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universities
'No Safety in Appeasement': Law Firms That Fought Trump Vindicated as DOJ Drops Cases
"Another significant victory for the rule of law over Trump's reign of lawlessness," said Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Mar 03, 2026
Congressman Jamie Raskin said the US Department of Justice's decision Monday to abandon its legal cases against law firms that refused to capitulate to President Donald Trump should serve as "a reminder that those who fight back against authoritarianism are winning."
The DOJ asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to dismiss its cases against law firms including Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Susman Godfrey, and Jenner & Block, which won legal challenges they filed last year after Trump issued executive orders saying they should lose government contracts and their employees should be blocked from government buildings.
Those executive orders were signed because the firms represented and employed high-profile Democrats and other opponents of Trump.
Other law firms, including Skadden Arps and Paul Weiss, angered lawyers within their ranks and the larger legal community when they signed deals with Trump; the latter firm agreed to end its internal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and provide $40 million in free legal work for the president and causes he supports.
The Trump administration's decision on Monday proved, said Raskin (D-Md.), that "there’s no safety in appeasement.”
“When the Trump administration tried to bully and silence law firms by banning them from federal buildings, courthouses and contracts, a handful—like Susman Godfrey, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale—fought back," said Raskin. "Today, those firms forced Trump to back down and abandon his blatantly unconstitutional effort to punish lawyers, clients, and causes because Trump disagrees with their speech. Meanwhile, the firms that chose to roll over saddled their associates and partners with doing billions of dollars-worth of free legal work for Trump, his twisted administration and his MAGA allies."
While other firms caved to Trump's demands last year, the companies that didn't quickly won legal victories, with one federal judge saying the executive order targeting Jenner & Block was “doubly violative of the Constitution" because it targeted the clients it represents as well as a lawyer it once employed—Andrew Weissman, who was part of former special counsel Robert Mueller's team that investigated Trump.
“This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the executive branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers," US District Judge John Bates wrote last May. "It thus violates the Constitution and the court will enjoin its operation in full.”
"This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the ethical courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying and then won, and those that compromised their ethics and gained nothing."
Jenner & Block said Monday that "the government’s decision to withdraw its appeals makes permanent the rulings of four federal judges that the executive orders targeting law firms, including Jenner & Block, were unconstitutional."
"Our partnership is proud to have stood firm on behalf of its clients, and we look forward to continuing to serve them—guided by these bedrock values—for many decades to come," said the firm.
Brian Hauss, deputy director of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the ACLU, said the DOJ had finally admitted "what everyone knew on Day 1: There is no way to defend these unconstitutional executive orders."
“This shameful assault on the rule of law has failed, thanks to the brave lawyers who refused to compromise their integrity," said Hauss.
Vanita Gupta, former associate attorney general under the Biden administration, told NBC News that the law groups that struck deals with the White House had "undermined the rule of law and the legal profession in this country."
"This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the ethical courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying and then won, and those that compromised their ethics and gained nothing," Gupta said. "Let’s hope that media companies, universities, and other organizations pay heed."
In addition to his attacks on law firms, the president has threatened universities with funding cuts and federal investigations into what the White House views as antisemitism and extremism on campus and the colleges' efforts to promote diversity and inclusion.
At least six universities have struck deals with Trump. The University of Pennsylvania agreed to ban transgender student athletes from participating on women's sports teams and Columbia University agreed to further crack down on campus protests like those that erupted in 2024 against US support for Israel's assault on Gaza—protests that both the Biden and Trump administrations claimed were antisemitic.
Harvard sued the administration over its decision to freeze $2.2 billion in research funding and was granted a restraining order last year to protect international students whom the White House had threatened with visa restrictions.
On Monday, Raskin said the DOJ's decision to back down from the attacks on law firms was "another significant victory for the rule of law over Trump's reign of lawlessness."
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Universities Didn't Fail, They Succeeded—That's Why They're Under Attack
Universities need to recognize that they are being targeted because of what they represent, not because of what they've failed to do, and resist accordingly.
Oct 14, 2025
I grew up watching my mother teach histories she was forbidden to teach, in a language that was illegal to speak. I know what authoritarianism looks like. And I'm watching American universities respond to this moment with the same dangerous pattern I witnessed then: accepting the narrative of their accusers, capitulating to illegal demands, destroying themselves from within.
At a time when blue cities become military zones, when citizens are arrested and abused on camera, when journalists are forced to transform from truth tellers to White House publicists, when the president accepts planes as gifts from foreign governments and then offers them military bases on US soil, it is not a moment for universities to ask, "What did we do wrong?" This is a moment to recognize: We are living through an authoritarian takeover, and universities are being targeted because of what they represent, not because of what they've failed to do.
The Trap of the "Universities Failed" Narrative
Across the country, university leaders are grappling with attacks on their institutions by asking: "How did we get here?" But without proper historical analysis, these questions lead directly into a trap set deliberately by those who seek to dismantle higher education as we know it.
The narrative is seductive: Universities became too focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They pushed "woke ideology." They marginalized conservative voices. They failed to serve their students properly. And now, this narrative suggests, they're reaping what they've sown.
When universities face these attacks, they have a choice: Resist in solidarity with the broader democratic struggle, or accept the framing of their accusers and try to appease them.
This is all a lie. More precisely, it's what political theorist Isaac Kamola calls a decade-long psychological operation, a well-funded, well-organized campaign of disinformation designed to make Americans believe that what's happening in universities is not what's actually happening.
The reality? American higher education has more women enrolled than ever before. More people of color than ever before. An educated populace is a civically engaged populace, a populace capable of critical thinking and democratic participation. Universities haven't failed. Universities have been succeeding. And that success threatens the wealth and power of those orchestrating these attacks.
Understanding the Authoritarian Playbook
We’ve seen this script before. Universities are always the first targets of authoritarian regimes. Look at Hungary, where Viktor Orbán seized control of higher education through a national system, banned gender studies programs, and forced the Open University to leave the country. Look at Turkey. After 2016, more than 6,000 academics were expelled in Turkey, hundreds prosecuted, and entire universities were closed. Many dismissed scholars were banned from public sector employment and from seeking academic work abroad due to travel bans, creating widespread precarity and self-censorship among remaining faculty. The pattern is unmistakable and deliberate.
When universities face these attacks, they have a choice: Resist in solidarity with the broader democratic struggle, or accept the framing of their accusers and try to appease them. History shows us that appeasement doesn't work. It only accelerates the destruction.
Look at Brown and Columbia. In both cases, Brown and Columbia accepted Trump administration demands largely to avoid funding cuts, yet both remain under sustained attack from the administration. Rather than fighting to preserve institutional independence and democratic principles in higher education they have accelerated the authoritarian takeover by capitulating.
We are watching universities and their leaders across America choose the second path. They're eliminating DEI programs, not because they believe these programs are wrong, but because they're afraid of losing funding. They're censoring faculty, not because academic freedom suddenly matters less, but because trustees are buckling under financial threats. They're accepting the premise that they somehow deserve what's happening to them.
They are playing into the tiny hands of authoritarians.
What's Really at Stake: Race, Rights, and Democracy
If we take a historical view, we can see more clearly what's actually driving these attacks: race. The legislative assault on curriculum, the attacks on critical race theory, the dismantling of DEI programs, all of this escalated in inverse proportion to the access that Black and brown people were gaining to higher education.
The bookeyman of DEI is a strategic tool for turning civil rights laws on their heads, for weaponizing the very protections meant to ensure equity. When White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller tells law enforcement they're "unleashed," when apartments on Chicago's South Side are raided and destroyed in the middle of the night and families, including citizens, are separated and detained for hours, when the National Guard is deployed to terrorize Democratic cities with large populations of Black and brown people, we're watching the same white supremacist project that universities are being punished for challenging.
Powerful interests have recognized how threatening an educated, diverse, critically thinking populace is to their accumulation of wealth and power.
Chris Rufo has been explicit about his counterrevolutionary agenda. He accuses universities of ideological capture and promotes a fiction: that radical leftists completed a "long march through the institutions" from the 1960s to today, turning universities into engines of woke ideology. His strategy has been devastatingly effective, tying federal funding to demands that colleges eliminate "race-based" programs and DEI initiatives, end political activism on campus, and enforce what he falsely calls "ideological neutrality." The bitter irony, of course, is that this neutrality means alignment with conservative values. Authoritarian regimes always claim neutrality while enforcing ideology.
The actual transformative change that generations of civil rights leaders have fought to achieve in higher education has been painfully, frustratingly slow. As Dr. King reminded us, the arc of the moral universe is long. Diversity, equity, and inclusion work had just begun when the backlash hit. As Isaac Kamola reminds us, we haven't gone too far, we've barely started. And that's precisely why the backlash is so fierce. Progress, however incremental, is intolerable to those who benefit from the status quo.
The Rapid Response Trap
Rapid response to individual attacks, while sometimes necessary, keeps universities perpetually defensive and reactive. Each response accepts the terms of the debate as set by those seeking to destroy higher education. Today, it's a demand to eliminate a DEI office. Tomorrow it's a threat to revoke accreditation. Next week, it's federal agents on campus or trustees forcing out presidents who won't comply. The exhausting onslaught of breaking news pushes institutions into pure survival mode, where they can only see the immediate threat in front of them. Meanwhile, the bigger picture, the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions, disappears from view.
This is how authoritarianism works. It overwhelms. It exhausts. It forces you to fight a hundred small battles so you cannot see the war.
And when universities respond by looking inward, by searching for their own failures, by implementing "reforms" that mirror the demands of their attackers—cutting DEI programs, restricting faculty speech, purging curricula of "controversial" content—they believe they're defending themselves. They're not. They're participating in their own destruction. Worse, they're legitimizing the authoritarian narrative: that universities deserved what's happening to them, that the attacks are a reasonable response to institutional failure rather than a calculated assault on democratic education itself.
This is precisely what authoritarians count on: that institutions will police themselves, that fear will accomplish what force alone cannot.
What Universities Must Do Instead
First, universities must stop accepting the false premise that they've failed. Higher education remains one of the most important engines of democratic participation, social mobility, and civic engagement in American society. The Truman Commission understood this in 1947: Higher education's core mission includes preparing citizens who can respond to social needs with intelligence and creativity.
That mission hasn't changed. What's changed is that powerful interests have recognized how threatening an educated, diverse, critically thinking populace is to their accumulation of wealth and power.
The question isn't "What did we do wrong?" The question is: "Will we defend democracy, or will we aid its destruction?"
Second, universities must understand themselves not as isolated institutions defending their own interests, but as part of a broader democratic movement under siege. The attacks on higher education are interconnected with attacks on blue cities, on journalism, on voting rights, on the rule of law itself. Universities cannot win this fight alone, and they cannot win it by trying to appease authoritarians.
Third, universities must reclaim the narrative. Higher education is not a commodity that consumers buy and sell. Universities are not corporations. They are communities, students, faculty, staff, administrators, and the broader public, engaged in the vital work of knowledge production, teaching, and the preparation of democratic citizens. That means the university belongs to all of us, and all of us have a stake in its defense.
Finally, universities, that is all those who create the university community, must act with courage. We’ve seen examples of this courage—boards (like that of MIT’s) standing behind presidents who refuse to capitulate, faculty senates (like that of the University of Texas at Austin) adopting new academic freedom principles, and institutions using the rule of law to protect their faculty and students. Courage, in this moment, is the super multiplier. It gives others permission to resist.
The Choice Before Us
Universities stand at a crossroads. They can continue to react defensively to each attack, to implement “reforms” demanded by those who seek their destruction, to accept the narrative that they've somehow failed and deserve what's happening. Or they can recognize this moment for what it is: an authoritarian assault on one of democracy's essential institutions.
I know from experience that once authoritarianism takes hold, it moves swiftly. The window for resistance narrows quickly. My mother made her choice, to keep teaching the truths she was forbidden to teach. Now universities must make theirs.
The question isn't "What did we do wrong?" The question is: "Will we defend democracy, or will we aid its destruction?"
The answer to that question will determine not only the future of higher education, but the future of American democracy itself.
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Our Universities Must Not Fold to Trump's Authoritarian Compact
This compact goes against every democratic principle our country and our schools should uphold, and we reject the Trump administration’s attempt to cajole universities into compliance through explicit bribery.
Oct 06, 2025
We are students at the nine universities most recently targeted by President Donald Trump. We've spent years demanding that our universities improve conditions for students, lower tuition, and create spaces for the free exchange of ideas. No one told us the way to influence our universities was simply to bribe them with millions of dollars of federal funding.
On October 1, the Trump administration sent our schools a 10-point memo titled "Compact for excellence in higher education." If adopted, the compact would limit international student enrollment, force universities to share student information with the federal government, enforce the adoption of a specific definition of gender and threaten affinity spaces, and take action against actors that “punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” In return, our universities are promised increased access to federal funding opportunities. If they don't comply? Well, any school can “elect to forgo federal benefits.”
This compact goes against every democratic principle our country and our schools should uphold, and we reject the Trump administration’s attempt to cajole universities into compliance through explicit bribery. It should go without saying that extorting universities to comply with ideological demands and quell freedom of speech is antidemocratic, but here we are.
In a public statement, White House Official May Mailman claimed that our nine universities—Brown, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, and the University of Southern California—were chosen because they are "good actors." In other words, the Trump administration expects our universities to fold. And they expect to use our compliance as a green light to force universities across the country into similar agreements.
If any one of our universities agrees to this compact, it risks creating a chain reaction for the higher education system at-large to side with tyrants over students.
Here's the thing—we cannot deny that Trump's compact pointed out some very real issues in our higher education system. It is true that "too many young adults have become saddled with life-altering debt." It is true that "truth-seeking is a core function of institutions of higher education." For decades, young people have borne the brunt of our country's refusal to invest in education. As federal funding has fallen, administrator salaries have ballooned while faculty, staff, and graduate worker wages have stagnated and tuition prices have skyrocketed. Today, many of our schools are run more like hedge funds than like centers of learning. That's why we have continuously demanded that our government and our universities make higher education more accessible, and allow us to freely share our viewpoints on campus.
Trump's memo, however, does not actually sincerely seek to confront these issues. It is a thinly-veiled attempt to undermine fundamental principles of university independence and attack vulnerable students, and it is a clear instance of authoritarian overreach. Trump claims to value "truth-seeking," yet limits what "truth" can be sought. The compact places surveillance on what ideas can and cannot be present in the campus setting, requiring screening of international students for "anti-American" values. Under the guise of promoting campus discourse, it gives institutions the tools to gut departments that the Trump administration could frame as "belittling" conservative ideas. What counts as an "anti-American" value or "belittling" conservative ideas is malleable to the Trump administration's vantage point. The compact also effectively bans peaceful campus protest, a crucial part of civil discourse on our campuses.
To define a "free marketplace of ideas" by its adherence to a specific set of ideas and exclusion of a specific set of individuals is not creating a free marketplace at all: It's breeding authoritarianism.
This compact also asks our universities to commit to repression of LGBTQ+ students, including "biological" definitions of sex and gender, that would strip our queer students of protections and resources crucial to their right to a free and safe education. For LGBTQ+ students, this compact is not just a "political" attack; it is an immediate threat to our education and survival.
And this comes after a speech-chilling effect has already taken over our campuses. Students who dared to speak out in support of Palestine, especially, have faced extreme repression on campus, including police sweeps, expulsions, and attempted deportations. Over the summer, we watched as Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania signed agreements that sold students' personal information to the Department of Justice, excluded trans students from university life, and stripped them of their healthcare. We watched as the University of Virginia acquiesced to the Department of Justice's demands to dissolve diversity, equity, and inclusion offices against the wishes of the university community and forced President Jim Ryan to step down. We've watched our peers, Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk, taken for daring to speak against Israel's genocide, and we continue to watch as Immigraton and Customs Enforcement takes our community members on and near our campuses.
The founding principles of our universities—quality education free from censorship, workforce development, and shared governance of university structures—have been under attack for decades. The solution is not to take a bribe from a wannabe-dictator who wants to trojan-horse exclusionary policies under the guise of protecting American students. The solution is to listen to the students, faculty, and staff who actually make our schools run.
This memo was sent out during a government shutdown. While key government programs are stopped and unknown numbers of federal employees are furloughed, the Trump administration is seeking ways to expand its power. If any one of our universities agrees to this compact, it risks creating a chain reaction for the higher education system at-large to side with tyrants over students. We demand that our universities do not fold, and do not sign.
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