Trump’s Wild Ride

Donald J. Trump and higher education are off to a very rough start.

In just six weeks, President Trump has roiled many academics, who see in his policies and rhetoric a scattershot vision that they say threatens students, hampers scholarly exchange, and even stymies the pursuit of truth.

Through executive orders, public statements, and tweets, Mr. Trump has waged a mostly implicit battle with higher education, provoking strong responses from college leaders who see a president oblivious to the far-reaching implications of his actions. There is little the Trump administration has touched, including immigration policy and transgender rights, that has failed to elicit panic in the halls of academe.

“It’s just one thing after another,” says David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College. “You never know what the next day is going to bring.”

President Trump’s early tenure has been marked by the very disruption and impulsiveness that ingratiated him to voters demanding change. In an anti-establishment era, higher education looks a lot like the establishment, so much of the sector’s discomfort is to be expected. While there are certainly exceptions, particularly among for-profit colleges that anticipate freer rein to do business, much of higher education is worked into a lather over the dizzying orders and pronouncements coming from the White House.

The volleys from the Trump administration have come fast and frequent.

First came the executive order that banned travel into the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries, stranding students and scholars overseas and making those on U.S. campuses reluctant to travel for fear that they might not be able to return.

Then there was the early-morning tweet suggesting that the University of California at Berkeley should lose federal funds for a protest that turned violent.

Next, a plan to accelerate the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, a chilling proposal for college students whose parents entered the country illegally.

Then a “Dear Colleague” letter, rolling back Obama-era protections for transgender students on college campuses.

The differences between college leaders and the Trump administration, Mr. Oxtoby says, go beyond discrete policy disagreements and strike deep at the heart of the fundamental character of higher education. The president’s reputation for uttering demonstrable falsehoods and the administration’s notorious embrace of “alternative facts” are at odds with the very nature of scholarly pursuit, Mr. Oxtoby says.

“We are teaching students to appreciate the process of discovery, and that’s being threatened,” he says. “These are the core values of institutions. It’s not like whether we agree or disagree with the war in Iraq. That didn’t strike at the core mission of colleges and universities the way the current rhetoric does.”

That core mission, Mr. Oxtoby continues, includes a commitment to educating young people who were brought into the country illegally as children. Under an Obama-era executive action, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, these students are permitted to work and study on two-year renewable terms without fear of deportation. The Trump administration’s aggressive posture toward undocumented immigrants has roused concerns even among students covered by DACA, despite assurances from the White House that those students will not be targeted by stepped-up immigration enforcement.

In November, Mr. Oxtoby organized college presidents to sign a letter urging that DACA be upheld. He also expressed his concerns in person to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, a first in his nearly 14-year presidency.

“We can’t promise them safety,” he says of undocumented students, “but we can tell them we’re working on this in terms of support and political advocacy.”

On Edge

In the swift-moving Trump presidency, upheaval seems the only constant. It is a rhythm that runs counter to academe. College leaders say they are driven to distraction of late, called upon to respond to the president’s latest tweet or policy pronouncement.

Raymond E. Crossman, president of Adler University, says the administration’s early days have felt like a sustained attack on higher education.

“If the media is Public Enemy No. 1, then higher ed is going to be Public Enemy No. 2,” Mr. Crossman says. “It feels like a full-out assault on our sector.”

His list of worries is long: President Trump’s rhetoric about violence in Chicago, while highlighting a real concern, has scared off prospective students, including at least one who had made a deposit and decided not to come to Adler’s campus there. Faculty members born outside the United States are anxious about crossing the border to visit the university’s Vancouver campus.

Mr. Crossman, who is co-chairman of LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education, worries, too, about transgender students. He is less concerned about a place like Adler, where students have for years used restrooms based on their gender identities, than he is about those at other institutions no longer bound by the Obama administration’s guidance on such matters.

“How terrible for trans folks across the nation to get this message,” he says.

Taken together, Mr. Crossman says, the Trump administration’s words and deeds have put everyone on edge.

Detained Scholar

When Fatma E. Marouf’s dean called her at about 10 p.m. one day last month, she got a glimpse of how much the Trump presidency had already changed things. A French historian, en route to a conference at Texas A&M University at College Station, where Ms. Marouf is a professor of immigration law, had been detained at the Houston airport. The university’s president, the dean said, wanted Ms. Marouf to intervene.

The historian, Henry Rousso, who was set to give a talk at the conference, is a prominent Holocaust scholar and a French citizen. His 10-hour ordeal at the airport, where he says he was threatened with deportation to Paris, lent credence to concerns that international scholarship is under attack in the age of Trump.

“It is now necessary to deal with the utmost arbitrariness and incompetence on the other side of the Atlantic,” Mr. Rousso wrote last month in the French edition of the Huffington Post. “What I know, in loving this country forever, is that the United States is no longer quite the United States.”

Mr. Rousso, who was to receive an honorarium for speaking at the conference, arrived with a tourist visa rather than a work visa, which should not have presented a problem, Ms. Marouf says. But it took Ms. Marouf and another lawyer until 1 a.m. on February 23 to persuade U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to grant Mr. Rousso entry into the country.

“Universities are really going to have to prepare for this type of situation,” says Ms. Marouf, who directs Texas A&M’s Immigrant Rights Clinic. “One thing I suggested was giving speakers letters and actually citing the statutes so they can give this to an immigration officer. We have so many international faculty. Many people from the countries on the travel ban, and even people not from those countries, are getting hassled.”

Danny J. Anderson, president of Trinity University, in San Antonio, worries about the effect the Trump administration’s rhetoric and policies may have on higher education’s international norms. On a recent trip to Mexico, where he discussed teaming up with Tecnológico de Monterrey, a business school, Mr. Anderson says his counterparts were troubled by the political environment.

“They wanted to be collaborators, but they expressed fears that it would become harder,” says Mr. Anderson, whose academic specialty is Mexican literature and culture. “There is concern about how people will be treated in immigration. They expressed concerns about the talk of building a wall. We’ve had guests decline the invitation to speak because they felt the United States was unwelcoming.”

Hopeful For-Profits

If there is a bright spot for relations between the Trump administration and college leaders, it may shine most in the for-profit sector.

The president’s loathing for regulation is welcome among administrators and lobbyists for colleges of all types, who say they are overwhelmed by red tape. But no sector seems as enthusiastic about this change of tune as the nation’s for-profit colleges, which spent most of Barack Obama’s presidency on the defensive, lambasted for deceptive recruitment practices and poor outcomes that industry leaders have argued were limited to a few bad actors.

“We are war torn,” says Steve Gunderson, chief executive of Career Education Colleges and Universities, an association that represents for-profit institutions. “We feel like refugees. The Trump administration has made very clear that the regulatory excess of the Obama administration and the Obama Department of Education needs to be reviewed and rescinded and repealed where appropriate. That obviously is a welcome reverse to our membership.”

Mr. Gunderson’s group is already pressing the White House and the Education Department to do away with the gainful-employment rule, an Obama-era measure that cracked down on career-college programs that saddle students with high debt relative to their earnings.

Leaders for-profit colleges argue that the rule relies on flawed metrics that fail to assess academic quality.

“The vast majority of this sector is good people, doing good work,” Mr. Gunderson says, “and they did not deserve the wholesale attack ideologically thrown at them by the Obama administration.”

While for-profit colleges felt pilloried by President Obama, leaders of some of the nation’s historically black colleges simply felt neglected.

President Trump recently welcomed into the Oval Office the leaders of about 90 such institutions, a meeting that the White House framed as a warm embrace of colleges too long left in the cold. On the day of the gathering, the White House press office posted on its website a McClatchy article titled “Trump Seeks to Outdo Obama in Backing Black Colleges.”

“The president has a strong commitment to them and understands over the last eight years they’ve been woefully neglected,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told the news outlet. “And I think he wants to really show a commitment.”

But the pageantry quickly gave way to reality. An executive order signed by the president last week promised more-direct White House access for the colleges. But it did nothing to acknowledge even an aspirational financial commitment sought by the institutions’ leaders, who plan to request a $25-billion infusion of federal funds.

The Turbulent Nomination of Betsy DeVos

President Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist and generous donor to many conservative causes, to be his secretary of education aroused some of the strongest opposition of any nominee for the Trump cabinet.

• In New Profile, DeVos Blames Staff for Rocky Confirmation Hearing
• How Much Power Does Betsy DeVos Really Hold to Shake Up Higher Ed?
• Betsy DeVos Survived a Historic Confirmation Fight. What’s Next for Higher Ed?
• Why Trump’s Billionaire Nominee Has Awakened Such Fierce Opposition

The order itself generated far less public discussion than the bizarre events that surrounded it. A historic gathering of black leaders in the Oval Office became a story of damage control, as two of the president’s lieutenants scurried to assure the public that they did not intend to demean the assembled college presidents or to misrepresent the noble history of HBCUs.

Betsy DeVos, the new secretary of education, set off the furious news cycle the day before the executive order was signed, when she suggested that HBCUs were “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” She walked back the comment, but not before betraying what seemed to some as political opportunism or ignorance of the forces of segregation that gave rise to black colleges.

“It was never about school choice,” says David Wilson, president of Morgan State University. “It was about blacks’ being excluded from higher education in this country. We certainly would hope that the secretary would spend some time reading about the great history of HBCUs, if indeed she’s not coming into office with that level of understanding already.”

As criticism of Ms. DeVos grew, a tweetstorm was brewing over a photograph of Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Trump, kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office and checking her phone during the HBCU meeting.

“Would she be flopped on the couch like that if those were the presidents of Ivy League institutions?” tweeted Gerren Keith Gaynor, an editor at the Grio, a website that covers African-American news.

Ms. Conway later told Lou Dobbs Tonight that she “meant no disrespect,” explaining that she was trying to take a picture in a crowded room.

But the damage was done. The most visible higher-education event of the young Trump presidency became a controversy to be managed.

Mr. Wilson laments the turn of events. “It’s unfortunate that this is what we’re discussing,” he says.

Blasting Berkeley

As a candidate, Mr. Trump vowed to “end the political correctness and foster free and respectful dialogue” on college campuses.

His first salvo as president came last month, when violent protests prompted the Berkeley police to shut down a planned speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a now-former Breitbart editor known to target and troll transgender people and immigrants:

“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

Nicholas B. Dirks, Berkeley’s chancellor, saw the tweet and concluded that the president had bought into a false narrative about Berkeley’s clamping down on free speech. The campus had mobilized 80 officers from nine campuses and drilled scenarios for a month to prepare for Mr. Yiannopoulos, Mr. Dirks says. But as protesters advanced, blocking traffic, lighting fireworks, and hurling Molotov cocktails, there was no safe choice but to evacuate the speaker, the chancellor says.

“The president was ill informed,” Mr. Dirks says. “Many stories were actually quite good, but I suspect that the president got his news from Breitbart, and clearly that is partly responsible for the fact that he got it wrong.”

President Trump’s tweet, apart from spreading what the chancellor calls misinformation, conveyed a disconcerting posture toward higher education.

“It makes one worry about the university being in the cross hairs of some people in Washington,” Mr. Dirks says, “and that’s alarming.”

It is one thing for the chancellor of Berkeley, a campus known as a bastion of liberal thought, to tangle with President Trump. It is arguably more complicated for college leaders in red or purple states to do so.

Karen M. Whitney, president of Clarion University of Pennsylvania, says she is very concerned about some of the policies and pronouncements coming out of the White House. At the same time, she says, “I assume half my students at Clarion voted for the president.” Almost 72 percent of voters in the county where Clarion is located voted for Mr. Trump.

“I am the president of every single student and every employee, so I take a very high road,” she says. “My approach is to look at what we do have in common and to create an environment of civility.”

Ms. Whitney, who is co-chairwoman of LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education, says, “There is every reason to be concerned based on the rhetoric” of Mr. Trump. “Many people feel the president has made promises that would adversely hurt the basic civil rights of a segment of our society. I am as concerned, but at the same time I’m open to working with the federal government to do my job.”

It is difficult to foresee what may come next out of the Trump administration, Ms. Whitney says, but college presidents should brace for a campus climate that reflects the polarization of the country and the anger of the electorate.

“It’s a convergence of increasing student activism on critical social issues and a tremendous sea change in administration,” she says. “We should anticipate increased instability and social unrest on our campuses.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.