“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
That’s what Ben Franklin supposedly said while signing the Declaration of Independence. It turns out he probably didn’t say it, but the force of his message remains: to face down an oppressor, you need strength in numbers.
Are you listening, American universities?
Apparently not. Higher education is under enormous threat from the Trump administration, which has radically reduced funding for the National Institutes of Health and other federal sources that support colleges and universities. And last week it abruptly canceled $400 million in grants to Columbia University, citing the school’s alleged failure to combat antisemitism.
In response, university leaders said . . . almost nothing. And what they did say seemed to genuflect to Trump, instead of taking him on.
Witness the statement released last Friday by Columbia Interim President Katrina Armstrong, who noted that the university had changed its approach to “managing demonstrations” and had instituted new “disciplinary processes” and “anti-discrimination policies” since the campus protests against the war in Gaza in 2023.
“We are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” Armstrong wrote. “We must work every day to do better.”
That’s not good enough. Although Armstrong’s statement confirmed Columbia’s commitment to “freedom of expression” and “open inquiry,” nowhere did she say that the Trump administration’s action represents a fundamental assault on those values.
How is the administration defining antisemitism and discrimination? Why did it single out Columbia for punishment? How did it decide to cut $400 million of the $5 billion in federal grants that are committed to the university? And how many other institutions might face similar sanctions?
As of now, the answer is 59. That’s the number of other schools the Department of Education is investigating for allegedly tolerating antisemitism, according to a letter it sent out yesterday. But it has given no justification for selecting these schools and no indication of whether it will add more institutions to its probe.
“All federal funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote on social media last week. Where does that stop? Nobody knows, which is the scariest thing of all.
That’s precisely why the presidents of the 60 schools already named by the White House need to stand up together and say: Enough is enough. You simply can’t have free universities in a democratic society if the federal government can establish gratuitous, seemingly random restrictions on what they say and do.
Of course the government has the right — indeed, the duty — to investigate all plausible accusations of discrimination in higher education. But it must do so in a thorough and transparent manner. If it can simply declare that any school is doing something wrong — and if it can withdraw millions of federal dollars on those grounds — then none of us are safe.
I don’t blame Katrina Armstrong for issuing her obsequious statement after Columbia was penalized. Sure, I would have liked her to speak out against Trump’s attacks on academic freedom. But we can’t expect her to go it alone.
Her first duty is to protect the thousands of people who work and study at her university. Their livelihoods and careers have been put in peril by Trump. She couldn’t risk alienating the administration still further and losing even more resources for the human beings in her charge.
But if the threatened schools spoke out together, each one would incur less danger. And their collective voice would resonate much more loudly than anything a school could say on its own.
I’m not saying the universities should issue statements about everything under the sun. Several dozen universities have recently adopted versions of the 1967 Kalven Report, which advised schools to maintain institutional neutrality on contested political questions. When a university establishes an official party line on controversial issues, University of Chicago law Prof. Harry Kalven warned, it limits free exchange and dialogue about them.
But Kalven also included an important exception to his principle: if “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” were facing a threat, then universities were obliged to speak out against it. We have reached such a moment, right now, and everybody knows it. We’re just too afraid to admit it.
We can’t presume that Columbia — or any other university — will pierce the silence by itself. The universities need to speak out collectively, just as Ben Franklin urged. If we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately. Indeed, Columbia just did.
Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.