Hello, University Administrators Hoping The Fascism Will Go Away On Its Own!

Bad news about those hopes!

Photo by Charles DeLoye on Unsplash

Hello, college and university administrators! You have homework!

You have serious homework, and it is due now.

As you certainly know but maybe aren’t ready to admit, Donald Trump and the Republicans’ “One Big Bill” is designed, in part, to financially devastate colleges and universities. Part of the plan is to make it impossible for lower- and middle-income students to get student loans, and part of is intended to cripple the higher education system itself by slashing access to federal funding for any school that doesn’t stick to spouting party-line conservative ideas. You have already begun to see the effects of having your research grants yanked around as the Trump administration tries to frighten and/or ban your foreign students.

None of this is an accident. The Project 2025 devotees who have poured into the second Trump administration have an explicit goal of destroying our nation’s universities.

You could wait until the bill gets passed, you’re forced to lay off faculty and staff and cancel crucial programs, and then you watch helplessly as cases slowly wind their way through the increasingly Trump-aligned court system, but do you really think your university can survive it? A year or two or three when the grants go away and those full-tuition foreign students disappear and the lower- and middle-class kids can’t get loans at all? Will you ever be able to get your high-performing scientific researchers back? Your best teachers? Your students?

Go talk to the awesome probability nerds in your math department and see if they would take that gamble.

A better idea is to write your congressional representative and both senators RIGHT NOW, TODAY, and give them a few facts:

• How many jobs their district/state will lose if your institution shutters;

• How many vendors their district/state will lose their primary source of business if your institution goes down;

If your institution does medical research, thank you. Please add a few more figures:

• The number of clinical trials for cancer that will shut down;

• The number of clinical trials for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and anything else the grant guy tells you;

• The number of trials for new medical devices and treatments that will shut down;

• The number of their constituents who will have their treatments cut off mid-trial;

• The number of their constituents who will lose their last hope for a cure if your institution goes down;

• Be sure to remind them that people in clinical trials have friends and families.

I know you prefer to be diplomatic because that’s what got you where you are. But while you are being professional and polite, you should also be explicit about the fact that every one of those small tragedies will be explicitly laid at the feet of any senator or representative who is dumb enough or mean enough to vote for this. Personally, I think you should drop the diplomacy entirely and go with “This bill will take away the livelihoods of 45,000 of your constituents and I will hold a press conference to remind them that you voted for it on my way out the door.”

Remember:

Paper letters beat phone calls.*

Phone calls beat emails.

Nobody cares about tweets.

While you’re at it, there has never, not once in the history of your institution, been a better time to light up your alumni network. I know that your school’s Development folks want you to avoid politics so you don’t offend anybody, but unless there’s a donor who’s ready to cough up seven billion dollars to replace your entire research program and also everybody’s tuition, it might be time to break that rule.

You don’t even have to speak out against that nice Mister Trump. Just point out that the bill, however well-intentioned it may be, will make it impossible for your institution to remain in existence. It’s that simple. No more reunions, no more football tailgates, no more resume prestige. Nowhere to send their kids as legacy admissions.

Email the whole alumni list, today, and encourage them to contact their own elected representatives.

And remind them:

Paper letters beat phone calls.

Phone calls beat emails.

Nobody cares about tweets.

I know this is a wrenchingly stressful situation and everyone is encouraging you to put your head down and hedge your bets. I know you have advisers telling you to bend just this one time and oh this other time too, and they won’t ask for more.

But authoritarians are never satisfied. They won’t stop demanding more. And there are members of Congress and the Trump administration who intend to break our nation’s universities. They will keep trying until they get a firm, public, nationwide rebuke.

This is it: The finest moment of your career. Be one of the people who is celebrated in ceremonies twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now.

Stand up and save your school.

*I mean, of course, cold phone calls to the office during which one speaks to a staffer. If you have the kind of personal relationship where you can get ol’ Tommy on the horn and talk to him directly, for the love of all that is good, DO THAT. Do that today.

Ali Davis’s newsletter is Davis Ex Machina!