College is the place where many students entering adulthood find their voice. But when it comes to addressing the White House’s ongoing battle with elite higher education, many institutional leaders seem to have lost theirs.
“I don’t know how many calls you have to make to get one (university) president to call you back,” President Michael S. Roth of Wesleyan University told CNN. “The fact that I can, you know, name the people and count them on my hand, it’s clearly an effort to keep one’s head down and hope that your school will not suffer.”
Roth is one of relatively few top university leaders who still openly criticizes the Trump administration for its monthslong campaign to pull funding from schools that don’t toe its line on a host of issues, from diversity programs to transgender athletes and pro-Palestinian protests.
While most students and professors were away from campus over the summer, the administration spent the season racking up wins against many of its top targets, with settlements from major universities that have promised a combination of fines, donations and policy commitments in line with Trump priorities.
“It’s so much worse, I think, than I anticipated,” said Danielle Holley, president of Mount Holyoke College and another outspoken Trump critic who began warning about threats from the administration before Inauguration Day.
Only Harvard University has taken on the White House directly in court, although the school has quietly pursued settlement possibilities on the side, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN.
For those who have stayed on offense publicly, it’s an increasingly lonely fight.
“There’s no doubt about it that the severe tactics being used by our federal government are being highly effective,” acknowledged Holley, a civil rights attorney who became the leader of Mount Holyoke, the small central Massachusetts liberal arts college, in 2023.
President Trump has made dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs – known as DEI – a top priority in his second term, focusing especially on transgender athletes in sports.
“Institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),’” stated an executive order President Trump signed on his second day in office. In a speech to a joint session of Congress, Trump called DEI “tyranny.”
The administration’s first major college settlement this year was with the University of Pennsylvania, whose swimming program became a lightning rod after Lia Thomas, a transgender athlete who had previously competed on the men’s team, set several women’s records in 2022 on her way to dominating the Ivy League championship.
“We acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” UPenn President Larry Jameson said in a statement on July 1 announcing the agreement. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
That apology was worth $175 million to the university, as the White House released federal funding frozen three months earlier.
While many universities have reconfigured, renamed, or scrubbed entirely any DEI references from their materials, Mount Holyoke – with just over 2,000 students – still has a dedicated DEI page on its website.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts extend beyond specific departments and are embedded in all areas of the College,” the page states.
Holley says continuing to speak out against the government’s efforts to curtail DEI is not a matter of obstinance – but is critical to the mission of the 188-year-old college, one of the historic “Seven Sisters,” and the first of that group to accept transgender students.
“At Mount Holyoke, we are a women’s college, and because of that, we are built on diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Holley.
More major universities cut deals
Since the University of Pennsylvania’s settlement, the deals between universities and the government have gotten more costly and the institutions more prominent.
Columbia University signed a landmark $221 million settlement agreement with the administration last month to regain access to its federal grants.
Acting President Claire Shipman acknowledged the pressure they faced at the loss of so much money but bristled at the idea that Columbia was surrendering to government intimidation.
“I actually think that the narrative that paints this as a kind of binary situation – courage versus capitulation – is just wrong. It’s too simplistic,” Shipman told CNN Kate Bolduan on July 24. “This was a really, really complex problem.”
“We could have faced the loss of any future relationship in the coming years with the federal government,” added Shipman, “and that would have effectively meant an end to the research mission we conduct as we know it.”
The Columbia deal includes an “independent monitor” to resolve any ongoing disputes with the government over admissions and hiring, an idea that distresses Holley at Mount Holyoke.
“The idea that an American university would have a government monitor, not related to what they have been found to be in violation of, but related to their academic departments and the way that they hire people,” said Holley, “I think everyone in the United States should be deeply concerned with the idea that our federal government is attempting to run private universities and attempting to tell those universities who to hire; what they should be teaching in their classrooms.”
One week after the administration’s deal with Columbia, Brown University, another elite Ivy League school, signed its own settlement with the government that included a ban on “unlawful DEI goals” and banned transgender women from women’s housing. The university also pledged $50 million to workforce development groups in Rhode Island, where Brown is located.
“The Trump Administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement announcing the deal.
“Woke is officially DEAD at Brown,” President Trump crowed on social media.
As the flurry of legal agreements in the past month has made clear, institutions of higher education are not going to hang together in a unified defense against the government’s demands. While he continues to speak strongly against the administration, Roth says he understands why other college leaders would cut their own deals.
“The fear I think many schools have is that the federal government is willing to not obey the laws as anyone has understood them before, and so the lawless federal government is very frightening,” said Roth.
“If someone pays a ransom to get their kid back from a kidnapper, I don’t criticize the parents for making a deal,” he added. “It’s the kidnappers that deserve our criticism.”
Harvard takes strategy of public fights and private talks
The Trump administration has been fighting a two-pronged civil rights battle against colleges and universities – demanding an end to DEI programs that the government says are discriminatory while also accusing several institutions of antisemitism in their handling of pro-Palestinian protests on campus in 2024.
In court filings involving Harvard, one of the last major holdouts, the Department of Education has pointed to the university’s own report on antisemitism to claim the school ignored rampant discrimination against Jewish students and faculty members.
“Protestors followed and verbally harassed some Jewish students, vandalized Harvard’s campus, and posted swastika stickers near Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall,” a government brief says, citing Harvard’s investigation.
The university also released a report on discrimination against Palestinians and Muslims on campus – an issue not mentioned in the Department of Education’s complaints.
The Trump administration says Harvard has been talking to them behind the scenes about finding a way out of their legal standoff, which includes a second lawsuit in response to the administration’s attempt to cancel Harvard’s international student program, a move a court indefinitely put on hold in June.
“We’re still in negotiations,” McMahon told Fox News last week. “We are closer than we were. We are not there yet.”
But Harvard President Alan Garber has told faculty that retaining its academic freedom without government-monitored “intellectual diversity” – a major sticking point in early dealings with the administration – remains nonnegotiable, according to the student-run Harvard Crimson newspaper.
“Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” Garber wrote in April when the school first filed suit against the government over more than $2 billion in frozen research funding.
The fight continues to be costly for Harvard. A federal judge has not yet decided whether to order the government to turn the money spigot back on, causing budgetary pressure that prompted Garber to take a voluntary 25% pay cut.
What university presidents have said
The administration’s intense pressure on higher education programs and students has not been met with complete silence. An open letter signed by more than 600 college presidents in April called Trump’s actions “unprecedented government overreach.”
“We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight,” said the letter.
“However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”
But Roth, one of the presidents who signed the letter, doesn’t believe putting out one statement is enough.
“I was glad that they did, but I don’t see many people sounding the alarm that this is an assault on the integrity of one of the most successful systems in America, the higher education system,” Roth said.
Private organizations also wary of upsetting Trump
Although not as prominent as Harvard or Columbia, Mount Holyoke is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a research institution with a billion-dollar endowment, and Holley says its focus on women’s issues has been a double whammy for its funding.
“If you are a researcher in this country, doing work on women’s health, or doing work on women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), doing work on women in leadership, any research that has to do with women is being caught up in those government searches and is being canceled,” she said.
“When one of our research grants was cut, the wording from the federal government was that this kind of work related to gender is not beneficial and not scientific.”
But the cuts have not only come from the Trump administration, according to Holley. She said some private funding sources are also stepping back and cutting grants because they are afraid to associate themselves with a school that might run afoul of the president.
“I would say that the estimate is about $2 million (in lost research funding), and that’s both cancelations from the federal government directly and cancelations from private funders who fear what the federal government might do,” Holley said.
Reworking DEI, or dropping it entirely
At Wesleyan University – an institution in Middletown, Connecticut, with about 3,000 students – responding to the administration’s policies and executive orders has meant reconfiguring some DEI programs. A summer camp program aimed at middle school girls in Middletown who were interested in STEM studies is now open to boys, as well.
“The fact is that girls weren’t signing up for STEM as much as boys, so that’s why we had that program,” said Roth. “But it seemed to some boys – big boys, I guess – to be reverse discrimination.”
With many other schools eliminating DEI programs or making them all but invisible, Holley believes that the quick moves to roll back those commitments, even without an immediate and direct legal threat, says as much about the schools as it does about the government.
“I think it is a representation of the fact that many organizations maybe did not believe in these principles as strongly as they said that they did, and the government has provided them with an out,” she said.
Administration continues fight with new targets
After encountering limited pushback from its Ivy League targets, the Trump administration is moving on to public institutions, starting with freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the University of California, Los Angeles.
UCLA is now actively negotiating with the Trump administration over a possible settlement. A government draft proposal would have the university pay $1 billion dollars, CNN has learned.
“There is a possibility that this administration, once they are done kind of dealing with Harvard and some of the larger institutions that they may begin to turn to the small liberal arts colleges,” said Holley.
Despite the millions of dollars at stake in a fight with an administration flush with recent victories, Holley insists her criticism won’t be muted.
“My mom was raised in the Jim Crow South, you know, both of my parents survived the Jim Crow era in this country, and I’m a student of the civil rights movement,” Holley said. “In these moments, I would never think of not speaking up.”
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Comments