BY HANK REICHMAN
Today the AAUP released a major new report—”Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance”—prepared by a joint subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on College and University Governance exposing how the Trump administration has extended its pay-to-play approach to governance into higher education. An online press conference today featured AAUP President Todd Wolfson, Committee A chair Rana Jaleel, and governance committee chair Afshan Jafar. As a member of both the governance committee and the subcommittee and a co-author of the report, I also spoke. The following are my opening remarks at the presser, slightly edited.
I’ll begin by briefly describing how the special committee developed this report. Our initial model was the AAUP’s 1956 report on violations of academic freedom during the postwar Red Scare. That report examined the imposition of loyalty oaths and blacklists, and the improper dismissal of faculty members at 18 different colleges and universities. We at first thought we might do something similar: treat each institution separately and then draw a number of parallels and conclusions.
But it quickly became clear that the current situation, the Trump extorted compliance campaign, is different. The Trump campaign, while it may have appeared at times to proceed institution by institution, is in fact a centrally coordinated and unprecedented governmental assault not only on the universities directly targeted, but on higher education itself.
We therefore needed to provide a more comprehensive account of how this assault has been and is unfolding, one that recognized that it is best understood by acknowledging not only the specific experiences of individual institutions but by uncovering and recounting common threads.
Moreover, we needed to situate the campaign in a broader context of what the report calls “an unprecedented, destructive, and sustained attack on higher education and the faculty central to its mission” from multiple sources, which is in turn part of a broader assault on democratic governance, civil society, and knowledge itself. Hence the report describes in some detail how by the time Donald Trump took office for a second time “the US higher education system was already reeling from . . . an intensifying series of external assaults, including by both the federal and state governments.” The report then demonstrates how the Trump extortion campaign “consolidates and intensifies in a single coordinated campaign the disparate assaults on institutional autonomy, academic freedom and shared governance” that preceded it.
By treating these events as a single national campaign – I believe for the first time – this report provides a vivid and detailed record of a crucial moment in the history not only of US higher education but of American democracy. It is, of course, a moment that continues, as recent developments at Yale, for one, illustrate. The report recounts the government’s too frequently successful efforts to bring prestigious institutions to heel, with special attention to Columbia, “the administration’s initial target and the institution where the agreement reached was most onerous.” We consider too efforts at Harvard and the University of California to resist the government in court, efforts led and made possible only by faculty action and AAUP leadership. Events at public universities in Virginia and at Northwestern University also play prominent roles. The report also examines the administration’s so far unsuccessful effort to impose its so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence.”
The report additionally makes important arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of higher ed’s response to this assault. Based on our examination of the actions – and inactions — of trustees and administrators, the report concludes that “the crisis posed by the second Trump administration has too often been met by silence when there is a need to speak out, by timidity when boldness is called for, and even by enthusiasm on the part of those who have seized on some of the government’s demands as an opportunity to impose more autocratic management.”
On the other hand, we also find that “if there is a silver lining to the cloud that is the Trump compliance campaign, it has been the mobilization of the faculty.” Faculty organizations have initiated all but one of the legal actions against the Trump administration’s extortion. While the report calls on “the entire higher education community – trustees, administrators, faculty members, staff, students, and alumni – to unite against the current assault,” we also conclude that “such unity will be won only if the real problems that have emerged in recent decades are more resolutely addressed and” – here I must stress – “only if the faculty is central to that effort.” In fact, we conclude, “Resistance has been, and will be, most effective – indeed, it may only be effective – when faculty members mobilize and take independent action. “
In closing our report, we returned to that 1956 AAUP report on the Red Scare, which acknowledged, “We cannot censure the justified public interest in colleges and universities or be unmindful of the extremely difficult task confronting academic administrations . . . Yet, to yield a little is . . . to run the risk of sacrificing all.”
The 1956 report went on, “We deem it to be the duty of all elements in the academic community . . . to stand their ground firmly, even while they seek, with patient understanding, to enlarge and deepen popular comprehension of the nature of academic institutions and of society’s dependence upon unimpaired intellectual freedom.” Clearly, a lesson of the report released today and of the Trump administration’s crass and brazen assault on democracy and knowledge is that this duty endures, even if, as the report acknowledges, “the danger today is much greater than in the past because the power of the state has been ruthlessly unleashed to an unprecedented degree.”
Read and download the full “Extorted Compliance” report here.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March 2025. He is a member of AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance and President of the At-Large Chapter.
