Whose Side Are College Administrators On?

For over a century, U.S. politicians have made condemning student protestors a key feature of their rhetoric. Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump — even Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden — have assailed students whose disruptions, depending on the parlance of the decade, represented “communism,” “political correctness,” “wokeness,” and now “antisemitism” and “terrorism.”

As undergraduates have taken arrows from the most powerful lawmakers in the country, how have college administrators responded in their defense? The answer is disappointing, but contextualizes our present moment well.

First, it’s necessary to understand which types of student protests have historically met the wrath of U.S. and college presidents: those against racial discrimination and war. College leaders have whipped themselves into action to appease vengeful politicians and donors who smear institutional reputations and threaten their purses over students’ activism. Administrators’ go-to punishments to break student strikes have been arrests, expulsions and the revocation of financial aid.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, Southern student demonstrators, especially at historically Black colleges such as Fisk University, were arrested for their labor activism and calls for social reform amid the Great Depression. Further north, a Columbia University student was expelled in the 1930s for organizing anti-Nazi demonstrations. These are just two examples of the many early 20th century cases where college leaders punished their students for associations with what were viewed as radical politics of the day. Administrators acted to protect the good name of their institutions, regardless of the accuracy of the allegations against the students in their care.

As the Cold War escalated through the 1940s to the 1960s, administrators handed over student records to McCarthyite legislators and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a matter of compliance. College officials turned over records of Ford Foundation grant recipients to the Department of Justice. Several presidents and trustees made their own requests to surveil campus civil rights organizers they suspected of “un-American activity” and, especially, communism. Administrators expected faculty to cooperate with the McCarthy investigations or risk being fired.

State repression targeting antiwar activists was particularly entrenched during the 1960s, when students used teach-ins, building occupations and strikes to demand an end to university-military partnerships. And while anti-Vietnam War protests were a national phenomenon, not just a campus one, state governments had economic control over college students they could not exercise over other organizers. Every summer from 1967 to 1970, waves of state and federal legislation were introduced to discipline campus activists. In 1969, the California state legislature considered more than 70 bills promising expulsion, revocation of financial aid and legal action against student protesters.

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Why have administrators tended to side with politicians over their students? For the last century, one answer has been that colleges value their reputations more than their students’ academic freedom, First Amendment rights and safety. Another answer, and the one that has seemed most relevant since the university’s outsize role in the Cold War, is money.

Research-intensive schools including Columbia, Harvard and Stanford received between $30 million and $40 million each in federal grants in 1968 alone. Massachusetts Institute of Technology received $80 million in federal grants that year, the equivalent of nearly $750 million today. Those enormous incentives turned college administrators into some of the most reliable allies of red-baiting politicians. Even with student tuition as high as $2,000 per year — the price of attending Harvard in 1968 — schools could afford to expel every single student to save their federal grants. 

Two months into his first term, Nixon reminded college presidents that “from time immemorial, expulsion has been the primary instrument of university discipline.” Expulsion was a particularly damning punishment in the 1960s, as it meant young men would automatically lose their draft deferment status and be sent to fight the very war they were organizing against. Republican governors, like James Rhodes of Ohio, were also enthusiastic combatants, going even further than Nixon. In May 1970, Rhodes warned Kent State University students that the state would “employ every force of law that we have under our authority” to force activists into submission. A day later, Rhodes’ National Guard troops shot 13 young people, killing four.

Antiwar students were not the only prey of politicians in the 1960s. Asian, Black and Chicano students who led strikes for a more representative curriculum were regularly subject to arrest, expulsion and police violence, especially in the South. In California, San Francisco State College’s president S.I. Hayakawa was legendary for his crackdowns against student activists of color. During the 1968-1969 Black Studies strikes there, police forces occupied the campus for months at Hayakawa’s request, making hundreds of arrests. He also fired faculty, expelled students and revoked club funding.

Revoking financial aid has been another tactic of belligerent politicians and administrators. To retaliate against antiwar and civil rights strikers in 1967, California Gov. Ronald Reagan announced that the state would no longer be in the business of “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” Reagan and his political allies dismantled the state’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education that made public colleges nearly free and open access — the only policy of its kind in the history of U.S. colleges. A deliberate effect of Reagan’s fee and tuition hikes was that working-class students (who Reagan adviser Roger Freeman besmirched as an “educated proletariat”) would either not apply or would need to finance their degrees. Students who borrowed tuition might second-guess behavior that jeopardized their enrollment standing: debt payments would still be due if they were expelled. 

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When it comes to their bottom lines, most U.S. colleges struggle to forecast their financial future. Whether public or private, all depend on undetermined sources of revenue, from tuition that varies by enrollment each year, to inconsistent alumni donations, to capricious state appropriations, to uncertain industry partnerships, to unpredictable grant awards from federal and private agencies. Administrators and their financial advisers have thus been motivated to shelter their savings. Throughout the 1960s, that meant appeasing conservative leaders like Reagan, Rhodes and Nixon, betraying students to receive tens of millions in grants. 

Turning appeasement into official policy, college governing boards of the era began adopting institutional neutrality policies to safeguard their assets, investments and reputations. The most iconic of these was outlined in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which is still a model for university policy today. The Kalven Report maintains that while students and faculty may exercise free speech and academic freedom, the institution itself remains politically neutral. The report makes clear that the university is, above all, a corporation with a first duty to protect its financial interests in “situations involving university ownership of property, its receipt of funds, its awarding of honors, its membership in other organizations. Here, of necessity, the university, however it acts, must act as an institution in its corporate capacity.” The idea is to separate the political speech of academics from the administrators in charge of the purse strings, sparing institutions the financial fury of vindictive legislators.

But the framing of neutrality in these policies is deceptive, as “neutrality” is a strategic appeal to fairness. In practice, neutrality upholds the status quo — exactly the unjust conditions against which students protest. The appeal to neutrality is thus a clever rhetorical sleight of hand by those whose power rests on the status quo, especially those who seek to punish progressive movements. This is a key linguistic trick, often used by the political right, for the way that it begs, and typically receives, respect from even-handed liberals. As the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has made clear, institutional neutrality policies are not necessary to uphold principles of academic freedom.

Right-wing organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Heterodox Academy celebrate colleges that have adopted neutrality policies since the first Trump administration. The policies have made a resurgence since Oct. 7, 2023, among universities with the largest endowments, as administrators and trustees obsequiously fall in line in fear of Republican proposals to tax college trusts over Gaza protests. Despite multibillion-dollar endowments, elite schools still make the case that taxing their investment portfolios would hamper the ability to provide, among other things, financial aid for needy students. 

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A demand of protestors since the 1980s, when students called for divestment from apartheid South Africa, has been for schools to disclose their endowment holdings. Those calls have come back since the early 2000s movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel over its apartheid structure, and especially since the start of the Gaza war. Echoing criticisms of university-military partnerships during the Vietnam War, the suspicion is still that campuses are too invested in apartheid governments and the financial spoils of war. And because so few institutions today have been transparent with their balance sheets, another suspicion is that universities — and their endowments — are ultimately governed by individuals with direct material and ideological interest in the status quo.

University endowments are informally known as “rainy day funds,” meant for emergency use during inevitable financial storms. But since the Trump administration’s recent revocation of $400 million in grants from Columbia University, its fellow Ivy League colleges Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — again, schools with some of the largest endowments — have taken steps to chill dissent by instituting hiring freezes, signaling that they are unwilling to tap into their financial reserves. Still, most of the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities do not have the resources to weather the kinds of cuts being threatened by the MAGA movement. Those whose leaders have stood up to the Trump administration in defense of students remain most at risk.

Regardless of endowment size, all colleges and universities are under threat from the second Trump administration. Appeasement will not remove the target from higher education’s back. As the AAUP has forcefully declared, anticipatory obedience does more to harm an institution than help it. And because more than 75% of faculty today are untenured, professors and students are more alike in their vulnerability to the university and the state than they have ever been. Trump has promised protesting students and faculty that they face arrest, expulsion and job termination. International students and visiting faculty and researchers have already been subject to visa revocation, green card termination, imprisonment and deportation.

Columbia’s compliance in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil makes clear that no amount of obedience in response to sanctions is enough to satisfy the executive branch. The Trump administration will not stop at arbitrary arrests of international scholars, nor will it stop withholding federal funding so long as college administrators keep a hand over their students’ mouths. The ultimate goal of the MAGA right is to dismantle higher education and other public services to remake them in the extreme right’s vision. Student protests are only pretense. 

The history of administrative complicity with hostile politicians is not inspiring for our present moment. As long as college leaders — especially those representing the most prestigious and resourced campuses — rely on old habits of reflexive acquiescence, they invite further retribution against us all.