Damian Almeida Baray

Snell-Hitchcock Hall.

Where do things stand in the war being waged by our own government on research and higher education?

The assault has taken place along at least five major fronts. First, the federal government has terminated many grants for research, including at the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or has unilaterally changed the basic terms of contracts post-award. The cancellation of nearly all grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) and the laying off of NEH staff are the latest actions of this kind.

Both the actions themselves—pauses in funding, termination of grants, and changes to contract—and the manner in which they have been performed raise procedural, statutory, and constitutional issues. Litigation is ongoing, and many complainants have been successful in obtaining at least temporary redress. The judges in question have been sharp and succinct in calling out the illegality and often the cynicism of federal actions. See, for example, John McConnell Jr.’s decision on the OMB “pause,” Loren AliKhan’s decision on the rescission of the OMB “pause,” and Angel Kelley’s decision on the violation of the Administrative Procedures Act in NIH grant terminations.

Second, in gross violation of the statutorily mandated procedures of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the government has withheld or threatened to terminate millions or even billions of dollars of grants and contracts with Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Harvard University, and Brown University. (Many other universities have been told that “investigations” are underway.) The best characterization of these actions might be hostage-taking, because where conditions for the restoration of funds have even been specified, the ransom notes have arrived only after the news has broken that funds are being withheld.

Third, the federal government has canceled the visas of, detained, and deported or seeks to deport large numbers of foreign members of university communities. The effort began with select students and researchers (examples here, here, here, and here) but is now culminating in a more silent and vastly larger effort to cancel student visas across multiple states (on institutions in California see here; on the national context see here). All this is above and beyond forbidding entry to the United States by foreign academics who are coming as visitors to U.S. universities.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the conditions of possibility for research in the United States, and for academic speech and free inquiry at universities in particular, have been altered beyond recognition. Projects have ended; researchers are being laid off; no foreign student or instructor can speak without fear, even in class. Those who are quiet, hoping the chalice will pass them by, are fundamentally mistaken regarding the objective conditions of their existence. Instead, they are electing merely to witness, without protest or counterargument, the dismantling of American higher education.

But there is more. The fourth front of the war on the research university is visible in the conditions specified for the restoration of funding to the universities under threat or, in Columbia’s case, in the preconditions laid down for the start of negotiations over the restoration of funding. In their details, these amount to a direct assault on the autonomy of universities and the exclusive role of academic judgment in academic matters. Columbia was told, first, to place an outsider in supervision of academic affairs in a given department. As a second matter, the university was enjoined to make professorial appointments in multiple departments, in which the viewpoints of candidates on policy issues will determine whether their application gets full consideration. Nonrational—non-epistemic—appraisal was to take priority over academic judgment. And Columbia agreed.

Finally, the federal government seeks to instrumentalize universities in the policing of speech. This is visible in the demands that Columbia change both its rules of conduct for community members engaging in political speech and its practices of policing. It is also visible in the requirement that Harvard “commit to full cooperation with DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and other federal regulators, and make organizational changes as necessary to enable full compliance.” And it is palpable in the fear created in foreign students and scholars when Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, issued a directive ordering the scrutiny of social media accounts of student visa applicants, citing an executive order that urged “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States”—students and scholars on visas—“do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles.” Thought is now grounds for the cancellation of visas and de jure deportation. Free inquiry is impossible when people are afraid.

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How should universities respond? Or, more specifically, what should universities say? I place an emphasis on speech for several reasons. First, since the methods of the government are largely illegal, universities must (among other things) be political. Its power being force, it can be opposed by speech that reveals its nakedness. Second, an important context for the current fight is the catastrophic loss in public esteem by research universities in particular, as revealed inter alia by the annual Gallup poll on higher education. A first step in winning back the public’s confidence would be to claim to have values and to be seen fighting for them—and I’m not talking about indirect cost recovery.

Finally, we should not forget that universities are also ethical communities, which is one of the reasons they are fragile. Bonds of affection must be sustained and renewed. An outward-facing statement of values would also have an internal audience of faculty, staff, students, and alumni, people whom it is worth reassuring and who also can be mobilized.

There is now action on this front, but not from universities, their presidents, or their trustees. Instead, the most striking recent development in the current struggle is the flood of resolutions from faculty senates, together with public letters by faculty at institutions without senates. The senates at the University of California, Berkeley; New York University; Rutgers University; and the University of Virginia have already spoken. Hundreds of faculty at Harvard have written to the Harvard Corporation. Faculty at Harvard Law School wrote to their students. I have been informed that the senates at the University of Michigan and Yale University are seeking to act. (Please observe that the University of Chicago is not on this list. I’ll come to that.)

Notably, many of these documents ask that their universities act in coordination with the sector as a whole or, in the case of Michigan and Rutgers, close coordination within the Big Ten. A similar move is underway to produce a joint statement by the faculty senates of the Jesuit colleges and universities, an effort that might be expanded to include Catholic institutions of higher education more broadly.

The rush of letters from faculty and senates is also diagnostic for what it reveals about the silence of others. What does it mean that the faculty are speaking up but, in general, university leaders are not? (The public statement about Rümeysa Öztürk by Sunil Kumar, president of Tufts University, and the legal action taken on Öztürk’s behalf by the university are notable exceptions.) A narrow claim might be made that university presidents are being tactical: they hope that silence will allow their institution to escape notice. But neither silence on the part of Columbia and Brown, nor preemptive submission on the part of Harvard—adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism, removing the faculty directors of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, canceling a public-health partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank—spared those universities.

A different sort of tactical claim would be that leaders of universities should not make promises they cannot keep or draw red lines they cannot enforce. But no one believes that a university can stop the federal government, nor are people so naive as to believe that a president who promises to assist students in returning to campus for their studies can somehow override the cancellation of a visa. What people want nonetheless is to belong to an institution that has values and is willing to act on them. They want leadership. The hunger for that is palpable.

It is also possible that, in some large ecology of speech acts, university leaders are relying on (powerless) faculty senates to offer public statements of principle, knowing that no one can demand that a faculty senate redeem the validity of those statements. Let senates perform this work, while old-fashioned lobbying, conducted by realists, goes on in smoke-filled rooms. Finally, it is possible that presidents are being constrained by, or are simply of a mind with, the people who truly run modern universities: their trustees (for interpretation and analysis of the role of the trustees in recent events at Columbia, see here and here).

To my mind, what is needed, both within and without the university, is clear and direct affirmation of the essential prerequisites of education, inquiry, and research, namely: autonomy, openness to the world, and freedom of speech. That these are civic virtues in a democratic society to which all collectives can aspire should allow universities to stand forth not simply as advocates for themselves but as beacons of virtue in a troubled time.

Where does the University of Chicago stand? It so happens that the Statutes of the University of Chicago state that the president of the University is the presiding officer of all ruling bodies, including the Council of the University Senate, the elected representative body of the tenure-stream faculty. The faculty of the University of Chicago—its Senate—therefore cannot speak as a collective unless the president allows it, nor can the Senate speak without formally implicating the University’s leadership. Here, the faculty don’t speak, at least not to the public.

But they can speak to their representatives. On April 2, 2025, a group of faculty submitted a formal request to the Committee of the Council, asking it to seek from the president and provost a public statement about values they endorse and red lines they will not cross. Last week, the president called for a special meeting of the Council of the Senate on Tuesday, April 8 to discuss the federal context—though discussion of the faculty request for action has been scheduled for a smaller meeting of a select committee only the following week.

To President Alivisatos, and to university leaders everywhere: for the sake of the institutions and, indeed, the calling to which we have dedicated our professional lives, please stand up. We stand with you.

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.