‘From all sides': universities in red states face attacks from DC and at home

Yahoo

10-05-2025

Days after the University of Michigan president, Santa Ono, announced that he was leaving his post to lead the University of Florida, his name was quietly removed on Wednesday from a letter signed by more than 600 university presidents denouncing the Trump administration's 'unprecedented government overreach and political interference' with academic institutions.
As Ono is set to become the highest-paid public university president in the country, in a state that has often been at the forefront of the rightwing battle against higher education, the reversal, first reported on by Talking Points Memo, underscored the challenges of standing up against the government's sweeping attacks on education in solidly red states.
Many private colleges and universities have begun to push back against Donald Trump's federal funding cuts, bans on diversity initiatives, and targeting of foreign students, while faculty at more than 30 universities, most of them public, have passed resolutions calling for a 'mutual defence compact' – a largely symbolic pledge to support one another in the face of the government's repressive measures. But in conservative states, where local attacks on higher education were in vogue before the US president took office, faculty trying to fight back find themselves fighting on multiple fronts: against state legislators as well as against Trump.
Related: Hope as US universities find 'backbone' against Trump's assault on education
Some have persevered, although for now that resistance has been limited to statements and resolutions calling on the universities themselves to put up a more muscular response. The faculty senate at Indiana University, Bloomington, voted in favor of a defence compact last month, days before Republican legislators passed a sweeping overhaul of the state school's governance. In Georgia, Kennesaw State University became the first – and so far only – school in the US south to join the call for the solidarity pact, in part to protest the state scrapping a decades-old initiative to increase the college enrollment of Black men, which was pulled as part of the broader Trump-led crackdown on diversity initiatives. This week, faculty at the University of Miami in Ohio and at the University of Arizona – both states with Republican majority legislatures – also passed resolutions in favor of mutual alliances among universities.
The resolutions are nonbinding, as faculty senates play an advisory role at most universities, and so far no administrations have responded to the call. But the idea, those behind it say, is to send a message.
'All universities in all states are under threat,' said Jim Sherman, a retired psychology professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, who proposed the resolution passed by faculty there. 'If we don't stand together and talk about what each of us is experiencing, how we're dealing with it, and what the options are, then we're standing alone, and that's much more difficult.'
Paul Boxer, a psychology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, first came up with the plan to organize faculty in the 'Big Ten' conference, a group of 18 large, mostly public universities, to put up a united front against the Trump administration. But schools outside the conference showed an interest, and the solidarity effort quickly outgrew the consortium to include other, mostly public colleges and universities across the country. Boxer also praised other collective initiatives that have since emerged, including by a group of 'elite' universities quietly strategizing to counter the Trump administration policies, but called on more universities to publicly unite in their resistance.
There is a lot of anxiety ... Red states might even be more under threat from their state legislatures than they are from the federal government
Jim Sherman, Indiana University
'A lot of the attention has been on Harvard, and the Ivy Leagues, and the universities that Trump has name-dropped, and I'm glad that Harvard did what they did, obviously, but they're sitting on a $50bn endowment, and they can do things that we can't in a public university,' Boxer said, referring to the university's public defiance of Trump's demands and a lawsuit it filed against the administration.
Large, state universities – particularly those in blue states with sympathetic legislators – had other advantages, Boxer noted, including strong connections to alumni in local government and the broader community.
That is a harder case to make in Republican-controlled states – some of which, like Florida, Texas, Iowa and Utah – had essentially drawn up a blueprint for attacking diversity initiatives and academic freedom in the years leading up to Trump's election. In Indiana, the recently passed measures, which legislators attached to a budget bill at the last minute, would establish 'productivity' quotas for tenured faculty and end alumni's ability to vote for the university's board of trustees, which would fall under the full control of the state's governor, Mike Braun.
'There is a lot of anxiety,' said Sherman. 'If Indiana is any indication, red states might even be more under threat from their state legislatures than they are from the federal government.'
Taking a public stance in a climate of growing repression is not easy, faculty say. In Florida, where Ono is headed, the state's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was an early champion of the battle against diversity initiatives and said this week that he expects the incoming president to abide by the state's mission to 'reject woke indoctrination'.
Related: Over 150 US university presidents sign letter decrying Trump administration
In Georgia, at a statewide faculty leadership meeting this week, scholars from across the state's universities debated how to defend programmes supporting Black students, help international students facing visa revocations, and prepare to fight proposed state legislation that would impose further restrictions on diversity initiatives and criminalize the distribution of some library materials.
'Faculty want to do something, they want to respond, but they also see the inevitability of their university system and their lawmakers doing it, there's no stopping that train here in Georgia,' said Matthew Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia who also leads the state's American Association of University Professors conference.
'There are state-level attacks, there are federal attacks,' he said. 'We are taking it from all sides.'