President Trump has declared that this country’s leading universities are sites of “anti-American insanity.” He has tried to cut their funding for scientific research. His administration has announced investigations into diversity programs and floated new taxes on university endowments. Brown and Columbia have had faculty or former students detained and threatened with deportation. On Thursday, the administration suspended $175 million of funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies on transgender athletes.
Fearing sanction or retribution, universities have already begun to placate the administration, banning diversity statements in faculty hiring or weighing whether to strip “trigger words” like “diverse” from their hospital system’s websites. In doing so, they risk abandoning their roles as centers of free speech and critical debate in the name of appeasement.
Top universities must instead exercise the financial independence afforded by their endowments, which are commonly valued in the tens of billions. Their leaders should collectively declare they will not suppress lawful free speech, diversity programs or campus research to appease any president. The wealthiest universities, in particular, must pledge to use all available endowment funds as a backstop for any federal funding cuts to research, educational programs or student financial aid at their schools, barring any donor restrictions. Endowments could even fund legal defense for students and scholars who are threatened with deportation.
Thus far, university presidents have largely kept their heads down rather than uniting to oppose Mr. Trump’s assault. That is a mistake. A key authoritarian strategy is to single out prominent individuals or institutions for repression so that others, afraid, forgo legitimate criticism of the authoritarian leader. Often, universities are some of the first institutions that authoritarians attack. Make no mistake, the Trump administration’s punitive cuts to federal research grants and detention of university students or faculty, couched under the President’s grievances over diversity programs and campus protests, are early signs of this strategy at work in America.
The most egregious example of this strategy was the administration’s decision to cancel $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, in part because the school officials had not reigned in campus protests about the Gaza War last year. The administration promised to negotiate with the university to restore that funding if the campus complied with nine preliminary demands, which included expelling or suspending students, centralizing its disciplinary process and placing the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership.” On Friday, the university conceded to some of the administration’s demands.
But what if, instead, Columbia chose to weather the storm?
The university has an endowment of nearly $15 billion. The $400 million in federal cuts would have been distributed across multiple years. However, even if Columbia were to freely spend $400 million more from its endowment in a single year to make up for the funding shortfall, its withdrawal from the endowment that year would increase to just under 8 percent from around 5 percent. Several universities engaged in similar extra spending during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Columbia’s endowment would likely continue to grow even if it maintained this spending increase in perpetuity — its annual endowment rate of return averaged around 8.5 percent over the past five years. The endowment also receives around $200 million in donations annually. Other wealthy endowments have done even better. The Trump administration could cut more of Columbia’s annual government grant and contract revenue, which totals roughly $1.3 billion. But Columbia can, at the very least, afford to challenge the legality of those cuts — ideally together with other wealthy schools. Columbia and its peers could further turn to sympathetic alumni to replenish endowments strained by the president’s attacks. The fund-raising appeals would write themselves.
In short, were the university to choose to defend itself, some simple arithmetic suggests that — at least financially — it could. Easily.
It’s not too bold to predict that every university president will face a similar choice in the coming months. So far, some universities have found initial success with lawsuits to block federal research funding cuts. But nearly a dozen wealthy universities have already announced plans to trim their spending. Harvard, with a $53 billion endowment, has announced a hiring freeze. Stanford, with a $38 billion endowment, has done the same.
The Big Five private universities with the largest endowments — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and M.I.T. — should have the most room to maneuver. Their endowments, each valued at over $20 billion, have grown around tenfold (after inflation) over the past 40 years while enrollment has increased only by a fraction. Even universities with endowments valued over just $5 billion, on average, spend less than 5 percent of that each year. If they won’t spend their wealth to defend their academic missions, what are they hoarding it for?
Universities sometimes call on the idea of intergenerational equity — that endowments should be preserved to provide comparable benefits for future generations — to limit spending their endowments. In this climate, intergenerational equity is little more than a fallacy. If those universities fail to defend free speech and scientific research now, future generations could lose their treasures to creeping authoritarianism.
The stakes are so high that those of us who care about free inquiry and academic freedom cannot sit by and hope that university presidents and boards of trustees will step up. Our university leaders will no doubt worry that tapping endowments will rattle their biggest donors. They may be right to. Even once-liberal billionaires have sought to make their own peace with Mr. Trump rather than face his wrath. Other donors may want their alma maters to rethink what they see as extreme developments in campus free speech and inclusivity. To those concerns, defenders of the university should welcome critical self-examination and even reform, but not at the whim of a U.S. president. Students, staff, faculty and concerned alumni must press their university leaders to use endowments to protect their fundamental educational missions first, before reform begins.
At public universities, especially those with smaller endowments, community members could work with university leaders to seek a funding backstop from state governments. Twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general from California to North Carolina have already joined universities in litigation to block Mr. Trump’s cuts.
State budgets may be strained by a shaky economy and other federal spending cuts pushed by the president. For this reason that the wealthiest universities and progressive state governments carry the most responsibility. They have the most resources to push back against authoritarian creep. Large endowments, long hoarded, can and should foot the bill. For all our sakes.
The post $15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President appeared first on New York Times.
