Appeared on SUBSTACK on September 15, 2025
https://anandanandalingam649613.substack.com/p/universities-are-slip-sliding-away
At dinner a few days back, an eminent MIT professor and good friend told me almost excitedly that his institution was not touched by the Trump administrations attack on academia, mainly because they had signaled that they would make a deal even before the onslaught. Stanford was doing the same. Apparently, several institutions have hired lobbyists, to “bribe” the most influential congressmen and Trump administration officials to point their “guns” away from these universities. Being a proud Harvard PhD graduate, when I started talking about the stand that Harvard had taken, I was told that it was an open secret in Cambridge that Harvard had also signaled to the Trump administration that they were ready to make a financial settlement even though they had won a legal case against it. A day after this conversation I read in the New York Times that Harvard was a bit miffed that while their settlement was around $500 million that Brown University had gotten away with paying $50 million of what I consider to be “protection” money. How far the great pillars of academia in the United States have fallen.
Columbia University was the worst culprit in bending its knees to the administration. According to news reports, Columbia “settled” with the U.S. government to the tune of at least $200 million (paid over three years) in order to restore the $400 million in research grants that were withheld by the Trump administration. Apparently, Columbia also agreed to pay $21 million to Jewish affiliates for “pain and suffering” caused to them, agree to no DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) on campus, a third party to oversee several university functions and the revoking or suspension of degrees of 70 students who participated in protests against the “genocide” in Gaza, Palestine. Talk about the worst form of capitulation to the dictates of a President. Several academics, Nobel Prize winners included, have written letters and articles against this massive capitulation.
Of course, another of my eminent friends, professor at Columbia University, tried to educate me that the institution had to protect its $7 Billion operation that employs more than 9,000 full-time personnel including over 3,000 instructional staff including 1,500 full-time faculty members. Columbia had to make a trade-off between succumbing to the dictates of a President-King or having to jeopardize the livelihood of hundreds of its employees. My MIT professor friend mentioned a few times that his grants helped employ around 20 high-end researchers, and they did not do anything wrong to be subject to jeopardy. I know for a fact that faculty in the life sciences at several universities implored the institutions to step in and protect their research enterprise and pressured the administrators and leadership to play ball with the Trump administration to stave off what they considered a short-term pain. After all this administration will be gone in four years and maybe its power with be severely curtailed in two years after the mid-term elections.
Universities that engage in short-term self-interest will harm academia in the United States in the long-term. Not only that, these decisions will also totally transform several of the most important attributes of the university system in the United States for the worse. Allowing a President or the federal government, even in the short-run, to dictate what is researched and taught, and who is hired is going to set in motion intrusive federal oversight of universities for decades to come. University education will have to comply with the political winds of the day rather than be a place of open scholarly exchange.
There is always a debate between the efficacy of short termism versus the impact on the long term. Society at large has always been challenged by the conflicts between short-term self-interest and long-term collective interest. Acting on one’s immediate self-interest is tempting even though everybody benefits from acting in the longer-term collective interest. We all know that in the long run everyone would benefit from a cleaner environment. And yet, all over the United States, during the summer, liberals who ostensibly want to reduce greenhouse gases nevertheless crank up their air-conditioning to deal with the hot weather, or, if they have money, fly out to cooler countries increasing the carbon footprint without thinking about the long-term implications.
The tragedy of the commons is a well-known phenomenon discussed in almost all universities. The story is about a group of herdsmen having open access to a common parcel of land on which their cattle grazes. It is in the interest of individual herdsman to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Yet if all herdsmen make this individually rational decision, the commons is destroyed and all will suffer. The richer herdsmen do much better in the short term than the others, but the damage to the commons is shared by the entire group including the rich ones. In the short-run some universities might do better by appeasing the Trump administration but the collective damage to the core values of academia and its mission will impact these institutions along with everyone else.
The conflict between private short-term interest and what is best for the long term was played out in real life during the Winter of 1978/1979 in the Netherlands. As described in the article on the website of Social Dilemma (https://socialdilemma.com/more-on-social-dilemmas/ “Due to an unusually heavy snow, a small village in the North of the Netherlands was completely cut off from the rest of country so that there was no electricity to use for light, heating, television, etc. However, one of the 150 inhabitants owned a generator that could provide sufficient electricity to all people of this small community if and only if they exercised substantial restraint in their energy use. For example, they should use only one light, they should not use heated water, the heating should be limited to about 18 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit), and the curtains should be closed. As it turned out, the [electricity] generator collapsed because, given access, most people in fact used heated water and lived comfortably at 21 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit), watching television, and burning several lights simultaneously.” The lesson from this example is clear: By each university simply taking care of its own business, it may do fine in the short run, will be kept “warm” and live comfortably. However, the “generator” that nourishes the academic enterprise will collapse.
There is a deeper philosophical issue at stake here, not to mention an existential question regarding universities. A society driven by pure short-term self-interest would experience a severe erosion of trust and social cohesion. People might be less willing to help others, contribute to shared goals, or engage in civic activities, leading to increased isolation and a reduced sense of a common purpose. The Prisoner’s Dilemma exemplifies this, where individuals acting in their own self-interest can lead to a worse outcome for everyone involved. As Columbia, Stanford and MIT make deals to further their individual goals, it will embolden the Trump administration and academic institutions all over the United States will experience increased attacks to their mission and integrity. Witness the Presidents of the University of Virginia and Northwestern being forced to resign on accusations that they did little to stem antisemitism or did too much to further diversity and inclusion. Even worse, the new orthodoxy of the government dictating to universities may well be cemented in place.
In addition, in a system where everyone is only focused on themselves, there is a risk of significant inequality and the exploitation of vulnerable populations. The pursuit of self-interest without regard for others can lead to a situation where the strong benefit at the expense of the weak, hindering the development of a just and equitable society, something that is in the vision statement of every university in the United States. Universities that do not have the resources like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT will not be able to avoid sanctions on their research mission and federal grants, and will fare much worse than those with resources to withstand the attacks.
Some of my friends in leadership positions at universities have tried to reassure me that their so called “compromise” is very minimal and that the institutions had planned to reorganize their visible DEI structures anyway, but they were committed to diversity and inclusion because they would not compromise their institutional values. The universities would not dictate to their faculty about their research and would allow vigorous discussion of international and social issues as they had done before but with certain restrictions of certain use of language, symbols etc. As for reporting their student admissions and faculty hiring statistics and information, the universities do this for internal consumption already and they would simply pass it on to the federal government. It is all a game anyway; we pretend to succumb to the dictates of the government with minimal changes in our institutional activities, and the government leaves us alone. What is the big deal?
There is an Oscar nominated 1975 movie called Seven Sisters by Lina Wertmüller where an Italian Pasqualino played by the famed Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini pretends to be a German to survive his time in a German concentration camp. He is pursued by an obese and sadistic female commandant of the camp who he then seduces to stay alive. The film explores themes of morality and survival, showing how Pasqualino abandons all principles in a desperate attempt not to be killed; but In the end, it does not help him. The demands on Pasqualino keep getting bigger and more drastic until he is called upon to shoot and kill at point blank range one of his Italian friends and fellow soldier to show his Germanness and loyalty to the Commandant. At that point, he has no choice!!
What do you think that the Trump administration and the congressmen will learn from leading academic institutions succumbing to their pressures and threats? Like the Commandant in Seven Sisters, there will always be a suspicion that the universities are not being sincere, and there will be further demands to show real “progress” along the lines defined by the Trump administration. This is not just a theoretical exercise or a movie plot. Do not forget the reason why Katrina Armstrong, the interim President of Columbia was made to resign within months of taking over from President Minouche Shafik was because of the leaked conversation she had had with the faculty and staff to reassure them that the “compromise” that the institution was making to the demands of the federal government was minimal. What do you think future administrations after Trump will learn about the capitulation of the universities to simply get through the next two-plus years? An unchecked government cannot make or keep promises.
Universities should be mindful of the higher purpose of their existence: the creation and dissemination of knowledge with no interference from external politics or the government of the day. Indeed, the mission of higher education is even codified by law. In Sweezy vs New Hampshire, the 1957 Supreme Court case, the Justices granted a large measure of constitutional protection and autonomy to professors at universities, as Justice Felix Frankfurter explains it “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.” University administrators should protect these four freedoms at all cost, not just for their individual institutions but for the collective good and higher purpose of American academia.
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