Trump poses ‘existential threat’ to HE and democracy

The Trump administration’s push to control universities is posing an “existential threat” to higher education and democracy and is transforming universities into breeding grounds of compliance, a panel of university leaders and academic freedom experts warned the Anniversary of the Magna Charta Universitatum MCU2020, hosted at King’s College London from 11 to 13 November 2025.

But universities have to do better at standing together and demonstrating and communicating their contribution to society in general and to their local community in particular, the panellists added.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said: “That we gather around at this convening, academic freedom, institutional autonomy, shared governance, the right to teach and learn and global collaboration are more urgent than ever.

“Yet in the United States, every one of these core values is under attack in ways that pose an existential threat to both higher education and our democracy.

“For more than half a century, the productive partnership between America's colleges and universities and the government has served as an engine of innovation, research and scholarship, a magnet for international talent, a catalyst for social and economic mobility and a mechanism for fostering global security.”

She said the unravelling of this partnership through the weaponisation of research funds, tax-exempt status and international students alongside fines for institutions that fail the president’s ideological litmus test has precipitated a “moment of enormity” for American higher education.

The American court system, which once championed the distinctive role of colleges and universities, no longer seems to recognise the critical importance of freedom from political interference as foundational to the strength of colleges and universities and their ability to fulfil higher education’s public purpose, she argued.

“Today’s courts have demonstrated a troubling willingness to allow for the infringement of academic freedom, the erosion of the marketplace of ideas and unwarranted governmental intrusion into every aspect of college and university operations, from who gets admitted, to what is taught, how it is taught, and by whom.”

She said these are not abstract concerns.

“When the federal government conditions research grants, accreditation, financial aid funds and the ability to admit certain students on ideological adherence, it threatens academic freedom and practice.

“When institutions and individual faculty, students and staff fear punishment, including being fired or expelled for dissenting views, the university is transformed from a site of inquiry into a breeding ground for enforced compliance.”

Global academic enterprise threatened

This crisis matters not only for American institutions of higher education but for the academic enterprise globally, Pasquerella said.

“If the US model of the autonomous university is weakened, the ability of colleges and universities to partner internationally in ways that model freedom and independence is reduced.”

At the same time, it sends a signal that integrity is up for grabs, and it emboldens those who seek to dismantle higher education precisely because it poses a challenge to their authoritarian, autocratic playbook, she said.

Moreover, the grand challenges and wicked problems of the future necessitate global collaboration, yet the current policies in the US are making US colleges and universities less global in orientation, she said.

This is despite one of the most significant strengths of American universities being their diversity, she said, with higher education institutions of all types long having welcomed international students and faculty, enriching their communities and strengthening US research programmes.

Increased scrutiny of international scholars and visa revocations imposed by the Trump administration linked to protests or political views and stricter enforcement of foreign funding conditions undermine the capacity to attract global talent and engage in global collaboration, she said.

“When US institutions scale back global partnerships, the entire ecosystem of international collaboration shrinks. This undercuts the global mission of higher education and weakens the US's role as a global hub of research and innovation.

“Under the circumstances, American higher education is incapable of serving its previous role as a benchmark for mobility of talent, for models of institutional autonomy, for international cooperation.

“When pressure builds on that system, it limits our collective capacity to sustain an open global network of universities and foments mistrust in international research, teaching and exchange in a globally interdependent world where challenges are transnational and the health of one major system impacts all.”

Ripple effects far beyond the US

Pasquerella said the weakening of US higher education’s global orientation or institutional independence has ripple effects that reach far beyond the US.

“Engagement with the Magna Charta offers an opportunity to reaffirm the principles that sustain the global university, and we need to use this moment to recommit ourselves to defending those principles and strengthening global higher education in its ecosystem, in a world that needs us now more than ever.

“We need to start by emphasising the public mission of higher education, not merely as a national good, but as a global common good,” she stated.

“Universities do not simply serve their home country. They serve humanity. We must insist that the global dimension remains front and centre.

“Second, we must build networks of solidarity among institutions globally through organisations like the Magna Charta, Scholars at Risk and Open Society University Networks.

“The attacks on academic freedom and institutional autonomy are not isolated. When any one institution is attacked around the world, each university must stand up and support the others,” she added.

“Third, we need to work together to ensure that across countries and across institutions, research remains free, global and orientated toward shared human challenges. This will require advocating for sustained and stable funding for flexible models of collaboration that are insulated from politicisation,” she noted.

Pasquerella said in addition, universities and colleges need to use “whatever vectors are available to us, including virtual exchange and collaborative online international learning, to encourage research and teaching projects that span borders and promote inclusive global outlooks”.

‘All universities must push back’

“Finally, we need to make clear that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are non-negotiable. All universities must push back against any form of coercion that seeks to condition academic inquiry on ideological conformity,” she concluded.

Robert Quinn, executive director of the Scholars at Risk Network, based at New York University, said the forms of pressure on US higher education are not new.

“They have happened in Turkey and Hungary and are happening in India today. They are not even new in the United States, with the current agenda of the federal administration, because individual states have been doing some of these things for, certainly, the last several years, if not longer.”

He said Scholars at Risk would not be involved if the Trump administration had chosen normal legislative processes to try to exercise policy changes. But much of the pressure on higher education and research was being exerted through extra-legal measures that “clearly resonate with authoritarian and anti-democratic processes”, and what was needed was a discussion about what to do about it.

“When the state declares certain terms are off limits, when the state declares that certain questions and areas of research are off limits, when the state specifically names individuals to be targeted for sanctioning, all of that is outside the norm,” he said.

“All of that is a violation not only of the core principles of the university but of any democratically legitimate society.”

The situation in the US has become so serious that Scholars at Risk now puts out a separate weekly media review with clips of articles about attacks on academic freedom in the US, in addition to its normal global review.

Isolation used as a tool of oppression

Quinn believes the Trump administration is seeking specifically to cut off the university from the public and prevent broad-based social legitimacy of the university, removing it as a source of power and critique.

Scholars at Risk has extensive experience of tracking these types of violations around the world, and one lesson learnt is that “violence is not the primary tool of repression”.

“Isolation is the primary tool, separating us from each other, making everyone feel isolated, making everyone think they’re under surveillance, because it’s a lot easier to do and a lot more efficient than to take power.

“So when isolation is the primary vector, then the response has to be ‘How do we unite? How do we come together?’”

Like Pasquerella, Quinn advocates cultivating counter narratives. “We have to continually assert the legitimacy of the values and functions that we insist the university space has in society. So that means getting out coverage and stories and examples about how the university does serve society.

“This is your job,” he told university leaders present. “It gives people courage and the space for resistance. And there’s a ton of experience in American higher education with various projects aimed at civil dialogue and discourse and its role in democracy and so forth, and all of those we need at this particular moment.”

But fundamentally, creative resistance in the teaching space and creative resistance in the public education spaces are needed, he said. And to do that, the sector needs to be “intellectually and emotionally honest” and not only defend itself but also look at what reforms it can take to be fully in step with the general public.

‘We need more leaders to assume risk’

“When I look at it from our point of view, at Scholars at Risk, there are two ways to engage the broader public, and that's by figuring out how to be of service to the public and how to assume risk for the public.”

He said those leaders who have stood up and spoken have taken on some risk for the sector, “and we need more people to do that, because this is about the societies which we serve”.

Scholars at Risk has begun working with a group of 600 to 700 academics called the Emergency Defense of Universities Coalition (EDU), sharing information on what’s happening on different campuses from public universities in red (Republican-leaning) states to private institutions in blue (Democrat-leaning) states.

“If all it does is pierce the isolation, that’s valuable,” Quinn said, “and if it gives a forum for people to form creative resistance of different kinds, that's even more valuable, and we're beginning to see that. In 2026 we're going to be rolling out new US-focused activities that are based on our global activities.

“That means adding staff to the Scholars at Risk protection team that works with individual scholars in the US who are feeling vulnerable at this moment – we spend a lot of time talking to scholars who are worried their phone is tapped – and organising litigation and working groups aimed at trying to counter the narratives that the administration and others are using to try to separate higher education from the public.

Confusion over neutrality

Quinn said during and since the campus Gaza protests there has been a lot of confusion over academic freedom and freedom of expression and protest and the legitimacy of those inside the higher education space.

This is common globally – in Scholars at Risk’s annual Free to Think report, 60% of the cited cases involve some form of violent incident that results from student expression or the crackdown on student expression.

Another area of confusion in the US is the call for university neutrality. Quinn said: “Of course these institutions should be neutral. They shouldn't be taking sides, except when you see that they really mean the university shouldn't speak to the public, it shouldn't engage with the public, and even within our institution, some say this is a way where we can protect ourselves.”

But pulling up the drawbridge and taking refuge in “our tower” is no guarantee of being safe, as SAR’s global experience shows.

“We quite well know that that is not true, and that when power wants to come forward into the university space, it will, whether we did something to trigger it or not.”

Many cases to learn from

He concluded by asserting that there has never been a better time to defend academic freedom because “we have never had more connection”.

“There are more networks that work on academic freedom today than there had ever been in the history of human freedom. We have a bigger body of experience dealing with these threats than we have ever had before.

“So it's our fault if we're not learning from the cases.

“We also have more tools. There is a global Academic Freedom Index to measure academic freedom at the country level. There are efforts to develop measurement tools for the national levels, and these should be encouraged.

“We have the attention of more interstate bodies today on issues of academic freedom and autonomy, whether it’s UNESCO or the European Union or the Organisation of American States or others.

Rights being stripped away

Jonathan Becker, vice-president for academic affairs, director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, US, and vice-chancellor of the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century (GHEA21), said the US was going through a “second redemption”.

A professor of political studies, he explained that after the American Civil War, after Reconstruction, there was the Redemption, when the rights given to African Americans were systematically stripped away, and the era of the Jim Crow laws – entrenching unequal rights for Blacks and Whites – began.

This was countered roughly from the 1950s when the Brown versus the Board of Education decision spoke out against separate but equal and ushered in an era of desegregation and civil rights, culminating with the empowerment of African Americans, but also the 26th amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

“That was called the Second Reconstruction, and now we’re in this period of Second Redemption, where many of the rights of things that we hold dear are being stripped away.

“And first and foremost [under attack] are universities, because they’re seen to represent two things that our ‘Redeemer in Chief’ really objects to.

“One of them is that young people tend not to vote that way, and [the other is the] independent thinking which goes on on college campuses.

“So we face this political and authoritarian moment. And the greatest threat in an authoritarian moment is not specific actions; it’s self-censorship. It's the actions that people take without being seen.“

But he said there was also a second challenge which has not been discussed enough, which is the “neoliberal challenge” because of the emphasis on career outcomes in universities and the “dismantling of social science and humanities departments, done in part by institutions themselves.”

Universities ‘need to be self-critical’

However, he agreed that universities need to be more self-critical. He cited his own experience of being rebuffed by an elite university when he asked if they could ask their students to join a Bard project teaching young people in the inner cities who needed support during the COVID pandemic.

He said it is really important, not just for US institutions but also institutions globally, to remember the role universities play in “shaping future citizens, not just employees”.

But he said it was also about cultivating citizens of other countries. He cited examples of the work Bard does, running ‘early colleges’ in six major US cities and running the largest degree-granting prison education programme in the US, but also supporting universities abroad, including in Palestine, and universities in exile such as the American University in Afghanistan.

“Two things that I think the Magna Charta Universitatum talks about that are worth underlying are, one, the civic role and responsibility of institutions.

“American institutions historically have emphasised this civic role, going back to Benjamin Franklin before the revolution, Thomas Jefferson, and the Truman Commission after the Second World War, and they all talk about the link between higher education and democracy, and almost every American mission statement – read Princeton’s, read Stanford’s – talks about that.“

He said it is really important not just for US institutions but all institutions globally to remember that.

“Our slogan in the Global Higher Education Alliance is, ‘What can we do together that we cannot do alone?’ And I would say, when universities are under assault, there is much that we can do together, but what we do together is much easier if we've been cooperating earlier.”

As an example, he cited the fact that Bard academics, when the Taliban retook control over Afghanistan, were able to work with partners from the American University of Central Asia, from the Central European University, from the American University of Beirut, and from the American University of Afghanistan to get many students, including many young women, out of the country, overland, so they could continue their education.

“We did this because we had been working earlier as a network who believed in academic freedom. I literally had a student who said, ‘I can't get my homework in because the Taliban is invading my city’.”

That same student now is at Yale University, running a programme which educates young Afghan women in English abroad using WhatsApp.