letter to the campus community that the university’s actions were in line with the path it had been following in the past year and were “guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.” Armstrong is correct when she suggests that Trump’s demands coincide with university values as defined by top campus leaders. It’s just that those values do not include, and never really did, academic freedom and free expression.

Understood this way, it seems quite likely that Columbia’s leaders accepted Trump’s demands not so much because they were forced to (capitulate), or because they saw fighting as either futile or potentially disastrous, but because they welcomed the opportunity and political cover that Trump’s order provided—to get rid of “unruly” students, increase the university’s capacity to limit protest and discipline students, staff, and faculty, and (bonus!) gain control over a department that by its very subject matter might prove troublesome. That’s complicity, not capitulation. It’s also right in line with what we have seen from university administrations, including Columbia’s, in the recent and not so recent past. Indeed, the current era of complicity started under Biden with the draconian response to pro-Palestine protests from universities throughout the country in 2024 (and of course has a much longer history dating at least to the 1950s).

The speed with which university administrations have abandoned DEI policies and practices must be seen in this light as well. The administrative commitment to very limited sets of DEI policies was always paper thin, or about as deep as their commitment to academic freedom. It’s more a marketing ploy and opportunity for virtue signaling than any sort of real political commitment. The fact that many universities scrubbed websites and academic units, in some cases overnight, of almost any mention of DEI when the political winds shifted is hardly surprising.

This is not to say that most campus leaders like or fully embrace Trump’s gestapo-like tactics (though some seem to be getting quite comfortable with it). But it is also the case—especially after the 2024 campus protests around Palestine—that most were on board with some sort of “course correction,” not unlike the position one finds on the opinion pages of the New York Times, which essentially argues that student protests went too far, faculty are too liberal, universities need to rein it in, and Trump has a point (for a good example of this “commonsense” drivel, see Greg Weiner’s piece).

To be sure, we should not downplay the distinction between Trump’s authoritarianism, which tends to see those on college campuses as dangerous radicals who need to be removed, from the liberal “course correction” that pushes reforms to “take politics out” of higher education. And yet, as soon as one starts to accept Trump’s fascist tactics for getting there, which increasingly embraces a grab-them-off-the-streets approach reminiscent of Central America paramilitaries in the 1980s, the distinction probably feels a bit like splitting hairs to those on the wrong end of it. Complicity, not capitulation.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that although highly paid administrators officially speak for universities, and have considerable power over university policies, they are not “universities” any more than are the boards of trustees that control them. Katrina Armstrong, or whoever replaces her, is not Columbia University. The students, faculty, and staff who make up the institution, as well as the communities they serve, are “the university.”

Put another way, to suggest that there is no reason to expect university administrators to be natural defenders of free speech and political dissent, and that history tells us that many of them will in fact be complicit with Trump’s brand of fascism, is not to say that we should not try to hold them accountable or that the fight is over and universities have been politically neutered. It is to say that we—“the university”—have to continue the fight that so many of us are already engaged in. Trump is coming for us because so much of the best that university faculty, staff, and students represent—science, education, reason, knowledge, and informed political engagement—poses a real threat to his project. Campus leaders may opt for complicity. Let’s make sure we are neither complicit nor capitulate.