As we near the first 100 days of Trump 2.0, what’s the vibe of working in higher education? It’s not great.
As a professor, I’m going through the motions and getting my work done. That means meeting with my graduate students, grading assignments, attending various committee meetings, and responding to the mountain of emails. The familiar sights and sounds of university life are all in place: the pings of notifications, the soft glow of slide decks, the blinking cursor on Word documents, and the gentle reminders to colleagues on Zoom that they’re still muted. In that sense, things remain relatively normal in the world of higher ed.
Except that things are really, really not normal. It’s not normal for a colleague’s grant — the culmination of years of work — to vanish right before it was set to begin. It’s not normal for a department member’s professional-development request to be reflexively denied because she was attending a leadership event for women. It’s not normal to check a website devoted to tracking the disappearance of international graduate students. It’s not normal to see the structures that propelled over a half-century of scientific advancement be haphazardly pulled apart. It’s not normal to read dozens of messages from friends and colleagues announcing they were laid off from federal positions designed to help and protect the American people. It’s not normal to wake up every Friday with dread over what news is about to drop. It’s not normal to worry that everyone in our sector is about to experience an economic meltdown.
The best thing we can do right now is to refuse our institutions’ siren call of normalcy.
As someone who’s recently written a book on improving the higher-ed workplace, I’ve repeatedly been asked to describe what it’s like working in academe right now. The truth is that I’ve struggled to find language to capture an unsettling feeling: normalcy mixed with the extremely not normal. In search of inspiration, I asked some fellow staff and faculty on Bluesky how they would describe the experience of working in higher education under the Trump administration. Their responses would make for a very dark word cloud: sad, bleak, aimless, uneasy, disappointed, listless, and exhausted.
One of the defining features of working through this moment is feeling rudderless or adrift — feeling like our institutions have suddenly lost their sense of identity or direction. We’re “unmoored,” as someone put it to me. It’s like we’re floating, but not in the lazy-river way. Colleges are having an incredibly difficult time articulating their values, let alone protecting them from an onslaught of attacks from the new administration. In the face of repeated violations of academic freedom and attempts to undermine institutional autonomy from political influence, many institutions’ responses have been the equivalent of a blank stare.
Many institutions are content to stay out of the way — a version of the duck-and-cover approach. The prevailing logic of many campus leaders is depressingly narrow: So long as it’s not happening here, it’s not my problem. But the dots on the map of disappeared international students are proliferating. The list of institutions swept into governmental inquisition is growing. The vague, nonsensical policies keep arriving. Chances are, if they aren’t playing out on your campus yet, they will be soon. The problem is here, and the problem is ours.
Some will ask, “What did you expect?” Our institutions are enamored with the status quo, beholden to funders, and terrified that any deviation will compromise legitimacy, status, and resources. Even when things aren’t normal, institutions will settle into path dependency and project a happy face because that’s what has traditionally served their interests.
But I expected more from everyone. I expected more college leaders to mount a full-throated defense of their institutions and the values they say we live by. I expected more policymakers to see colleges as essential democratic institutions worth defending. I expected more philanthropies, advocacy organizations, and think tanks to realize that conversations about attainment goals and return on investment require the baseline existence of institutions. I expected board members to tell their private-sector colleagues and political allies that they were wrong about these places. But in so many cases, my expectations were too high.
As long-time Chronicle reporter Goldie Blumenstyk recently noted at a summit hosted by Arizona State University and Global Silicon Valley:
Where is the industry here? The industry that has got itself rich off this sector for so many years — where is that industry right now? … I have not seen the higher-education industry, the business sector, respond at all. These are your customers; these are your clients; these are also the institutions that provide you the intellectual capital for your own companies. Where are they?
And so, a second defining feature of working through this moment is a palpable sense of abandonment. A hashtag, #askthequestion, popped up in response to Blumenstyk’s remarks, time passed, and yet there has still been no widely visible or particularly notable support for higher education from its vendor and investor communities. It’s an isolating experience when your industry, the source of your livelihood, is being uniquely targeted by your own government, and many Americans are either completely unaware or cheering on its demise.
Our sector’s untenable situation calls for some introspection. When it became increasingly clear that there was no cavalry coming to save us, I asked myself: What am I going to do about it? I didn’t have a good response. And I hated that I didn’t have a good response. I resented the fact that, on top of trying to be a good teacher and contributing in some small way to our storehouse of knowledge, I even needed a strategy for protecting the fundamental rights of scholars and students. The tools I had developed felt entirely insufficient for this moment. Write an opinion essay? Advocate for small change on my campus? These actions felt like filling bags of sand in the shadow of an approaching tsunami.
And yet, there are everyday faculty and staff, people with limited power, protection, and platforms, taking action. They are writing petitions and offering teach-ins. They are educating students and peers about how to organize and build coalitions. They are drafting resolutions that call on their institutions to stop competing and join forces for mutual preservation. Unions are filing lawsuits and showing us, again, why we very badly need unions. Scholarly associations are hosting events and also pursuing legal action.
For the campus leaders reading this, my main message is that whatever you may be doing to support the well-being of staff and faculty, it’s likely not enough. During the pandemic, there was an upwelling of resources and new policies aimed at “work-life harmony” and improving mental health. Many of these were the products of pressure from a national conversation about burnout and turnover. There’s no analogous national conversation about the experience of higher-ed employees in the second Trump era. We have the same stress, uncertainty, fear, and harm that affected higher-education workers during the peak of the pandemic but without the same level of institutional recognition or action.
The challenge is that most employees don’t want another well-being workshop. They want something much harder to come by these days: principled, courageous leadership. We are starting to see more examples of what this looks like in the aftermath of Harvard University’s rejection of the Trump administration’s demands and subsequent lawsuit. Over 400 college presidents signed a letter organized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities opposing the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” It is a step in the right direction.
We hang on the words of university leaders like Michael Roth of Wesleyan, Christopher L. Eisgruber of Princeton, and Alan M. Garber of Harvard not because they are perfect leaders who get everything right but rather because they are using their power and platforms to stand up for higher education and its place in a democratic society. Not every leader can or should publicly challenge politicians. Some are in states whose local politics add an additional layer of complexity and risk. We know that important work is happening behind the scenes. But at some point, you have let your community know what you are doing and what you stand for.
Campus leaders may be busy putting out other fires, and there are plenty of them to divert attention from what’s happening among their workers. There’s perhaps less urgency to address the employee experience because we do not yet seem to be facing a Great Resignation-style shift in the sector. Still, leaders shouldn’t mistake the decision to stay put as evidence that employees are feeling good about their jobs or institutions.
My message for everyone else who works at colleges and universities is that it’s OK if things feel off. It’s OK if the joys of the job are harder to come by. It’s OK if you’re struggling to summon the same energy for this work. It’s OK to feel anger and disappointment at living in a country that is turning its back on learning and knowledge. Indeed, the best thing we can do right now is to refuse our institutions’ siren call of normalcy — to recognize that people in power have been slow to defend us and that our best bet is to care for and rely on one another.
When you find yourself in a riptide, the worst thing you can do is swim against it to the point of exhaustion. Instead, get strategic and swim sideways out of the current. If things are very not normal, perhaps it’s time for all of us to paddle perpendicular to the prevailing flow and try out new ways of being and doing.
