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At long last, one of America’s most venerable institutions, Harvard University, bastion of wealth, influence and privilege, has groaned its way into battle with the Trump administration’s quest to seize control of our colleges and universities. For years, the institutions that should have fought for basic American values have tried to pass the buck, perhaps hoping someone else would do the hard work, but at last Harvard’s leadership has recognized that you can’t bargain with a bully.
But as Harvard enters the fray, I keep wondering when my graduate alma mater and current employer, the University of Minnesota, will do likewise. What do we, the communities that make up this public institution, really stand for? Who do we serve?
It’s been a strange time to be working at the U. I’m personally focused on serving students, advising them on courses, careers, goals, dreams. I often lately don’t know what to tell them. That’s not a new experience, entirely. I was a professor during the 2008 recession and an adviser here at the U during COVID, but at least then the unpredictability didn’t come from malice in the White House. With the U on the list of targeted schools, times are tense here, and what we all want to know is simple: Will university leadership fight for us?
They should. I’ve long been a critic of too much attention paid to the Ivy Leagues. The most important institutions of higher education in this country are public: community colleges, branch public universities and flagship schools like the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus coming together to offer affordable and high-quality public educations to everyone (in theory; it’s all still too expensive). Still, in this moment, the Trump administration obsession with the Ivy Leagues provides a convenient model for what’s going to happen everywhere. When Columbia University faced demands that included placing an entire department under federal oversight, lest they lose hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the university caved. But the $400 million not only remains frozen, the Trump administration has seized another $250 million. Harvard leadership perhaps witnessed this, and when facing even greater financial threats but also demands for affirmative action for conservatives in hiring, refused to comply. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but at least the Harvard community knows they’re fighting back.
Some of this is happening under the guise of fighting antisemitism, and as a Jewish academic, it’s been disconcerting watching the dismantling of my life’s work in order to protect, I guess, me. Antisemitism is real; it happens on college campuses; I’ve experienced it, but it’s not more a problem than any other form of bigotry. What’s more, there are an awful lot of explicit antisemites deeply embedded in the MAGA movement — as pointed out by Michael Roth, like me a Jewish historian, and president of my undergraduate alma mater, Wesleyan University. If we want to get antisemitism out of our campuses, the first move is to block the Trump administration from interfering.
I want to believe that the U’s leadership is going to join in the fray. So far, the most visible step taken by the Board of Regents has been to ban academic units (departments, centers) from making public statements. The policy seems to be retroactive and implemented without input. A colleague just resigned from the Center for Austrian Studies after a 2022 statement about the invasion of Ukraine was summarily stripped from the website. What remains of a university if true statements about the world, issued by experts, are purged from the public record?
