Big Ten university faculties push for defense compact against Trump

A burgeoning movement among Big Ten universities would create an alliance to counter government attacks on higher education, which the White House says aim to end “woke” policies on campuses it views as fostering antisemitism and harboring foreign students engaged in “known illegal” activity.

Several faculty and university senates have approved resolutions asking their leaders to sign a NATO-like agreement that would allow the institutions to share attorneys and pool financial resources in case President Donald Trump’s administration targets one of its members.

The Washington Post reached out to all 18 senates and administrations at schools in the Big Ten for comment. Many professors contacted said the proposed compact was vital to ensure they are protected from a White House that has cut research funding, revoked visas of international students and tried to direct curriculum at some institutions. Most administrators, with whom the final decision will lie, did not directly address the issue.

The faculty and university senates at six schools have signed resolutions asking their administrators to join the effort, including Indiana University, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Rutgers University and University of Washington.

A special senate meeting Thursday at the University of Minnesota will consider the “mutual academic defense compact” resolution. The same is expected to take place at Ohio State University, the largest Big Ten school, despite school spokesman Chris Booker telling The Post that “it is not legally permissible for the university to participate in a common defense fund.”

The situation across campuses is extremely charged because of the Trump administration’s threats to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding to higher education. To date, officials have primarily gone after Ivy League institutions. Harvard University — with its $53.2 billion endowment — has been its largest target.

But the Big Ten isn’t an enclave of elite, northeastern schools that cultivate America’s next ruling class. It represents land-grant universities in the Midwest — and corn-fed athletics programs — that are central to each state’s identity.

“Big Ten institutions haven’t been in the crosshairs, but they can read the writing on the wall,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for the American Council on Education.

All but one of the schools have been spared so far. Still, nine received a letter from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they failed “to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” Each recipient saw campus protests in support of Palestinians during the 2023-2024 academic year.

The administration’s onslaught changed the calculus of whether to fight, Fansmith said. For many college presidents he represents, the prevailing thought now is: “Trying to keep a low profile won’t stop the attacks.”

Yet he said he also suspects they would be wary to sign onto the compact without knowing exactly what it would require.

Only administrators, not faculty senates, can commit their institutions to the compact.

The Rutgers faculty senate became the first to support a Big Ten compact with its vote on March 28. Organizers there plan to stage a teach-in next week and May Day protests with other campuses next Thursday in support of the compact, journalism professor Todd Wolfson said. He expects a protracted fight with university administrations over the summer.

“We have had to lead and they have followed us,” Wolfson said. “Now we will demand they actually put resources into defending our campuses.”

Wolfson also serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP is a union with chapters at more than 500 schools, including several in the Big Ten. It is among the first to sue the Trump administration to block federal cuts to higher education funding, he noted, and is now pressuring school leaders to band together to fight back.

Steven “Jim” Sherman, a psychology professor emeritus at Indiana University, modeled the successful resolution he proposed at its faculty senate earlier this month on the Rutgers language. He was motivated in part by an incident last month when the FBI raided the home of a tenured colleague.

University administrators never explained why the cybersecurity professor lost his job. The faculty senate later voted no confidence in both the president and provost, but the board of trustees supported the president by significantly increasing her salary and extending her contract to 2031.

To Sherman, that suggests the challenge ahead in getting trustees to endorse a compact. “It will not be done quickly or easily. I have no illusions about that,” he said.

At the University of Michigan — which has an endowment of more than $19 billion, one of the largest of any public school — the faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to endorse a compact last weekend.

Physics professor Keith Riles spoke against the compact, condemning it as a “legal mutual suicide pact.” He acknowledged his research is at risk because it’s funded through a federal grant. But he blamed the supporters of DEI policies — for diversity, equity and inclusion — and other “ideologues” on the left for provoking “the understandable anger of voters, for whom President Trump is a vehicle for retribution.”

“You brought this down on all of us, and now some of you have the nerve to cite academic freedom,” he told colleagues. “When a university’s position is based not on the law, not even on principle, but merely on what it thinks it can still get away with, it is vulnerable to the turning of political tides.”

Among those supporting the compact was Silke-Maria Weineck, a professor of German studies and comparative literature. She decided to vote yes after seeing Michigan on the government’s “target list.” Already this semester, she said, more than a dozen staff have been fired as Michigan administrators ended campus DEI initiatives.

“Either they wanted to do this and used the Trump policy as cover, or they’re cowards,” Weineck said Tuesday. She faulted Michigan’s president, Santa Ono, for failing to support the compact effort.

“We need a wartime president. He’s completely not up to the moment,” she said.

Ono did not respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, five University of Michigan regents — a majority of the publicly elected board — published an op-ed urging university officials to take a stronger stand against Trump.

“When government officials make unlawful or unconstitutional demands, we must be prepared to assert our rights: publicly, clearly and in court if necessary,” they wrote in the student paper, the Michigan Daily.

Mark Bernstein, a litigator who has served as a regent for 13 years, told The Post it is a “moment of reckoning for higher education.”

“This notion that universities will be able to hide in the shadows while others are being attacked is an extremely dangerous and cowardly approach,” he said.

The stakes are personal for some in the fight.

Greyson Arnold, a doctoral student in family social science and an AAUP organizer at the University of Minnesota, has been organizing support for a compact.

“We have seen the effects of federal attacks on our campus already,” he said, including federal immigration officers detaining a student and other international students whose visas were revoked or who lost federal DEI-related grants and lab jobs.

Arnold, who’s from Alabama, said he’s also concerned because he’s transgender.

“I chose to come to the University of Minnesota because I thought it would be the safest for me personally but also to do my research,” he said. “They come after one but then they move on to other people, and I think trans people are pretty high on that list.”

The Purdue University Senate, while highly critical of the Trump administration, fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to endorse the compact proposal. But the group did pass two resolutions Monday in solidarity with the rest of the Big Ten, the student newspaper reported.

And in a collective statement released Tuesday by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, more than 100 campus presidents and higher education leaders rejected the “coercive use of public research funding.” While saying they were open to constructive reform and not opposed to “legitimate” government oversight, they drew a line: “… we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

Louisa Mackenzie, a University of Washington professor and chair of the faculty senate there, said her colleagues approved a resolution last week calling for school leadership to sign onto the compact push.

“Faculty members are calling on administration to leverage the collaborative power of the Big Ten alliance, to create cross-institutional solidarity, share resources, and build strength in numbers, faced with multiple and existential threats from our own government to our core mission and values,” Mackenzie wrote in an email to The Post.

Though the Big Ten is rooted in the Midwest, it has undergone major expansion due to the football conference alignment and now spans the country, from UCLA to the University of Maryland.

“It’s quite heartening to see places with such different dynamics in their local environments and we’re reminded that we’re all part of the same enterprise,” said Northwestern University political science professor Ian Hurd.

Northwestern appears to be the only Big Ten school with federal grant funding frozen by the Trump administration. Hurd, who is president-elect of its faculty senate, said the group hasn’t officially considered joining the alliance effort, but he feels there’s strong interest.

“I think there’s a really clear sense of shared fate across American universities at the moment in the face of a common threat. So working together seems like a very obvious step forward,” he said.