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How did we get here? On April 17, the Faculty Senate — which includes all faculty, librarians, archivists, curators, and research scientists — met to pass four resolutions asking our alleged leaders to stop licking President Trump’s toes, please. They passed with overwhelming margins and an unprecedented participation rate. A few days later, five Democratic regents — two of whom are up for re-election next year and had been quickly losing the support of the party base and possibly their own self-respect — published an opinion piece in our venerable and indispensable student newspaper, The Michigan Daily.
The Daily piece is fairly anodyne. It does not mention Trump by name, and its most bellicose lines are: “Independence is not only important for academic excellence, but also essential to democracy. Universities exist to challenge assumptions, test ideas and create space for independent thinking, even when that thinking runs against the grain of popular opinion or political ideology. This is especially true when they attempt to raise the next generation. That’s why authoritarian regimes so often seek control over their universities. Free inquiry is a threat to unchecked power.”
It’s hard to disagree with that (though our two Republican regents and one of the Democratic ones apparently did). Unchecked power is indeed a threat, particularly from the current regime. “Ignorance, allied with power,” as James Baldwin put it, is “the most ferocious enemy justice can have,” and it is also a bad combination for universities. Yet Ono stayed silent, and did not once speak up for those most threatened: immigrants and international students; faculty and staff; transgender and queer people; women; Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous constituents whose support systems (such as they were) have been unceremoniously eliminated; pro-Palestinian protesters and writers.
The regents’ op-ed, which does not mention the communities in Trump’s crosshairs either, is a half-hearted and coded defense of at least some diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. After Ono and the regents eliminated the DEI office, we are now getting an “associate provost for access and opportunity,” an office that will, one must assume, serve much the same function. One of the five regents, Mark J. Bernstein, is quoted in the The Detroit News suggesting that “we need to do a better job of speaking with clarity and purpose about our work around diversity.” We do indeed, and that op-ed would have been a nice place to start. And it would have been an excellent place to condemn the government’s arrests of students and scholars such as Mahmoud Khalil, who missed his first child’s birth; Rümeysa Öztürk, who was denied her asthma medication; and Badar Khan Suri, who is currently allowed two hours of fresh air a week, or to mention the 22 students at the University of Michigan who saw their visa status terminated (and later reinstated).
To be fair, the regents do assert that we must remain “free to determine who teaches, what is taught and who is admitted — without interference from the political party in power.” But to nobody’s surprise, the verboten words “diversity, equity, and inclusion” make no appearance here, and the authors do not acknowledge the acute danger in which many of our community members find themselves. Perhaps, in the future, we will hear concrete plans on how to shield our colleagues and students from deportation, on how to ensure that our hospitals and clinics will continue to deliver transgender health care and offer abortions to all who need them, and on how to restore the badly damaged culture of protest that UM used to proudly celebrate.
However unsatisfying the five regents’ essay was, it nonetheless signaled a break from the politics of appeasement Ono had pursued — though at the time, we did not yet know that Ono was auditioning for the man who just tanked a dean search at the University of Florida because the finalists were insufficiently hostile to DEI.
This all might have flown under the radar had not someone sent the op-ed to Nolan Finley, the right-wing editorial-page editor and columnist at The Detroit News. (He’s argued that “Harvard should follow Hillsdale’s lead” and that sort of thing.) That someone is most likely one of the two Republican regents. In a spectacular own goal, Finley, a rabid Trump supporter, manages in his column to make the five regents look principled and brave whereas Ono appeared weak and indecisive. The kill shot — and it was always difficult to see how Ono would survive it — is this: “Ono was asked to sign the op-ed, but refused.” Coincidentally, Ono had not been seen in quite a while, was said to have skipped meetings with his advisory committee and the executive officers, and seemed generally MIA in the war brewing across campuses. He was, it turns out, negotiating the terms of his new job.
On April 29, our two Republican regents published their own op-ed in The Detroit News touting “the leadership of President Santa Ono.” Op-ed (R) does not articulate any concerns about authoritarian interference in universities’ autonomy, instead touting the same programs to increase access for low-income students that op-ed (D) celebrated. It brags about the fact that the nominally Democrat-controlled board passed a whole series of Republican-favored policies last year, such as an institutional neutrality bylaw, a ban on diversity statements, and, in the now-familiar doublespeak of right-wing suppression of protest, “policies to hold students accountable for actions that infringe on others’ abilities to have free speech on our campus.”
Open conflict between Republican and Democratic regents is good for us. The era of regental rule by consensus is finally coming to an end here at UM, it seems, and not a moment too soon. After the Trump administration had some success picking off universities one by one — Columbia’s surrender being a particularly shameful chapter here — our institutions are finally stirring and might be poised to overcome the acute collective-action problem that has paralyzed them so far. Harvard is suing, Princeton has been sending out bat signals, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities letter in support of academic autonomy sports more than 300 institutional signatures now. (Ono signed after the op-ed came out. It would be exquisitely funny if that signature cost him his job at UF, for which he is “the sole finalist,” but not yet confirmed.)
Faculty-governance organizations, including ours, have passed motions in support of a mutual-defense compact, spearheaded by Rutgers University faculty. In general, a more festive mood of resistance is spreading across universities — even while they see their federal funding disappear, their grants subjected to ideological screening, and fantastic research projects felled overnight.
Any hopes for a change, of course, will be hampered by the fact that universities are currently navigating three distinct conflicts simultaneously. The first is between institutions and MAGA’s vandalism of higher education, the most acute threat. The second is between universities and a public that seems increasingly unsure what universities are good for, largely due to decades of right-wing onslaughts on education, execrably incompetent messaging from university communication offices, and, yes, a certain insularity for which we scholars ourselves are partially to blame. The third is between university administrators and trustees or regents on one side, and the faculty and students on the other, a conflict that has played out at countless institutions, including mine.
The first antagonism is a war, and it needs to be fought with all we have — in the courts, in the media, and in the streets. The second one is fixable — Harvard’s celebrated homepage touting its research accomplishments and their contributions to the public good is an example other universities need to follow. We also need 30-second TV ads, I think. Imagine a spot where five or six Americans of all kinds look straight in the camera and say, “I lost my mother, my sister, my friend, my daughter, my wife to breast cancer.” Cut to a scientist: “I was working on a breast-cancer vaccine.” Cut to black. Print only: “Trump and Musk canceled the research. Call your representative and ask them to defend our universities.” We can all think of dozens of such ads, and they need to include a defense of the humanities and the social sciences, too, no matter how much easier it is to sell medical and engineering research.
The rift between university leaders and the faculty, however, became a chasm in the context of students and others on campus protesting Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, and it opened wider still after many universities hastily abandoned DEI programs they had loudly championed for decades. (The UM senate voted with almost 80 percent of the vote that it wanted to restore them.) As previously honored norms of shared governance are eroding, university leaders increasingly refuse to even talk to faculty anymore, preferring to govern by decree, by badly written email, and, now, by op-ed. This is all the more infuriating in light of the fact that the core mission of the university — a mission that is in grave danger — is research and teaching, the things we and only we do (though of course we depend on the support of staff members, without whom nothing happens and nothing works).
To date, neither the regents nor our administration have publicly acknowledged the fact that more than 3,000 senate members asked them to defend academic freedom, protect our international community from immigration authorities, and restore, within legal parameters, the DEI initiatives they abandoned. This disregard for democratic or parademocratic norms is unacceptable, and it does not bode well for the future when regents can publicly decry “authoritarian regimes” while themselves acting without regard for the consent of the governed. I wonder if any of them has spoken to any of the staff members they chose to fire rather than reassign when they closed the Office of DEI — or could even name a single one of them.
Many of us would also like to see the regents acknowledge their own complicity in the Stefanikian “antisemitism on campus” narrative, which they vigorously aided and abetted, to the point where several of our students stand charged with felonies. One of those students recently spent four days in jail for violating his bond conditions, which banned him from campus for all purposes other than attending classes. This morning, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, moved to dismiss all charges, a recommendation the judge accepted. Our regents should take note.
As one of the most brilliant headlines of our current moment stressed, “Donald Trump and His Allies Don’t Really Care What Kind of Leftist You Are.” As far as Trump is concerned, Bernstein and fellow regent Jordan B. Acker, who publicly attacked DEI at UM, are “far-left lunatics” along with the rest of us who want a more diverse, more equitable, and more inclusive university — though we are certainly more than happy to have long conversations about how exactly to go about that. Seeing that their political futures will be tied to the alliances they enter now, the regents might as well start to at least treat the faculty as honorable opposition worth serious and sustained engagement — be it on DEI, on the pro-Palestinian movement, or on how to live without, or with far less, federal funding. As they themselves write, “in this moment, it is only by standing together that we can preserve the public university as a truly exceptional American institution.” At a university, you cannot “stand together” if you do not stand with the faculty, the students, and the staff, all of whom need to be heeded. We can only hope that UM’s next president will understand this.
