What’s New
Faculty senates across the nation are endorsing the idea of standing collectively against the actions of the Trump administration. Ten of the Big Ten’s 18 member institutions have adopted resolutions in recent weeks calling for an alliance among that group’s members, and on Saturday the State University of New York’s University Faculty Senate also endorsed a mutual-defense compact.
In total, at least a dozen resolutions have been approved in the past month, with the latest among Big Ten institutions occurring at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Washington, Ohio State University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. They join Rutgers University, whose University Senate was the first to endorse the mutual-defense pact in late March, and was followed by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Indiana University at Bloomington.
The SUNY Senate, which represents 33 colleges within the system and is one of the largest faculty-governance organizations in the country, calls for the creation of two compacts, one among New York institutions and a second “Public Good U Alliance” open to public institutions whose leaders signed a statement led by the American Association of Colleges and Universities last week and to other state-university-system leaders.
Separately, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Faculty Senate has called for the creation of alliances among public and land-grant campuses and Massachusetts-based institutions; Emerson College’s Faculty Council passed a similar resolution. Within the City University of New York system, the Senates at Hunter College, Hostos Community College, and the City College of New York have done the same for a New York-based effort. And in Georgia, the Kennesaw State University Faculty Senate’s mutual-defense resolution proposes a coalition of all interested public institutions. It was endorsed by the executive committee of the Kennesaw State chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Georgia AAUP president.
The Details
Many of the resolutions use similar language, noting that the Trump administration poses a “significant threat to the foundational principles of American higher education,” including shared governance, research integrity, and free speech. Mutual-defense compacts, the resolutions propose, should operate on the notion that “the preservation of one institution’s integrity is the concern of all,” which the authors of the original Rutgers document have compared to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose member countries offer one another military and political protection in a collective-defense arrangement.
Institutions participating in the compact would be committed to contributing to a shared-defense fund and to extending their resources — such as legal representation, amicus briefs and expert testimony, legislative advocacy, and communications efforts — to members that find themselves “under direct political or legal infringement” from the federal government. Each resolution calls on the head of its institution to lead the charge in proposing and establishing an alliance.
While no presidents have formally responded to the resolutions to date, one Big Ten leader indicated that he and his contemporaries would likely “take up” the subject. Kevin M. Guskiewicz, president of Michigan State, told The State News that he “expects” the compact to be considered at a late-May meeting of Big Ten presidents and chancellors. “I think it’s good that the faculty are organizing,” Guskiewicz said. “That’s what’s happening at that level, and we’ll have to ultimately see what we decide to do as university presidents with it.” Guskiewicz did not say whether he supported the resolution.
Because faculty-senate resolutions are non-binding, actually creating an alliance would fall to Guskiewicz and other presidents. In the meantime, some skeptics have asked how such an arrangement would work in practice — and whether it would even be legal. The secretary of Ohio State’s University Senate, for example, has written that his institution’s resolution was “dead on arrival because it is calling on the university to engage in acts that are in violation of state law and university policies.” As a practical matter, Jared Gardner, who as secretary is a nonvoting member of the Senate, argues, “there is no state legislature in even the bluest state that is going to be OK with state dollars being spent in the service of another state’s institution.” (Gardner also writes that he’s sympathetic to the political “crisis” of the moment but encourages faculty members to trust that administrators are working to defend their institutions, though they may not be able to share the details of that work with the broader university community.)
An Ohio State University spokesperson told The Chronicle via email that “it is not legally permissible for the university to participate in a common-defense fund.” Other institutions did not respond to requests for comment about their faculty senate’s resolutions, or sent statements that did not commit to taking action. And the Big Ten Academic Alliance said in a statement that it “did not contribute to and has not endorsed” calls for a mutual-defense compact among its members. As a matter of policy, the alliance said, “we do not comment on campus matters.”
Samuel R. Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said that while he couldn’t predict the specifics, he was “extremely confident” that a mutual-defense compact could be enacted “consistent with the law.” Bagenstos, who sponsored Michigan’s resolution, said concern about the legality of pooling funds “ignores the whole point of the resolution.”
“This is not, ultimately, the University of Michigan spending in defense of the University of Minnesota,” Bagenstos said. “This is the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota committing that they’re going to stand to defend each other and themselves. That’s the only effective way that the University of Michigan can defend itself. If it waits until after all of the other dominoes fall, then the University of Michigan will be standing alone and unable to respond effectively to pressure from the Trump administration.”
The Backdrop
Support for mutual-defense compacts has come alongside several other efforts to stand against the Trump administration’s actions, among them the AAC&U statement condemning “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in academe, which now has been signed by more than 500 higher-ed leaders.
Following weeks of public criticism that higher education was not doing enough to defend itself against federal incursions, leaders have also spoken out against student-visa revocations and funding freezes, including at Harvard University, which became the first institution to sue the government after being targeted by Trump.
Presidents and trustees from about 10 institutions have also formed an informal private collective to discuss possible responses to the administration, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The Journal did not name those institutions but noted that they included Ivy League campuses and top private research universities, primarily in blue states. The group hopes to band together to prevent one institution from agreeing to a deal with the administration that would force other institutions’ hands, according to the Journal, which added that the Trump administration “has been worried schools would team up in resistance, because it is harder to negotiate with a united front.”
What to Watch For
The senate bodies at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Oregon are scheduled to consider mutual-defense compact resolutions at their meetings this week, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison will do so in May.
The resolution failed last week to gain a two-thirds majority in Purdue’s University Senate, according to The Purdue Exponent, though the Senate did sign on to a broader, and less binding, statement in support of higher education’s core mission and values. Some faculty members worried that the compact risked tying their institution to an effort that could cause problems later on. “I think putting our eggs in this basket at this moment isn’t the wisest move,” the immediate past chair of the Senate said, according to the Exponent.
That leaves Northwestern University and the Universities of Iowa, Southern California, and California at Los Angeles as the Big Ten institutions that have not yet considered a resolution.
