Universities in the United States are under assault by the Trump Administration, facing three unenviable options: Capitulation, Resistance, or Trudging Along.
These are all bad options. Capitulation requires abandonment of academic freedom and constraint of innovation, rendering universities ideologically distorted and intellectually-barren vocational institutes. Resistance offers a small potential of restoring independence, with the likely outcome, bar collapse, of becoming political targets, loss of critical funding and tax-benefits, and reputation politicization.
At least, however, the first two provide clarity. Schools either change or reinforce their principles, but don’t abandon all of them outright. But many universities are taking the third option – making gradual pre-emptive concessions, avoiding provocations, and seeking to preserve as much of their funding as possible. This approach is naïve and doomed to fail.
A University that no one believes stands for anything cannot succeed. In doing the minimum to appease while rejecting full capitulation, the institution betrays its values and identity, shreds its reputation, raises the suspicions of its overlords, and turns against the very core of its societal value: a forum for free and constructive expression, critical thinking and knowledge creation, vital research with multiplying benefits, and the empowerment of curiosity. Universities adopting this approach starve themselves in order to survive. The costs of short-term security guarantee long-term collapse. Trump does not reward reluctant compliance, but enthusiastic embrace. While not every school can afford to resist Trump’s authoritarian advances, those who can, must, because an America without free universities cannot itself be free.
Sydney Wilhelmy is a first-year MIA Student at the Hertie School in the International Security Track, originally from the United States.
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