Higher Education and the Defense of Democracy

This article is part of a preview to the spring 2025 issue of Academe. The full issue will be published in May.

In the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, a blizzard of executive orders heralded destabilizing change and potential real damage for many sectors in our nation. Few areas were spared the president’s pointed pen as the administration ordered drastic reductions in the federal workforce, marginalized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, paused research funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sought to deny the humanity of transgender people, threatened birthright citizenship, and renamed the Gulf of Mexico. Higher education—already on the ropes in numerous states and subject to intense criticism on many fronts—faces significant challenges arising from the executive orders and related actions in executive agencies. President Trump and his allies are using the levers of government to impose extraordinary controls on the freedom of colleges and universities to teach as the faculty deem appropriate, to conduct research broadly, and to operate as autonomous institutions that support our democracy through the discovery and conveyance of knowledge independent of authoritarian governmental commands.

While most of the executive orders are vague, pending specific implementation directives in various agencies—with some likely to be put on hold as litigation commences—a number of the orders and agency directives are particularly harmful to higher education, including

• orders to purge any consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from campus programs and curricula and to ban DEI considerations in federal agencies more broadly, with accompanying threats of investigations and financial harm to institutions that fail to comply;
• the issuance of a “Dear Colleague” letter by the acting assistant secretary of education for the Office for Civil Rights that claims that all race-conscious activities in education are illegal discrimination, accompanied by a threat to end federal funding for institutions found in violation of the directive;
• severe disruptions to funding for research at NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies, affecting everything from the ability of labs to continue operating to PhD admissions and undergraduate internships;
• the dismantling of environmental justice initiatives and a retreat from environmental protection rules, with significant impact on climate science research; and
• threats of mass deportations affecting undocumented students and their families, and tightening of rules for various student visas.

It feels like we’re in an airplane in great turbulence. The oxygen masks have fallen. We have to remember what they teach us on the ground: Put on your own oxygen mask first, not so much to save yourself but so that you can live to save others.

Higher education is in a potentially life-threatening moment of turbulence right now, and we are trying to save ourselves. But we can truly save ourselves only if we understand our larger purpose in rescuing our nation, our very democracy, from the strangling grip of the most authoritarian president ever to take over the White House and, indeed, all of the levers of power in Washington.

Saving ourselves is an important first thing, but making it our business to save America is everything.

In the era of Trump II, higher education is being challenged as never before to prove its worth to the nation, not just in terms of educational outcomes for students but also in terms of its role as a pillar of democracy and steward of the fundamental American values of freedom of speech and press, equal protection, and equity and justice for all. Politicians offer many different excuses for attacking higher education—tuition is too high, outcomes are too vague, the faculty is too insular—but at root, the Trump administration is pursuing this war against higher education because of what we do. Universities create and convey knowledge, and knowledge is a fundamental threat to authoritarian power. Consider what The New York Times editorial board wrote on January 17, reflecting on Trump’s long habits of using fear tactics to bully and intimidate opponents: “Mr. Trump is using fear . . . to deter elected officials, judges, executives and others from exercising their duties in ways that challenge him or hold him accountable. He wants to make dissent so painful as to be intolerable.”

In some ways, we should not be surprised that the pendulum let loose in the wake of the 1960s now boomerangs against a half century of gains in progressive thought and action for our nation—civil rights, women’s rights, the rights of LGBTQ people, the rights of immigrants and of those left on the margins of our society. In some ways, colleges and universities, with their broad hospitality to many different ways of knowing and constructing society, were the necessary incubators of great social change across many decades; they were the educators of the thought leaders and civic activists who pursued the change agenda.

Maybe the greatest transformation higher education realized was the acceptance of once-marginalized people—Black, Latina, female, gay, undocumented—into an academy that historically was a bastion of white male elites; we thought cracking open the door was hardly enough, but, obviously, others thought it was too much. While we pursued the ideal of a diverse and equitable good society with revolutionary fervor, those who looked askance at our work invented terms of disparagement: first with accusations of “political correctness” and, more recently, with the label “woke indoctrination,” used as a cudgel to batter higher education’s desire to teach many different students how to live and work and be successful in the most diverse society the world has ever known. The criticism has now metastasized into a well-funded movement to crush higher education’s spirit and purpose through political diktats; to constrain what we teach; to neuter our expression; to limit access for marginalized populations; and to expel any president, faculty member, or colleague who dares to confront the repressive regime.

As recently as two years ago, after three Ivy League presidents rendered tepid answers before a congressional committee interrogating them on their responses to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests, it seemed that the political ire was largely localized to elite universities and some notoriously conservative states. But today we know that the assault on higher education is not just about Harvard or Penn or Florida or Texas; it’s not just about individual academics or institutions. What we are experiencing is no less than a wholesale assault on knowledge, on the application of intellectual talent to civic governance and the continuing formation of a just and fair civil society. The blueprint for this assault was clearly spelled out in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s presidential transition plan that candidate Trump denied knowing about but that President Trump is following scrupulously. We were warned.

The assault on higher education is premised on an ideology of ignorance that mocks our very purpose, disparages higher education as unworthy of American trust and investment, and diminishes the centuries-long contributions of American colleges and universities to the vitality and progress of our nation and society through educating citizen leaders and expanding knowledge through research.

The ideology of ignorance was exposed in 2016 when then-candidate Trump proclaimed, “I love the poorly educated.” He triumphed in no small part because of a stunning volume of lies fueling his political positions and public rhetoric—lies amplified on social media. We now see the ideology of ignorance triumphant in the appointment of cabinet officers who are manifestly ignorant of the knowledge and expertise that they should have for those jobs and, indeed, are hostile to knowledge and expertise: a secretary of health and human services with no professional health-care experience who wants to eradicate not diseases but vaccines; a secretary of education whose claim to fame is in professional wrestling; a television personality as secretary of defense. Universities in America have spent centuries educating citizen leaders for public duties, and this is what we get?

Unfortunately, at a time when our nation desperately needs clear and unequivocal voices raising alarms over justice, equity, freedom, and democracy’s future, higher education is largely silent. Indeed, as the AAUP’s January 2025 statement Against Anticipatory Obedience illustrates, many boards and presidents’ offices have already adopted a posture of capitulation. The rush to dismantle DEI offices and scrub websites of any references to racial justice is a shocking example of “anticipatory obedience” even as some of the executive orders are challenged in court and most have no specifics about enforcement. Those who hope that early cooperation will prevent the ultimate destruction of higher education’s value as an independent social enterprise are fooling only themselves and revealing a woeful lack of historical knowledge about how authoritarian regimes work.

In “Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic Left,” an essay in The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg quotes the right-wing provocateur Christopher Rufo as observing that many corporate leaders, including some university administrators, actually welcome the anti-university movement, saying that “the resistance to Trump’s agenda is at an all-time low.” How can higher education contribute to the protection of American democracy when it can’t even muster the courage to confront the destruction of its own purpose in the formation of future citizen leaders of high intellectual attainment and strong personal values?

College and university presidents ignore the burgeoning threats to academic freedom at their own peril. Academic freedom is essential to fulfill the purpose of the university in teaching and research. Even more, academic freedom is the backbone of the academy’s ability to strengthen and replenish the vitality of American democracy that is so badly debilitated right now. We need to make the defense of academic freedom not about our own perquisites but, rather, about how academic freedom makes it possible for higher education to strengthen our nation.

We must insist on leveraging academic freedom to sustain efforts to teach the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and, as an overarching value, the ongoing imperative to promote racial justice in higher education and American society. This is not some “radical leftist” plot, as the new president claims. It goes without saying that the future citizen leaders we educate must develop knowledge and expertise about the broad diversity of humanity, culture, and society. Diverse campus communities are learning laboratories that shape future professionals with the perspectives and values necessary for effective corporate and civic life, serving the needs of all people, not just the wealthy, not just one race, not just one belief system.

The political abolishment of DEI from campuses and curricula crushes the freedom of faculties to choose how and what to teach about the true history of our nation’s formation; about the sociology and psychology of the human community; about the religious, cultural, economic, and political influences on many different groups coming together in community; and about the essential need for a broad perspective to shape laws, policies, and practices that can work for everyone. Now more than ever, we need the courageous voices of historians and sociologists and political scientists and philosophers and law professors raising up the truth of America’s racial history across nearly three centuries of denial of equal opportunity to Black Americans who continue to suffer marginalization in too many places. When an acting assistant secretary at the US Department of Education writes that “educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism,’” higher education should have a loud, courageous, and unified response presenting the evidence from Jamestown to Jim Crow to Little Rock, from Emmett Till to Medgar Evers to George Floyd. We have the knowledge to present the truth—why are so many of us so silent?

We have to remember that the anti-DEI movement is not only about political interference with campus programs and institutional autonomy but even more perniciously about denying access and opportunity to people who are different in race or background or culture—and, by limiting their access to and support in higher education, constraining their lifetime opportunities for access to careers and positions of influence and power. The anti-DEI movement is a cousin to the anti-immigrant movement: Both are motivated by animus toward people who are “other” in the eyes of the largely white, economically powerful ruling class.

The proponents of the anti-DEI movement insist that they are simply advocating for the allocation of benefits—admission to universities, opportunities for hiring and promotion—based on merit, not race. But this notion of “meritocracy” ignores centuries of white male privilege and subjugation of women and people of color; it reinforces barriers to their education and denies them equality of opportunity as a matter of law and practice. Equity programs are a relatively modest attempt to level the playing fields after centuries of harmful oppression on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics.

Equal opportunity and racial equity are not opposed to merit; they are all about teaching everyone that people who are different have just as much merit as those who have historically defined the rules of power and privilege. The only “unfair advantage” is leaving people who are different trapped on the margins. In this way, the defense of academic freedom on the topic of DEI is not just about the right of the faculty to teach what they choose but, truly, about the most fundamental values of our nation and its future in the opportunities that we must hold open for all people.

Academic freedom is essential to confront and defeat the ideology of ignorance on many fronts. Whether the topic is equality of opportunity, climate change, the economic consequences of tariffs, the dangers and potential of AI, the development of vaccines, global poverty, the causes of migration, or the truth of America’s long struggle for racial justice, it is the job of the faculty through the various disciplines to teach the myriad issues at stake for our society, with many different points of view informed by deep research, using a pedagogy that fosters honest and open dialogue with students to show them the continuous nature of learning and discovery. Far from indoctrinating students in one point of view, great teaching leads them to question convention and explore multiple angles on any given proposition.

History tells us that the ideology of ignorance has been a favorite tool of authoritarians through the ages. The less the people know independently, the more the tyrant is able to secure and enlarge power. Orwell told us nearly three-quarters of a century ago that one of the primary aims of the Party is “to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.” A government that wishes to deny the independent intellectual capacities of the country’s citizens will stifle academic freedom; a government that knows that citizens who question convention contribute to the progress of the nation will celebrate and encourage even greater freedom for the faculty.

We must use the academic freedom we have at present to encourage institutional engagement with the critical issues we face as a nation. We cannot be neutral; neutrality betrays our very purpose. Some may argue that a posture of institutional neutrality is a good thing, supposedly fostering a climate of encouragement for open expression by all on campus. That approach seems naive and dangerous in our current political moment. Silence concedes to the aggressor; the politicians advocating for institutional neutrality are not concerned with the rights of the faculty but rather with gagging the ability of the higher education sector to challenge the abuses of governmental power. This is a moment that demands courageous advocacy.

Colleges and universities are the great counterweight to government in a free society, or are supposed to be. It is the responsibility of all of us in higher education to confront the ideology of ignorance, to insist that the health and future of this nation as the most enduring democracy in history demands a well-educated population whose leaders have the expertise necessary for advanced civilization. That expertise includes being able to work with and lead the most diverse society in history. That expertise includes using the power of critical thinking to examine and critique public policy proposals independently, to develop alternative ways of understanding human society, to conduct the kind of research that leads to innovations across many disciplines that contribute to the healthy development of a free and just nation.

To do all of this, we also must insist on the essential need for robust academic freedom for faculty to teach as they deem appropriate, to conduct research in whatever area they choose, to write and speak without fear of censorship or retaliation either inside or outside of the academy. We must find the courage and strength to raise our voices on behalf of the freedom and independence of higher education, because the future of our democracy depends on it.

This article was adapted from remarks delivered on January 24, 2025, at a meeting of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.

Patricia McGuire is president of Trinity Washington University. She received the AAUP’s Alexander Meiklejohn Award for Academic Freedom in 2010.