Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon

A gargoyle peers down from Cobb Gate.

Every day, the headlines report further assaults on research and higher education. The University of Chicago has lost grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services; every single project at the University funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities has been terminated; the National Science Foundation may have just killed 200 grants in its education directorate. Researchers are losing their jobs; visa holders will have to leave the country. Seven UChicago students and alums have already had their visas cancelled. Foreign students cannot speak without fear.

The University is silent. What does its silence say?

Its leadership may hope that silence will allow it to negotiate the present moment, to emerge less compromised, less harmed, than might otherwise eventuate if it spoke out against these harms to its community and its mission. It may imagine that by compromising its values—suffering illegal actions in silence, allowing members to be cheated of education and their lives to be disrupted, accepting that free inquiry will be available at best only to some—it can husband resources and emerge stronger, or at least less poor, in five to ten years’ time. Perhaps we are making tradeoffs: some lose their education, some must be silent, and some research is terminated so that others may survive.

The predicate of such arguments is that, the storm weathered, we just might return to the world as it was before. But there is no going back. That world is gone. And one reason it is no longer available to be recovered is that the leaders of our university consented to its destruction. For one thing our silence surely says is, “This is normal; this is ok. We have no values to oppose this attack.”

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To clarify the stakes of what is going on, we cannot forget that the government’s actions are based tactically on the brazen abuse of power and substantively on lies. As regards the former, at the level of the interpretation of statute and adherence to procedure, the Trump administration is manifestly in the wrong. As regards the latter, the demands the government has made of universities in the name of eliminating discrimination range absurdly beyond any conceivable remediation of a civil rights issue. The aim is to seize control over every aspect of institutional operations. 

For example, on February 14 the Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to institutions of higher education, announcing its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The Department of Education demanded not only changes to admissions practices but also an end to programs that “teach” certain ideas. Even with regard to admissions, it went far beyond what the Supreme Court said. In casting the intellectual aspirations of DEI as illegal, the letter trammels on the First Amendment, to say nothing of academic freedom.

Where antisemitism is concerned, on February 28 the Justice Department’s newly formed Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that it would “visit” 10 university campuses that had experienced “antisemitic incidents.” Not long thereafter, Leo Teller, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights and the newly appointed leader of the U.S. Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, said on Fox News, “We’re going to bankrupt these universities…. We’re going to take away every single federal dollar.”

On March 7, the Trump administration froze $400 million in grants to Columbia University. Three days later, the Department of Education cited the action against Columbia in its release of a list of 60 schools that were being informed of investigations into “antisemitic discrimination and harassment.” Funding has since been frozen to, in chronological order, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern. Both the form of action to wit, a massive funding freeze, and the procedure by which these actions were taken were illegal.

The demands made of Columbia were already insupportable, many having nothing to do with the ostensible cause of the government’s action. Nevertheless, recent reports show that the government is additionally seeking to impose long-term federal oversight over the university, via a consent decree. Harvard received a list of demands significantly more outrageous than the made of Columbia, which struck at the very heart of its autonomy as an academic enterprise. It  elected to fight, which has spurred further penalties and far more invasive demands that particularly target Harvard’s foreign students. For its part, Columbia’s president has now announced that it will accede to no deal that compromises its academic freedom.

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This background is necessary to understand the implications of the University of Chicago’s silence and, indeed, that of other universities. In my view, these silences involve significant forms of moral and strategic risk and enact substantial forms of self-harm.

One silence concerns the projects that have already lost federal funding, the students whose visas have been cancelled, and the postdoctoral fellows whose professional careers are being disrupted by the termination of federal funding. No communication to the University at large has been made about these actions, yet everyone knows they are happening. (The Dean of Students in the Physical Sciences Division did send an email to graduate students in that Division. Allowing that international students in particular might find the times “stressful and challenging,” it encouraged them to meet the challenge by “focus(ing) on strengths and purpose” and included the number for the therapist on call and a link to spiritual support.)

On the contrary, the surface level of university communications advertises research success—it broadcasts normality—in a fashion that ignores real suffering by individuals and both losses to knowledge and damage to careers via terminated research. That makes it hard to figure out what harms we would not be willing to paper over.

This is what I term a moral risk.

A second form of silence concerns the threats to Northwestern, among other institutions. Of course, one can imagine sector-wide responses. But where were Columbia’s peers and neighbors when Columbia was attacked? (Princeton’s President Eisgruber did write a public letter about the attack on Columbia twelve days after the $400 million was frozen, one day before the federal government’s deadline.) Why did MIT not speak up when Harvard was attacked? Is there not a possibility that in remaining silent, we are assenting to attack as an ordinary course of events?

That is what I term a strategic risk.

These two forms of risk come together in an almost surreal way on the main pages of the websites of the targeted universities: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, and Princeton. Nothing on these pages suggests we are not in some antediluvian world of prestige and calm. The dissonance between that content and what every literate person in the world knows is, I suspect, not helpful. My own communication with students and colleagues at these institutions suggests profound disappointment bordering on a loss of faith, that their leaders turn out so to lack conviction about the enterprise as not to speak in its defense.

A third silence concerns the assault on higher education and advanced research as global projects: the ideal of the free movement of persons and ideas, the aspiration to educate everyone who wants to come, the belief that we can only be excellent if we recruit and converse with the best we can find, wheresoever they might be. At one time, the University of Chicago’s leadership understood that “[our] ability to engage with members of the international community is of fundamental importance to fulfilling our highest aspirations in education, research, and impact.” Messages to this effect about both DACA and the curtailing of visas were sent by President Zimmer and Provost Lee to the entire university community throughout 2020. The letter from the Department of Homeland Security to Harvard on April 16 goes much further than simple travel bans in its threat to the very ethics of the research university. It seeks to transform Harvard from victim to instrument in a xenophobic and nationalist enterprise. We must abhor this. We must denounce it.

A final silence concerns the broad acquiescence of university leaders to the Trump administration’s spurious characterization of DEI in its letter to universities. (A welcome contrast to this silence may be found in the resolution of the University of Virginia’s Faculty Senate.) The failure of universities to defend diversity as an intellectual good or inclusion as fundamental to free inquiry, to say nothing of the epistemic aims of DEI, is worrisome in itself. That record of silence is even more troubling, given the track laid down for future action by the President’s executive order on “Defending women from gender ideology extremism.” Silence on these issues entails self-harm to essential academic enterprises. We need to beware of being the agents of our own falling short.

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If we break our silence, what should we say? What should we do?

I return to the claim that there is no going back. We must create the world we wish to inhabit. This requires the clear articulation of the values we espouse and the contribution we make and a resounding denunciation of the positions we oppose. If we are not strong, if we are not loud in the defense of freedom, openness, and inquiry, what do we stand for?

Many parties, both inside and outside academia, have urged the leaders of America’s colleges and universities to act in solidarity and speak with one voice. Indiana’s and Emory’s faculty councils have recently joined this number. A letter in Fortune magazine, signed by 80 (mostly former) college and university presidents—none from Chicago—and published on April 15, was an important, unifying step.  In addition, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published on April 22, “A Call for Constructive Engagement,” signed by many current leaders in higher education—once again, Chicago was silent. It’s a start, but a very timid one.

What is needed as well is a joint statement from the leaders of the Ivy Plus universities not under attack—CalTech, Chicago, Dartmouth, Duke, MIT, and Stanford—declaring the value of academic freedom and standing firm with their peers. That means denouncing the attacks on them in the strongest terms. Such a statement might come from all universities in the Association of American Universities. But we are the ones under assault; we are the ones whose courage or cowardice is on display. We will not rally the present nor win the future through timidity or silence. Speak up.

Clifford Ando is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and in the College, as well as Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University.