The Very Slow-Moving University Establishment

Or, why has the academic response to Trump 2.0 been so scattershot?

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

In case you were in a coma for the last two months, the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented assault on, well, just about everyone who did not vote for him (and quite a few who did). Garrett Graff describes it as a “constitutional crash.” Jonathan Bernstein calls it a constitutional attack. Jamelle Bouie labels it “anti-constitutional.”

The assault on myriad prongs of civil society — including universities, law firms, doctors, scientists — has wreaked considerable carnage, both intentional and collateral. This includes mass layoffs, hiring freezes, crashes in consumer confidence, and threats to the judiciary.

And yet, to many it seems as if no one is resisting. And those people have a point. Senate Democrats had an opportunity to make demands, and they whiffed. But it’s the lack of a civil society response that seems more notable. The organized opposition to Trump 1.0 was pretty sizeable. This time around things are different. Despite — or perhaps because of — unprecedented executive branch actions, law firms are mostly keeping quiet and university presidents are mostly mum.

The Financial Times’ Ed Luce takes the U.S. establishment to task for its timidity:

“We will never, ever, in any way, shape or form be part of the United States,” says Mark Carney, Canada’s new prime minister, about Donald Trump’s designs on his country. “It’s crazy. It’s very simple. That’s all you can say.” That message would make no sense coming from a US governor, president of an Ivy League university or a Fortune 500 chief executive. But there is nothing to stop them from sharing Carney’s spirit of defiance. Many who in fair weather routinely cite the heroism that launched the US republic have held their tongues since the storm clouds arrived. When a government fears the people there is liberty, goes the saying, but when a people fear their government there is tyranny. The US establishment lives in dread of the kraken….

American civil society is deeper and thicker than in other nations. Power has always been widely dispersed. But that only counts if it is exercised. Trump’s opponents are paralysed by a collective action problem. If one chief executive speaks out, that company will be punished. Only in numbers can there be safety.

Lest there be doubt that corporate and civic leaders’ silence is dictated by fear, ask any newspaper reporter how hard it is nowadays to get such figures to talk on the record.

Dani Rodrik asks a similar question of university and business leaders:

When the basic institutions of a democracy come under attack… leading major business and academic organizations have an outsize duty to say something. Yet neither business executives nor university presidents have stepped up to the plate. Instead, their approach seems to be what Harvard political scientists Ryan D. Enos and Steven Levitsky call “quiet appeasement.” They have calculated that by working behind the scenes and not drawing attention to themselves, they can avoid the worst….

Autocrats thrive when their opponents remain divided and fearful of speaking out. Such is the tragedy of collective action: we all lose when we refuse to stick our individual necks out. That is why the country’s leading universities and largest corporations – those with both the most credibility and the most to lose – now bear a disproportionate responsibility to do something.

Imagine that the chief executives of America’s top universities and richest corporations – along with labor unions, faith groups, and other civil-society organizations – issued a public statement that spoke clearly and loudly about the dangers of undermining the rule of law, academic freedom, and scientific research. Such a gesture would not move Trump and his allies, but it would give heart to other democratic forces, galvanizing them and helping them mobilize. Tens of millions of Americans are asking when someone will have the courage to speak out. At the very least, those who do will put themselves on the right side of history.

Rodrik’s last point is doubly important. He is correct that any kind of organized opposition would not move Trump or MAGA — but such statements would definitely tell others who are fearful that they are not alone. Some professors, deans and college presidents are speaking out — but it all seems so fragmented and insufficient. Why aren’t more of them speaking out?

I’m just a lowly associate dean of research. Based on a variety of conversations I have had with a variety of colleagues at multiple institutions, however, I can proffer a few possible explanations. Please bear in mind that these are explanations and not excuses. I am not trying to justify the lack or response, but rather explain it.

1. Speed. While the Trump administration’s actions are not entirely surprising, their rapidity has been shocking — so shocking that some university leaders have seemed overly slow or cautious in response.¹ An argument could be made that this is inherent to universities as organizations. In Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow described universities as “loosely coupled” systems in which a catastrophe in one unit would take a while to affect other units. That applies to decision-making as well. As previously noted, university presidents have to contend with the most entitled interest groups in existence. Expecting them to act quickly even in the current crisis is expecting them to exercise muscles that have never been used.

2. Precarity. Remember that an awful lot of university presidents — heck, an awful lot of university administrators, period — are interim at the moment. They lack leadership training. Furthermore, a lot of big university donors are sympathetic to the Trump administration’s actions. The New York Times’ Ginia Bellafante recently observed that, “in the current environment, the grievances of those donors — against diversity initiatives and unruly agitators — stand in precise alignment with the agenda in Washington.” This set of circumstances will often push university leadership towards more risk-averse strategies. In the current moment that means not saying or doing all that much. The logic would be that getting attacked is one thing; getting attacked after speaking out invites recriminations from some stakeholders — especially if the attacks in turn trigger mass layoffs.

3. Collective action. An individual professor can write and publish a statement of protest in a matter of minutes or hours. Even an individual university president can write or say something in relatively short order. Getting an assemblage of faculty to agree to anything requires consultations that can make the Congress of Vienna seem like a simple lunch order. Combine this with the speed of the Trump administration’s actions and you get a bunch of actors that seem to be reacting way too slowly.

4. Recent history. I’ve been writing about the War on College for well over a decade now. The past few years have been particularly trying for universities, and they have not always put their best foot forward in response. Clearly one reason that Trump believes he can eviscerate a key pillar of American influence with minimal consequences is that Republicans have stopped trusting higher education. Unfortunately, university leaders are not bringing a lot of goodwill to the public sphere at the current moment.

My hope is that eventually university leaders will soon begin to appreciate the existential threat that the Trump administration represents. But it is going to take some time.

1. I study economic statecraft for a living. If you had told me that the Trump administration would successfully eviscerate USAID in less than six weeks, I wouldn’t have believed it.