Champions issue demand for respect for HE’s independence

PEN America on 29 September published an open letter signed by more than 67 former university presidents, provosts and other university leaders who are members of the Champions of Higher Education (the Champions) demanding that “government and society” respect higher education’s independence.

The Champions bluntly rejected Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s ‘National Call to Action’ issued in early September and her diagnosis of what ails higher education as an attempt to pressure university leaders to publicly commit to policies and priorities advanced by the Trump administration.

“The strength of American higher education results from the contributions of many different types of schools, both public and private, from large research and comprehensive universities to liberal arts, minority-serving and mission-driven colleges, and technical institutes.

“They each deserve respect for their differing missions, fair and predictable treatment, and freedom from partisan or ideological direction.

“The public benefits when colleges and universities can make educational decisions about what is taught and who teaches it without government interference. Accountability does not require political or partisan control, and reform does not require surrendering institutional independence,” they stated.

The Champions urged university leaders to go out and ‘flood the zone’ – as one champion described it using an American football term – with stories about how higher education serves the American people.

“This is a moment for all higher education to speak directly and affirmatively to the American public about what our institutions contribute, where we need to improve, and the principles that enable us to fulfill our public mission. We urge you to take the initiative and tell your own story.”

However, the Champions also acknowledged that higher education at the same time must earn and sustain the public’s trust.

They said time is ripe to renew the social contract between higher education and “we the people”. But that contract carries responsibilities on both sides.

“Our institutions owe the American people educational opportunity; academic rigor; affordability and value; intellectual openness; responsible stewardship; transparency; research integrity; and service to our communities and country.”

They called on higher education leaders to reject the McMahon letter’s diagnosis of higher education and instead to recognise that “institutional diversity and autonomy are the assets that have enabled America’s colleges and universities not only to serve the common good but to lead the world in teaching, research, and innovation”.

McMahon’s letter was a follow-up to the Trump administration’s ‘Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education’ (Compact), proposed in October 2025, which only a handful of universities signed on to.

In the name of preserving “a vibrant marketplace of ideas”, the Compact would require “revising governance structures . . . [and] abolishing institutional units [that is, departments or offices] that purposely punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”.

It would also require conducting rigorous, “broad spectrum” assessments of “viewpoints among faculty, students and staff at all levels” and making these findings public.

Additionally, signatories to the Compact would have been legally required to “screen out students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values; and to provide instruction in American civics to all foreign students”.

Critics were scathing, with the American Association of University Presidents charging that McMahon’s “offer to give preferential treatment to colleges and universities in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda stinks of favouritism, patronage, and bribery”.

McMahon says humanities ‘politicised’

McMahon’s September “National Call to Action” strikes what (at first) appears to be a different tone. Beginning with an encomium to America’s 250th birthday celebrated last 4 July, she goes on to praise the 400 year-old history of teaching “students a love of beauty and truth . . . . advanc[ing] science” and “power[ing] the modern research enterprise that secures our sovereignty and military might.”

Yet, citing the recent report of Yale University’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education, she charges that America’s higher education institutions have diluted academic standards, kept in place opaque admission policies that continue to violate the Supreme Court’s invalidation of affirmative action and fostered a left-wing political “monoculture.”

Citing the Vanderbilt and Washington University report on the humanities released in July, she points to the “politicisation [by left-wing scholars] of the humanities and humanistic sciences.”

In the rest of the three-page letter, she calls on institutional leaders to publicly address and where applicable publish on their websites how their institutions will address seven issues.

Among them are opacity of admissions, protecting free speech and ensuring punishment for unruly protestors, promoting intellectual pluralism and ensuring the research is dedicated to advancing knowledge, deepening understanding, and serving the American people who fund it.

Additionally, McMahon called on colleges and universities to contain costs and improve pricing [tuition and fees] transparency and indicate how they will “protect academic programs from foreign influence and safeguard integrity of the research enterprise.” (This last point has also been the subject of directives by the Secretary of Defense, see below.)

On 10 September, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a letter modelled on McMahon’s seven points that rejected both her request and analysis.

Given the DoE’s history under her of illegally cancelling grants, it asked “How will you ensure that . . . the department’s enforcement decisions are governed by law and not the political preferences of the Trump administration?” and “Will you publicly affirm that a genuine commitment to the Constitution means that the government must protect dissenting speech as well as speech that favors the administration and its political priorities?”

Turning to the question of globalised research, the AAUP asked: “What will you do to preserve international collaboration that has long driven and enriched science, the humanities and arts, and social science research and innovation?”

For her part, Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges & Universities wrote in an email that McMahon’s concern with affordability, academic rigor, research integrity and falling public trust were “questions universities themselves have been asking” and dealing with.

Yet, said Pasquarella, there “is a significant difference between inviting institutions to demonstrate how they are fulfilling their responsibilities to students and the public and using federal authority to prescribe how they must teach, conduct research, hire faculty, or define their educational missions.

“Public accountability is essential, but it must not involve the substitution of decisions based on academic expertise with those based on political ideology.”

Pasquerella is concerned that McMahon is setting conditions – as did the Compact – that universities must meet for “favorable treatment in funding, enforcement, or other federal decisions.”

Amy Reid, PEN America’s Freedom to Learn programme director, echoed her point.

“We’re concerned about the McMahon letter’s implicit attacks on academic freedom, on international engagement, and want to make sure that higher education leaders know that they have support for the good work that they're doing,” explained Reid.

McMahon’s letter does not have an explicit statement, as the original Compact did, that failure to comply with the federal government’s wishes would lead to the cutting off of government funds, including support for student financial aid.

However, Reid told University World News that in the webinar in which the letter was released, department officials made it clear that withdrawal of federal funding was still in the cards.

The department’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy and Implementation, Jonathan Pidluzny, “went through McMahon’s letter point by point, trying to assert that everything is reasonable, but concluded that universities that don’t join their bandwagon ‘are committing to a broken status quo’.”

By implication, Reid believes, there is a connection between those institutions that sign on to this agenda and access to financial support from the federal government.

Concern about ‘coercive’ intent

In explaining how the Champions are involved, Reid told University World News, they want “to provide support to college and university presidents and trustees who need to be able to stand up for their institutions in higher education at this moment”.

“They are concerned about the coercive nature of McMahon’s letter that asserts a specific set of problems or a certain diagnosis of what is ailing higher education that does not actually reflect the strengths of the US higher education system, which is diverse in terms of institutional mission,” said Reid.

By ‘diverse’, Reid explained: “diverse in terms of the specific benefits each institution provides to the community it serves, and so they articulate a set of principles and values that are shared by American higher education leaders, and urge leaders to articulate on their own terms how their institution is living up to the values of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and real support for the communities in which they work-they are anchored.”

Reid and the two former university presidents I interviewed emphasised that they are committed to explaining these values to the great mass of Americans who don’t wake up everyday worrying about academic freedom at Harvard or grade inflation at Yale.

Reid underscored that whether or not Yale’s report is correct about grade inflation at Yale, it is not a problem across America’s higher education landscape that comprises almost 5,000 institutions.

Reid wants, for example, to move the discussion about academic freedom from what she calls “wonky politics” (from the label, “policy wonk”) and into something that is meaningful for Americans.

“For me, what matters most about academic freedom is not about the faculty’s academic freedom for research, but that it provides a guarantee to students that they are receiving an education they deserve free of government censorship,” she explained.

Elaine Maiman, who spent 24 years as the chief executive of universities in Illinois, Alaska and Arizona, underscored that McMahon’s “Call to Action is infused with partisan politics. Government should not be setting the agenda, should not be framing the narrative.” She and the other Champions have the task, she said, “of reframing the narrative” around shared values.

The Champions can, Maiman explained, say and write things (in op-eds, for example) that the “people who are sitting in the hot seat right now who are, dealing with circumstances that we are not directly dealing with cannot”.

“We want to be able to say things that may be much more difficult for people, especially in very contested political environments, to say, we can say these things collectively.

“We can speak as a larger community, and of course, what we're saying in our open letter to sitting presidents and trustees, and all of the people who are in the hot seat right now, is really to say, all of us recognise, whether you are now an active president or retired president, that we are part of something extremely valuable to US society, and we are part of an ongoing compact contract, social contract between higher education and civil society,” said Maiman, who is a regular contributor to the newspaper the Philadelphia Citizen.

Constraints on resistence

Robert Scott, who was president of a public college in New Jersey for 15 years and of Adelphi University in Manhattan for 15 years told University World News that “I never imagined that the fundamental purpose and values of higher education would be so aggressively undermined” as they have been since Donald J Trump returned to power almost two years ago.

He also gave an example of both the difficulties of organising colleges and universities to resist the attacks the Trump administration has made on elite institutions like Harvard, Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania – and why organising them is vital.

At one point, after the Trump administration sued Harvard University, he asked presidents, “Would you join an amicus [friend of the court] brief on behalf of Harvard?” Several responded, “Why would I support Harvard? What has it done for me?”

He responded: “If Harvard loses, and the Supreme Court overturns Sweezy, every institution, two-year, four-year, research, public, private, will be totally undermined. So, we, as a community, have an interest in this.” (In its 1957 decision in the case of Sweezy v New Hampshire, the US Supreme Court enunciated the foundation of academic freedom.)

“We retired presidents,” said Scott “will do our best to speak not only to the government and legislators, but through op-ed pieces and talks at chambers of commerce to talk about these issues and why they’re important.

“I have an op-ed coming out in a couple of weeks, just about Long Island and the significant, not only economic but obviously cultural and social benefits of the 17 colleges and universities in Nassau and Suffolk counties. And I know that I will get responses from business leaders who will say: ‘Gee, I wish you said. I’m glad you said that. I didn't think about it. So, we can speak to the public’,” Scott told University World News.

Universities accused of Rigid orthodoxy

McMahon does not have the power to end tenure or directly dictate curriculum. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth does when it comes to America’s Military Service Academies, which offer BScs. In February, he ordered the Department of Defense (DoD) to cut educational ties with Harvard, charging that it was filled with “wokesters.”

“Too many faculty members openly loathe our military; they cast our armed forces in a negative light and squelch anyone who challenges their leftist political leanings, all while charging enormous tuition-it's not worth it.

“They’ve replaced open inquiry and honest debate with rigid orthodoxy. In our line of work, ideological automatons are useless. . .. Even more troubling is Harvard’s partnership with our adversaries. Campus research programs have partnered with the Chinese Communist Party.

Quoting President Trump, Hegseth wrote of his alma mater, as “being a factory of woke ideology and a breeding ground for anti-American radicals” – funded in part by the taxpayer.

In April, he ordered the Naval Academy to remove almost 400 books from its library that promote diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelo and Memorialising the Holocaust by Janet Jacobs.

Last Tuesday, 29 September he issued a memorandum committing to further purge America’s Military Service Academies by ordering an “immediately cease appointing civilian employees to tenured positions.”

Such positions, he said: “lead] to academic stagnation, faculty complacency that drifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of tenured academics,” whom he considers woke.

“To ensure our educational institutions remain firmly focused on their warfighting mission, we must address [that is, remove] the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic norms to dilute our focus on lethality.”

Hegseth doesn’t explain “civilian academic norms,” which normally include academic freedom, and free speech.

On 27 February, when he announced that the Department of Defense was cutting ties with Princeton, Columbia, MIT and Brown universities, Hegseth provided a gloss on these civilian universities as having “replaced the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness. They've traded true intellectual rigor for radical dogma, sacrificing free expression for the suffocating confines of leftist ideology.”

‘Lack of transparency’

Hegseth’s actions against the military academies have raised concerns for both the American Council of Education (ACE) and AAC&U.

“ACE, along with the rest of the higher education community, supported the creation of the ‘1286 list’ as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, with the goal of helping identify entities and organizations of concern in relation to Department of War-funded research,” ACE Vice-president and Chief of Staff of Government Relations, Sarah Spreitzer, wrote in an email.

“We are concerned that it now apparently is being applied much more broadly to programs not funded by the Department of War. We hope that if there are additional national security concerns that the administration will work to communicate those broadly and in a transparent manner."

Pasquerella also noted that “National security and the risks posed by foreign interference in research should be addressed through policies and practices.”

In reference to the history of the Trump administration and, especially, in reference to a question about DoD’s announcement on 17 August that gave 30 universities (including Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, University of Texas Austin, Cornell, Duke, and New York University) “two weeks to audit their academic, financial and research connections to foreign entities that the government considers too risky or hostile to engage with,” she sounded a warning.

“Those risks should not become a rationale for weakening academic freedom or severing relationships among universities globally because their intellectual cultures are deemed insufficiently aligned with the views of US government officials,”

Pasquerella then turned to Hegseth’s order to end new tenure appointments for civilian faculty at the military academies, which she said is “particularly troubling” from the standpoint of academic freedom.

“The nation does not strengthen its military by insulating future officers from independent scholarship or contested ideas. In fact, the liberal education traditionally provided at our service academies – including history, philosophy, literature, science, economics, and political thought – is foundational to military leadership, preparing officers to exercise judgment in circumstances in which technical proficiency alone is insufficient,” she wrote.

“There is an irony in calling upon universities to serve the nation and simultaneously treating them as adversaries.

“American higher education has contributed enormously to our national security – from scientific and technological discovery to the education of generations of military and civilian leaders.

“That partnership has been strongest when government identifies national challenges and supports universities in addressing them, while respecting the independence of scholars and institutions,” wrote Pasquerella.

“At a time when the United States faces genuine national-security challenges around the world, it is stunning to see the Department of Defense devoting so much attention to determining which American universities are sufficiently aligned with the administration’s conception of American values, treating them as potential subjects of loyalty tests, instead of partners in economic and national security,” she said.