The Trump administration’s culture war on universities died this week—not with a bang, but with a whimper.
On Monday, education secretary Linda McMahon sent an open letter to university leaders, asking them to publicly commit to addressing ideological bias among faculty, “unruly and violent protestors” stifling discourse on campus, and lingering DEI policies in admissions. “Americans’ trust in universities has reached record lows,” McMahon wrote. “For the good of the Nation, university leadership must seize this occasion to drive essential reforms.”
McMahon’s polite request to please be less woke marked a dramatic retreat from one year ago, when the administration was steamrolling universities with a brazen extortion campaign that conditioned access to federal funding on compliance with MAGA’s cultural agenda. By the end of July, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Brown had submitted to various administration demands—which ranged from curtailing DEI and trans rights to policing campus antisemitism, among other things—in exchange for the restoration of research grants.
At that time, Princeton and Harvard were the two major holdouts, the latter having been the first school to hit back at the administration with a lawsuit. But in August of 2025, the New York Times published a string of stories suggesting that Harvard, which remained in settlement talks with the administration, was on the verge of caving and striking a deal. As veteran journalist and Washington Monthly contributing editor James Fallows wrote, the upshot of these stories “was that not even Harvard—[the] oldest, richest, most famous of the US universities—could defy Trump.”
What has changed since then? How did the Trump administration go from cowing some of the world’s most powerful universities into submission, to gently pleading with academia as a whole?
In part, this is a (rare, these days) story of strong elite leadership. Contrary to the Times’ reporting, Harvard did not cave, and in September a judge ruled that the administration’s freezing of the grants to the school was unconstitutional. (The administration appealed the ruling). This decision opened the litigation floodgates: the California State University system, faculty associations and labor unions associated with the University of California system, and a slew of outside advocacy groups have since filed lawsuits challenging funding cuts, winning further legal victories. Two weeks ago, three dozen schools filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard’s ongoing legal battle—including early capitulators UPenn, Columbia, and Brown.
The feds’ coercive threats “very much caught the sector flat-footed at first,” Kevin Carey, the director of education policy at the think tank New America, told me. “Harvard just didn’t freak out and trusted that the American legal system still functions, in its way, and they turned out to be right. I think that gave some spine to other institutions.”
With its stick strategy mired in the courts, the administration turned to a carrot in October, pitching a “compact” with universities: Preferential access to research funding for schools that adopted a package of preselected policy changes. Here, the research powerhouse Massachusetts Institute of Technology led the opposition, rejecting the compact in scathing terms. A handful of other high-profile schools initially pitched by the administration subsequently declined (with the exception of Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin, which stayed neutral); ultimately, only a couple small conservative colleges volunteered to sign on. The failure of the compact set the stage for McMahon’s toothless open letter, which came without any specific policy demands or threat of funding cuts.
Undeniably, elite schools–Harvard and MIT, and to a lesser extent Princeton–played key roles in galvanizing universities’ successful resistance to the Trump pressure campaign by sticking their necks out first and providing cover for others to follow. But in order to take the right lessons from this ordeal, we need to be more precise about the particular actors and forces within these institutions that drove their response.
The spotlight has largely been on university presidents. Harvard’s Alan Garber has become something of a celebrity, receiving several flattering profiles from major news publications, a “Legend in Leadership” award from rival Yale, and a thunderous standing ovation at the school’s 2025 commencement exercises. Around the same time, Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber was featured on the influential podcast The Daily as “The University President Willing to Fight Trump.”
But take a closer look at how universities arrived at their stands, and what you’ll find is not so much profiles in administrator courage. Rather, school leaders were under intense pressure from the various constituencies they serve.
Take Harvard, for example. Following Columbia’s capitulation to federal demands, students and faculty massed in Cambridge for multiple hundreds-strong rallies calling on Garber not to do the same; the Cambridge City Council voted unanimously to send the same message. At this point, school administrators were eagerly demonstrating cooperation with the administration’s antisemitism investigation, and privately telling donors that Harvard would choose its battles carefully. Later on, after Harvard had resisted the administration’s initial set of demands but was entertaining settlement talks, newly formed student and alumni advocacy organizations kept up a drumbeat of pressure on Garber.
This dynamic has played out on campuses across the country. At MIT, 29 student, faculty, and employee organizations called on president Sally Kornbluth to reject the compact a week before she became the first university leader to do so. After Brown struck a deal with the federal government over the summer, student activists returned to campus and played a prominent role in pushing administrators to follow MIT’s lead in rejecting the compact. The California State University system’s lawsuit came amidst student protests and a threat from Governor Gavin Newsom to withhold state funding for “sellout” colleges that cooperated with White House demands.
A fight currently engulfing Yale offers perhaps the clearest evidence that universities’ resistance to Trump is being driven by organized students, faculty, alumni, and local elected officials more so than administrators. In July, the revelation that president Maurie McInnis was negotiating to settle a Justice Department investigation into the school’s admissions practices sparked protests from students, faculty, and a new Stand Up For Yale alumni organization. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker visited campus to encourage protestors to keep up the pressure, while state lawmakers have threatened to take away Yale’s tax-exempt status. In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Yale alums Arne Duncan (Barack Obama’s education secretary) and David Pressman (Joe Biden’s ambassador to then-Viktor Orban-led Hungary) applied pressure on the university’s board of trustees, calling out members by name.
Ultimately, it is university administrators’ accountability to their school communities, rather than their inherent courageousness or idealism, that explains why they have by and large mounted a successful resistance to Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Conversely, the absence of this broad-based accountability in the corporate world helps explain why business leaders have not done so. Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris was early to this observation, pointing out in November that “university leaders are under immense pressure from powerful constituencies — students, faculty, university senates, and alumni — to stand their ground,” whereas “corporate leaders answer to institutional shareholders who demand the opposite.”
As an enrollment crunch threatens the finances of non-elite colleges across the country, this distinction may become less pronounced. Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and an expert on higher education finance, told me that university presidents are increasingly forced to “think more like business leaders” as near-term finances become an existential concern. But for now, at least at the prominent universities targeted by the Trump administration as bastions of radical ideology, stakeholders with other priorities are holding sway.
