{"id":345,"date":"2026-08-06T09:39:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T09:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=345"},"modified":"2026-08-06T09:39:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T09:39:03","slug":"how-universities-won-their-battle-with-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"How Universities Won Their Battle with Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Trump administration\u2019s culture war on universities died this week\u2014not with a bang, but with a whimper.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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On Monday, education secretary Linda McMahon sent an to university leaders, asking them to publicly commit to addressing ideological bias among faculty, \u201cunruly and violent protestors\u201d stifling discourse on campus, and lingering DEI policies in admissions. \u201cAmericans\u2019 trust in universities has reached record lows,\u201d McMahon wrote. \u201cFor the good of the Nation, university leadership must seize this occasion to drive essential reforms.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

McMahon\u2019s polite request to please be less woke marked a dramatic retreat from one year ago, when the administration was steamrolling universities with a brazen extortion campaign that conditioned access to federal funding on compliance with MAGA\u2019s cultural agenda. By the end of July, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Brown had submitted to various administration demands\u2014which ranged from curtailing DEI and trans rights to policing campus antisemitism, among other things\u2014in exchange for the restoration of research grants.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

At that time, Princeton and Harvard were the two major holdouts, the latter having been the first school to hit back at the administration with a lawsuit. But in August of 2025, the New York Times<\/em> published a string of stories suggesting that Harvard, which remained in settlement talks with the administration, was on the verge of caving and striking a deal. As veteran journalist and Washington Monthly<\/em> contributing editor James Fallows wrote, the upshot of these stories \u201cwas that not even Harvard<\/em>\u2014[the] oldest, richest, most famous of the US universities\u2014could defy Trump.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

What has changed since then? How did the Trump administration go from cowing some of the world\u2019s most powerful universities into submission, to gently pleading with academia as a whole?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In part, this is a (rare, these days) story of strong elite leadership. Contrary to the Times<\/em>\u2019 reporting, Harvard did not cave, and in September a judge ruled that the administration\u2019s freezing of the grants to the school was unconstitutional. (The administration appealed the ruling). This decision opened the litigation floodgates: the California State University system, faculty associations and labor unions associated with the University of California system, and a slew of outside advocacy groups have since filed lawsuits challenging funding cuts, winning further legal victories. Two weeks ago, three dozen schools filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard\u2019s ongoing legal battle\u2014including early capitulators UPenn, Columbia, and Brown.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The feds\u2019 coercive threats \u201cvery much caught the sector flat-footed at first,\u201d Kevin Carey, the director of education policy at the think tank New America, told me. \u201cHarvard just didn\u2019t freak out and trusted that the American legal system still functions, in its way, and they turned out to be right. I think that gave some spine to other institutions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

With its stick strategy mired in the courts, the administration turned to a carrot in October, pitching a \u201ccompact\u201d with universities: Preferential access to research funding for schools that adopted a package of preselected policy changes. Here, the research powerhouse Massachusetts Institute of Technology led the opposition, rejecting the compact in scathing terms. A handful of other high-profile schools initially pitched by the administration subsequently declined (with the exception of Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin, which stayed neutral); ultimately, only a couple small conservative colleges volunteered to sign on. The failure of the compact set the stage for McMahon\u2019s toothless open letter, which came without any specific policy demands or threat of funding cuts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Undeniably, elite schools\u2013Harvard and MIT, and to a lesser extent Princeton\u2013played key roles in galvanizing universities\u2019 successful resistance to the Trump pressure campaign, by sticking their necks out first and providing cover for others to follow. But in order to take the right lessons from this ordeal, we need to be more precise about the particular actors and forces within these institutions that drove their response.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The spotlight has largely been on university presidents. Harvard\u2019s Alan Garber has become something of a celebrity, receiving several flattering profiles from major news publications, a \u201cLegend in Leadership\u201d award from rival Yale, and a thunderous standing ovation at the school\u2019s 2025 commencement exercises. Around the same time, Princeton\u2019s Christopher L. Eisgruber was featured on the influential podcast The Daily<\/em> as \u201cThe University President Willing to Fight Trump.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But take a closer look at how universities arrived at their stands, and what you\u2019ll find is not so much profiles in administrator courage. Rather, school leaders were under intense pressure from the various constituencies they serve.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Take Harvard, for example. Following Columbia\u2019s capitulation to federal demands, students and faculty massed in Cambridge for multiple hundreds-strong rallies calling on Garber not to do the same; the Cambridge City Council voted unanimously to send the same message. At this point, school administrators were eagerly demonstrating cooperation with the administration\u2019s antisemitism investigation, and privately telling donors that Harvard would choose its battles carefully. Later on, after Harvard had resisted the administration\u2019s initial set of demands but as it was entertaining settlement talks, newly-formed student and alumni advocacy organizations kept up a drumbeat of pressure on Garber.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This dynamic has played out on campuses across the country. At MIT, 29 student, faculty, and employee organizations called on president Sally Kornbluth to reject the compact a week before she became the first university leader to do so. After Brown struck a deal with the federal government over the summer, student activists returned to campus and played a prominent role in pushing administrators to follow MIT\u2019s lead in rejecting the compact. The California State University system\u2019s lawsuit came amidst student protests and a threat from governor Gavin Newsom to withhold state funding for \u201csellout\u201d colleges that cooperated with White House demands.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A fight currently engulfing Yale offers perhaps the clearest evidence that universities\u2019 resistance to Trump is being driven by organized students, faculty, alumni, and local elected officials more so than administrators. In July, the revelation that president Maurie McInnis was negotiating to settle a Justice Department investigation into the school\u2019s admissions practices sparked protests from students, faculty, and a new Stand Up For Yale alumni organization. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker visited campus to encourage protestors to keep up the pressure, while state lawmakers have threatened to take away Yale\u2019s tax-exempt status. In a Washington Post<\/em> op-ed last week, Yale alums Arne Duncan (Barack Obama\u2019s education secretary) and David Pressman (Joe Biden\u2019s ambassador to then-Viktor Orban-led Hungary) applied pressure on the university\u2019s board of trustees, calling out members by name.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it is university administrators\u2019 accountability to their school communities, rather than their inherent courageousness or idealism, that explains why they have by and large mounted a successful resistance to Trump\u2019s authoritarian tendencies. Conversely, the absence of this broad-based accountability in the corporate world helps explain why business leaders have not done so. Monthly<\/em> Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris was early to this observation, pointing out in November that \u201cuniversity leaders are under immense pressure from powerful constituencies \u2014 students, faculty, university senates, and alumni \u2014 to stand their ground,\u201d whereas \u201ccorporate leaders answer to institutional shareholders who demand the opposite.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As an enrollment crunch threatens the finances of non-elite colleges across the country, this distinction may become less pronounced. Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and an expert on higher education finance, told me that university presidents are increasingly forced to \u201cthink more like business leaders\u201d as near-term finances become an existential concern. But for now, at least at the prominent universities targeted by the Trump administration as bastions of radical ideology, stakeholders with other priorities are holding sway.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more Democratic Voters Are Boiling Mad at the Democratic Establishment, and It\u2019s Ridiculous<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And why they have been able to resist his authoritarian demands while the business world capitulates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,8,18,19,2],"tags":[144],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-care","category-higher-education","category-law-and-justice","category-newsletter","category-politics","tag-tagged-dei-donald-trump-harvard-linda-mcmahon-massachusetts-institute-of-technology-princeton"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Universities Won Their Battle with Trump - USA Business Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=345\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Universities Won Their Battle with Trump - 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