Zachary Leiter

The Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C.

On April 9, the wave of visa revocations that has rocked the country’s institutions of higher education hit UChicago. Seven members of the UChicago community—three current students and four recent graduates—found out that their F-1 visas under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program had been terminated by the federal government. 

UChicago’s response to the revocations, and to the federal government’s recent attacks on universities as a whole, has been too quiet. In a statement to the Maroon, a University spokesperson said that the Office of International Affairs (OIA) “has offered to connect the affected individuals with immigration attorneys.” An OIA email on April 4 notified the community that “OIA will begin hosting virtual office hours to address any questions or concerns you may have.” 

These are valuable resources for the University to be offering, but they are not enough. More is possible—and called for, as actions that other institutions have taken show.

We are now at a moment in which scholars are hesitant to travel abroad for fear of being unable to return, young scientists are changing their plans and studying and researching outside the U.S. instead, and projects can lose their funding on a whim. Under these conditions of uncertainty, the University must take concrete steps to protect vulnerable members of its community, and ensure that they are secure enough to continue their scholarly activities and personal lives free of fear.

We call on UChicago to commit to the following:

1. Guaranteeing funding for affected international scholars to access immigration lawyers;
2. Publicly supporting due process for those whose visas have been revoked by the government;
3. Not taking preemptive conciliatory actions in an attempt to avoid direct targeting by the Trump administration;
4. Not capitulating to any Trump administration demands impacting the running of the University, such as placing certain academic departments under receivership, giving the government power to audit various aspects of the University, or revising the University’s admissions processes;
5. Not taking punitive actions against faculty (such as firing, demoting, or reassigning) based on their research or expression of support for perspectives of which the government disapproves;
6. Maintaining and supporting the demographic and intellectual diversity of its student body.

We recognize that there are limitations to what a single institution can do to resist antagonistic actions from the federal government, and that a number of factors may lead the University to act cautiously. Just this Monday, the government froze $2.2 billion worth of federal funding to Harvard University within hours of its refusal to cooperate with demands such as reforms to leadership, admissions, and student discipline processes. 

The costs associated with refusing to comply are all too clear. On top of its relatively small endowment of $10 billion in fiscal year 2024, UChicago is facing serious financial pressures—it had a projected budget deficit of $221 million in fiscal year 2025. It’s unclear to what extent our endowment could replace substantial federal funding due to legal restrictions and donor earmarking. Due to its hospital and medical school, UChicago also receives a significant amount of federal funding—$338 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding 2024, as compared to $58.4 million in 2024 for Princeton University, which receives the least NIH funding among Ivy League institutions. This funding is crucial to maintaining the life-saving and globally impactful education and research that happens at UChicago. 

However, these financial hurdles do not relieve the University of its duty to protect its community. 

By refusing to comply with the Trump administration, UChicago would indeed risk losing a substantial portion of its funding—a dire threat to the University’s core mission to seek and produce knowledge. Yet complying would threaten the very same mission in a slower and more insidious way, and the University would have betrayed its core value of upholding academic freedom. A student cannot pursue their education properly if the threat of being detained or deported hangs over them; a faculty member cannot pursue their research properly if they fear being fired over where they look or what they find. Seeking and producing knowledge can only happen in an environment where scholars are secure and able to inquire, investigate, and debate freely.

We believe that our proposals consist of concrete and meaningful actions that the University can take immediately. Some actions may be more costly and difficult to carry out than others. It is up to the University to determine which are worth pursuing.

In making its decision, UChicago should consider the fact that yielding to the Trump administration’s demands would set a dangerous precedent. If it bows now, even in seemingly minor ways, drawing a line in the sand will likely become increasingly difficult under more demands and greater pressure. An open letter to Harvard’s president, signed by around 2,000 of the university’s alumni as of time of this article’s publication, warns, “We cannot appease the Trump administration – it always asks for more.” 

UChicago does not act in a vacuum. Universities will be stronger when they stand together against an administration that runs roughshod over the Constitution. If UChicago wants to be a leader among higher education institutions, it must have the courage to take a stand when it matters.

Guaranteeing Funding for Affected International Scholars

UChicago should guarantee financial support for international students to access immigration attorneys. Offering a connection to legal resources, as the University has already done, is a start—but when 50 percent of UChicago’s student body receives some form of financial aid, that support may remain largely inaccessible without financial backing.

Nicole Hallett, a UChicago Law professor and the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic director, emphasized in an interview with the Maroon the importance of making legal support financially accessible.

“It’s very expensive to hire a lawyer in this country, and many students are not in a position to pay very much money to a private lawyer to take their case, and there just simply are not enough nonprofits out there to represent people pro bono,” Hallett said. 

If the legal counsel UChicago offers to connect students with remains out of their reach due to prohibitive expenses, then the University’s gesture is ultimately a hollow one. The University must actively stand behind students with tangible support. 

Publicly Supporting Due Process

The University needs to publicly support the members of its community that the Trump administration targets and do its utmost to ensure that they receive the due process to which  everybody, citizen or noncitizen, in the United States is constitutionally entitled.

As of April 18, over 1,550 international students and recent graduates across 240 institutions of higher education have had their legal status changed by the Department of State, according to Inside Higher Ed. The response from many university administrations has been markedly muted. 

However, one notable exception has been Tufts University. Tufts released a statement after Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student from Turkey, was taken into custody by masked Department of Homeland Security agents on March 25 as she was leaving her apartment. The statement requested that Öztürk receive the due process rights to which she is entitled and was filed as a declaration of support in Öztürk’s case. 

Tufts’s Office of the Provost has communicated openly about its policies on a page titled “Answers to Community Questions,” including stating its policy regarding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence on campus. In line with the attorney general of Massachusetts’s recommendations, “[w]ithout a court order or warrant signed by a judge, immigration officers cannot compel [a school] or their officer[s] to comply with their requests,” the policy reads. 

In stark contrast to Tufts’s public response, Columbia University has said shockingly little, even as the Trump administration deports its students and seeks to take control of its administrative decisions. 

In a March 10 email to the Columbia community, two days after ICE agents took Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil into custody from his university-owned apartment, then Interim University President Katrina Armstrong acknowledged feelings of “distress” brought on by the presence of ICE agents around campus. Armstrong did not address Khalil’s arrest. In recent days, a U.S. judge ruled that the Trump administration can deport Khalil, despite his status as a permanent legal resident who has not been charged with a crime.  

UChicago should follow the example of support and transparency Tufts has put forth.

Avoiding Preemptive Conciliatory Actions

Beyond immediate steps, UChicago must also resist the impulse to preemptively take conciliatory actions in an attempt to avoid being targeted by the Trump administration.

Since Trump’s election last November, the University has scrubbed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) language from its public-facing websites, starting even before the Department of Education issued a directive to end DEI programs. That the University made this decision preemptively is deeply regrettable and akin to self-censorship.

As recent events at Columbia have shown, such preemptive actions will not save the University  from any potential targeting by the Trump administration. Columbia established a task force on antisemitism in late 2023, which published two reports in 2024. Columbia’s University Senate also voted in February 2025 to pass a resolution “to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate.”

Despite the decisive steps Columbia took, it still had $400 million in research funding frozen last month. Even after it yielded to a list of demands sent from the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism last month, which included expanding its internal security force and placing its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership, it still had an additional $250 million of NIH funding frozen.

Many Jewish groups have argued that Trump’s instrumentalization of the fight against rising antisemitism has done nothing to truly address the problem. A coalition of 10 Jewish groups convened by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs publicly rejected the “false choice between confronting antisemitism and upholding democracy,” and warned that the government’s push to deprive students of due process risks undermining the rule of law. In an open letter to Trump, Jewish Harvard students argued that Trump’s funding cuts, taken in the name of protecting Jewish students, instead hurt them and the community they care about deeply, as internships and research opportunities are canceled.

Preemptive actions attempting to appease the Trump administration are untenable and have proven ineffective. Nor do they fall under the principle of institutional neutrality—conciliatory action in anticipation of federal pressure is not neutrality, but submission. Collapsing the distinction between neutrality and appeasement only legitimizes the trend of federal overreach.

UChicago must refrain from taking that path.

Not Capitulating to Demands

Despite what it stood to lose, Harvard refused to accept demands made by the Trump administration to do what Alan Garber, the university’s president, characterized as “control the Harvard community.” The letter of demands included requirements to “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity,” reform hiring and admissions processes to be “merit-based,” stop admitting international students “hostile to… American values and institutions,” and immediately discontinue all DEI programs.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” lawyers representing Harvard wrote in an April 14 letter. 

Although the government has not yet presented it with similar demands, Princeton’s president has also publicly committed to not making any concessions.

UChicago could be the next to face such a list of demands. Before it does, the University should, like Princeton, preemptively commit to not making concessions. 

And if and when a list does come, UChicago must,  as a university that claims to champion free inquiry and expression, join Harvard in refusing to accept such demands. That means resisting external pressure to place departments under receivership, submit to invasive audits by the government, alter admissions policies to align with ideological demands, or any other action that would compromise its academic freedom.

Avoiding Punitive Actions for Research and Expression

UChicago must refuse to discipline any member of its academic community based on research they have done, viewpoints they have expressed, or other scholarly activities they have conducted that fall outside of the Trump administration’s approved boundaries. 

Harvard did well in its refusal to accept the Trump administration’s demands. However, it had also dismissed the faculty leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies on March 26. The center had faced allegations that its programming was antisemitic and “failed to represent Israeli perspectives,” according to an article from the Harvard Crimson. In an email to center affiliates announcing the dismissals, Harvard did not give any explanation for why it forced the faculty members from their positions. That left its community to guess, and some landed on the explanation that the firings were because Harvard had decided “only particular narratives are worthy of study,” as one student wrote in a Crimson op-ed.

Such actions, especially when left unexplained, lead to an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear and create a chilling effect on academic inquiry and practice. UChicago cannot let itself be complicit in spreading this atmosphere. It must maintain its commitment to safeguarding academic freedom on its campus by refraining from taking punitive actions against those expressing perspectives which the government deems unsatisfactory or threatening.

Maintaining a Diverse Student Body

If the University truly believes, as it often claims, that diversity is “critical to the process of discovery,” then it must act like it by maintaining access programs and actively defending the full spectrum of DEI initiatives. 

Specifically, the University should maintain and build on the robustness of programs like its Center for College Student Success for first-generation and low-income students, its resource groups for students from underrepresented backgrounds, its Student Disability Services, and more. 

It should also continue to meet 100 percent of demonstrated need for financial aid and ensure that each pool of accepted new students is diverse geographically, culturally, economically, ethnically, and intellectually. It should maintain the same diversity among its faculty and teaching staff.

The Trump administration purports to fight for “viewpoint diversity” in higher education. Yet it has punished international students, such as Öztürk, for exercising their First Amendment right to voice perspectives with which the government does not agree.

The Trump administration is also attacking programs and research that serve demographically diverse groups. It has called DEI initiatives, such as on-campus cultural centers and mentorship programs that make higher education accessible to students from low-income and historically marginalized backgrounds, “divisive” and “exclusionary.” The government has cut funding for researchers across the country because their work includes trans people, addresses sex differences in health, or tackles illnesses that predominantly affect minority groups.

If UChicago caves to government pressure to roll back its diversity programs, the diversity of thought and perspectives on campus will suffer, hurting the process of intellectual inquiry vital to the University’s mission. Scaling back these programs would also have downstream effects that will shape academia for years to come. Student bodies grow into the next generation of scientists, policymakers, and entrepreneurs, and their diverse backgrounds ensure that their work will serve entire communities without leaving people behind.

Conclusion

The University must act decisively in defense of its community and higher education. 

The loss of government funding will undoubtedly reshape and weaken universities. However, the alternative would be ceding power to the government. Without its independence, the University as we know it will cease to exist. 

The University has historically prided itself on its commitment to free expression, invoking the 1967 Kalven Report in justifying its decisions on whether to speak or remain silent on social and political issues. The report leaves no room to doubt the right course of action in a moment such as this.

“From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”

That time is now.

Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon has recused himself from this editorial because of reporting conflicts.