Arne Duncan, founder of the community violence intervention group Chicago CRED, was U.S. education secretary from 2009 to 2015. David Pressman, a national security and human rights lawyer, was U.S. ambassador to Hungary from 2022 to 2025.
If there were ever a time to question the wisdom of the academy, it is now. Just not for the reasons President Donald Trump has suggested.
This month, the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis will convene a summit of university leaders to discuss how to “restore trust in higher education” by addressing a laundry list of concerns from the president and his administration, including allegations of discriminatory practices and political bias.
Remarkably, however, there is little comparable effort among university leaders to coordinate a political response to attacks on academic independence by the administration. Whatever the organizers’ intentions, the signal sent — to the president and to other university leaders — is that appeasement is being coordinated while resistance is not.
For decades, universities have cast themselves as guardians of free inquiry and intellectual independence. Yet when confronted with political coercion aimed squarely at those values, too many have revealed a troubling gap between rhetoric and practice.
We have each represented the United States in prominent roles — one as secretary of education, the other as U.S. ambassador to Hungary. The parallels between what happened in Hungary and what we now see unfolding at home are unmistakable. The early responses were the same. And if left unchecked, the outcome will be as well.
In Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary, a kleptocratic and illiberal political movement began not with tanks in the streets, but with pressure, “compacts” and quiet accommodation. Storied institutions of higher education and research were slowly captured, their leaders coerced through financial threats and political pressure.
There, university rectors told themselves that going along was the best way to protect their institutions and their work. But they were wrong. Accommodation did not moderate the regime; it emboldened it, signaling weakness and inviting further demands.
Today, American universities likewise face a threat to their independence unmatched in modern U.S. history. By conditioning federal research grants on ideological conformity — and threatening investigations, funding freezes and intrusive oversight — the Trump administration has turned money meant to cure disease and advance knowledge into political ransom. Yet with only a handful of notable exceptions, the academy’s leadership has responded with timidity, silence or preemptive concession.
If America’s university presidents believe that their foremost responsibility is simply to keep their institutions operational — collecting tuition and protecting endowments — they are mistaken. Much as lawyers are guardians of the rule of law, presidents and chancellors are stewards of intellectual freedom and democratic norms. When institutional self-preservation replaces moral leadership, universities abandon their core mission. This is a striking abdication of responsibility — particularly from leaders entrusted with educating the next generation of citizens.
What’s needed is not complicated. It does, however, require courage.
First, universities must begin to treat political extortion as something more than legal challenges to be sorted out in court. Instead of confronting extralegal attacks with lawyers, America’s universities would do well to muster a political response. When legal caution displaces moral leadership, universities surrender before a fight even begins. One university leader recently reported that her institution avoided collaborating with peers because its office of general counsel warned of possible antitrust concerns. If that’s the advice universities are receiving from their lawyers, their lawyers are part of the problem. Recent congressional hearings — in which university presidents delivered lawyered, evasive answers to basic moral questions — demonstrate the cost of substituting legalism for leadership.
Second, universities must collaborate openly and publicly. Solidarity is leverage. Higher education leaders know how to do this. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, universities across the country offered displaced students housing and tuition-free enrollment. If universities can cooperate in the face of a natural disaster, they can cooperate in the face of a political one. We know that the federal government wields enormous power — but universities are engines of innovation. Working together, they can blunt the impact of financial retaliation and protect faculty and students.
Third, universities must abandon the comforting illusion that accommodation will bring this conflict to an end. Authoritarians do not stop when met with flattery or compliance. Some leaders seem to believe that if they keep their heads down, this moment will pass. It will not. This ends only when the administration believes the costs of further escalation outweigh the benefits.
Fourth, universities should embrace a principle long understood by NATO: An attack on one is an attack on all. If sovereign nations can pledge collective defense, so too can American universities. Public, mutual commitments to support institutions targeted for retaliation — financially, academically and reputationally — would fundamentally alter the administration’s cost-benefit calculus.
Fifth, faculty members themselves have agency. Just as it is hard to understand how Democratic Party leaders remain partners at captured law firms, profiting off of their firm’s decision to succumb to the president, so too is it difficult to understand the acquiescence of professors remaining passive as their institutions bend to the demands of the administration. We recognize the real constraints many professors face, but institutions would make different choices if they believed compromise could cost them their most respected scholars. So long as universities believe their most respected faculty will stay regardless of capitulation, accommodation remains cheap.
Finally, there is hope if universities choose to act. Nothing about this moment is inevitable. The independence of higher education is worth defending. When chancellors and presidents accepted their roles, they assumed responsibilities larger than raising money and protecting endowments. They are being watched — by their students, by their faculty and by the public.
Silence is not neutrality; it is permission. The record that university chancellors, presidents and trustees create in this moment — who spoke, who acted and who stayed silent — will be studied long after today’s political actors are gone. The decisions made now will define their individual legacies and, in no small measure, the future of American democracy.
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