The immortal words of David Byrne have never stopped being relevant, and the present moment continues to reaffirm them. At the time of writing—less than three weeks into the second Trump administration—there is a strong sense that the world has effectively turned itself upside down in a matter of days. In the world of higher education, in particular, several policy changes with immediate impact have left students, faculty, staff, and even administrators trying to cut through the thicket of executive orders, judicial injunctions, bills proposed and withdrawn, etc., in the hopes of reading auguries of the future from the guts of an ugly and convoluted system.
The crises of the immediate moment—immigration enforcement, DEI, antisemitism audits, and above all the rumblings at the NIH, NSF, and other federal funding agencies that pour billions of research dollars into university coffers across the country—have all come to a head, seemingly at once, and no doubt there will be more to come. However, the recent past offers some clues as to how we have gotten to this point. Universities have had to consider their policies on ICE in the past; the full-force attack on DEI can be seen as the big-budget sequel to the Supreme Court’s ruling ending affirmative action; the investigations of antisemitism have been dredged up from the muck of the Biden presidency and are nothing new. The attack on federal grant funding is perhaps the most novel attack on the independence of higher education, and it is perhaps the most dangerous one, as will be discussed shortly.
All of these are coming at an already-challenging time for higher education leadership, who have come under attack from the right for the academy’s perceived elitism and favoritism toward liberal ideology, and who the left have held a long-running skepticism of since the ‘60s and well before. Universities, like all public institutions in the United States, have been subject to a loss of public trust, one that has placed the decisions of trustees and chancellors under strict scrutiny (and perhaps rightly so—transparency is a virtue for major actors in the public sphere, after all). With all of this in mind, the idea that an authoritarian, right-wing administration would choose to target higher education in general and certain high-profile institutions more specifically feels like a natural, if unpleasant, escalation of the war of words and policy that has already forced out several top university administrators nationwide.
Within the past couple of weeks, the term “Vichy Democrats” has gained popularity in progressive and left-leaning circles on Bluesky and other social media platforms. It is used to describe the attitude taken by mainstream national Democrats such as Chuck Schumer and Amy Klobuchar, who denounce Trump’s actions while continuing to approve his cabinet nominees and refusing to meaningfully gum up the works of the Trump-GOP political machine. This is in marked contrast with the low-level mutinies occurring across the various federal agencies, with unionized workers in particular leading the charge on the streets and in the courtroom to challenge the policies that threaten their livelihoods.
Vichy France was, as students of history will remember, the collaborationist regime established after France’s 1940 defeat in the Second World War by Germany. Americans tend to labor under the illusion that Vichy was a complete puppet of Germany, established at gunpoint by the Nazi occupation and imposed by force on a population that favored the continuation of resistance at all costs. The reality is more complex. Vichy was headed by a popular hero of the First World War, Philippe Petain, and the main figurehead of Free France, Charles de Gaulle, was a mid-level military officer who had little background in electoral politics. For four years (!) many French, embittered by the swiftness of their military defeat and resentful of the unreliability of Britain as an ally (particularly after England’s destruction of the French navy at Oran to prevent a collaborationist regime from joining the war against them), felt that there was nothing to do but keep their heads down, keep in line, and when needed, actively cooperate with the German occupiers. Although the political script flipped completely after the liberation, to be a partisan was far and away the exception rather than the rule before the D-Day landings.
From this, the concept of Vichy Democrats should hardly require explanation: a group of people in positions of relative political influence, faced with the sudden domination of a hostile and authoritarian force, decide to position themselves as its counterpart, maintaining some independence on paper from a fascist other while refusing to meaningfully resist its dictates. While there are obvious areas where the analogy breaks down under close scrutiny, the virality of the concept speaks to its effectiveness as a pithy, punchy epithet against an ineffectual, vacuous political elite.
Trump’s decision to reopen antisemitism investigations against five universities (Columbia, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, Portland State, and the University of Minnesota) was met with some confusion as to the specific rationale: why these institutions, in particular? Encampments and occupations protesting the genocide in Gaza, and the complicity of university endowments in it, were a nationwide phenomenon, spanning states red and blue, campuses small and large, urban and rural, and so on. Previous Republican congressional reports made mention of some of the institutions targeted in the new order, but not all. What’s the rationale?
Much should be made of the fact that all five institutions targeted under the new order are in blue states that voted against Trump and that are led by Democrats who have been more than willing to fight the new administration in the court of law. But that correlation only leaves us with the first chapter—from an electoral standpoint, it’s not going to win Trump any big points either with his base or with his periphery, and it’s unclear anyone will even remember it in four years’ time. We must dig deeper to find the full story.
Let’s return to the issue of federal research funding. This represents a grimly efficient way for the government to bully universities into line: every R1 school receives hundreds of millions of federal dollars each year in the form of federal grants. Most of this money goes directly to individual researchers, who can then spend it on hiring graduate assistants, buying equipment, booking instrument time, etc., in order to further whatever particular research goal that particular researcher wanted the money for, be it developing corn-based plastics, advancing quantum computing, cracking the case on Alzheimer’s, or some significantly more prosaic task. However, the university itself generally skims a nice wad off the top first (referred to as indirect cost rates or indirect cost recovery; the NIH has already taken steps to set firm limits on how high these can be for grants that they fund, representing a significant cut to university budgets already) and puts this money towards general operations, i.e., in the same pool as tuition and unrestricted state funding, money that can be spent on basically anything within the institution. For both these reasons, R1 administrators crave federal grants—they can be a remarkably effective way of bringing both money and prestige to the institution without requiring the university to do the unpleasant work of having to raise tuition or grovel at the feet of state legislators. As a result, conditioning those research dollars on certain criteria—such as banning DEI initiatives—is an extremely potent way of forcing large institutions into compliance. (Perhaps meaningfully, the very recent, unconditional attack on indirect cost rates has seemingly provoked the first signs of genuine, public frustration from university leaders.)
Compliance is the operative word here. It is not sufficient for the Trump administration to be perceived by its electoral supporters as fighting the good fight against the elite professors and administrators who are cloistered away in the ivory tower. The conservative agenda at this point is not just to fight but to win.
Again, though, why? What is the purpose of forcing universities into toeing the line?
The fuzzed-out guitars of the 1960s reverberate. The radical, militant protests standing against the genocide in Gaza clearly echo those of their historic counterparts: the Vietnam and civil rights protests that upturned American life fifty to sixty years ago and presented a not-insigificant threat to the ruling order of the time. Social upheaval is a constant presence in contemporary life, and the academy continues to be a nerve center for what might be termed as “subversive activity” by paranoid G-men and DOGE commissars.
University administrators and regents are already inclined to target student protestors—and faculty and staff, if need be—if they feel that their leadership is being undermined to an extent they consider dangerous or unacceptable. This instinct is one that they share with the federal government, even if it varies somewhat in style and scope. Chancellors and trustees must walk a tight line, but at the end of the day, they know which side their bread is buttered on; collaborationism and a tendency to bend the knee to federal dictates, concealed under mealy-mouthed platitudes, have been and will continue to be the natural results. Devolution of the campus climate into paranoia and panic are a worthwhile price to pay if it means the paychecks and the grant money come in on time; threats to the latter are to be met with legal sabre-rattling, but it remains to be seen whether this will turn to genuine resistance (I wouldn’t bet on it, personally). Deviation from the line dictated by the federal commissars will be punished, so why bother? Nobody wants to be the next Minouche Shafik. Any complications of public safety can be resolved by injecting an aliquot of law enforcement of appropriate size into the situation. If a heavy-handed response only sparks more dissent, increase dose and repeat. The end results are predictable: a return to the tumult of the ‘60s (and potentially the violence of the ‘70s if disillusionment with peaceful methods takes hold), and a technologically advanced and tactically sophisticated counterinsurgency response from the federal government and their partners in higher education: metaphorical snipers on the ivory tower.
Now that we understand the collaborationist tendencies of these “Vichy administrators”, the question of how to break our institutions out of their death spiral must be addressed. I believe that a coordinated movement across multiple sectors of the university and surrounding world will be necessary to present an effective fight in the years to come.
The obvious starting point is the campus protest movement. Student organizations—occasionally abetted by faculty, staff, and community groups—made a forceful return to the public consciousness last spring, organizing cohesive and powerful disruptions, encampments, and occupations that could not be ignored, and that, indeed, earned nationwide attention and sparked substantial debate. This remarkable coordination has often been able to successfully mask to outsiders the fact that these coalitions are not entirely seamless, and that internal debate and disagreement are practically a given. Although the many moving parts of the protest movement have proven to be fragile at the joints, students who are deeply concerned about the changes to come must find ways to build back stronger, learn from the mistakes and missteps of spring 2024, develop novel and innovative tactics, and get organized in every sense of the word: to augment the preexisting nationwide network of young activists and build it out into spaces where it has struggled in the past.
Student protests alone are not enough, however; the events of the last year, as impressive as they were, demonstrated the challenges in effectively converting a spontaneous mass movement into effective, durable change. Others have more skillfully dissected the internal challenges that students, faculty, and staff will face; I will pivot to how others on both the inside and outside can play their own part in holding universities accountable.
Unionized staff will have an essential role to play, partially in their ability to provide support and cover for protests as they are able, but more importantly, to fight the new dictates of the university on their own turf. Cuts to DEI, or budget cuts more generally, will mean cuts to staff positions, and unions will be motivated to fight back to prevent or challenge this in the courtroom or on the picket line. The admirable resistance demonstrated by federal employees must be duplicated at colleges nationwide, and the connections unions have with community organizers and government officials must be put to good use in building a support base for this fight. All in all, the academy may not be able to afford to live without federal grants, but it also cannot afford to see critical staff go on strike.
One set of under-considered but potentially valuable allies is alumni, and in particular donors. Former students of an institution generally retain loyalty to it, and are willing to fight hard to ensure it is heading in what they perceive as the right direction. Many of these individuals have been concerned by past administrative missteps. Many more will have worries about where things are heading in the years to come. Finding ways to organize this demographic, with an emphasis on those with money to donate—or withhold—will provide a critical source of leverage, particularly for private universities, in generating leverage on an institution. This will be challenging; most alumni associations are major boosters for the institution, and will not take kindly to being co-opted against their own chancellors and trustees. Nevertheless, the work holds potential.
Meanwhile, for public schools in blue states in particular, one of the most important factors to consider will be the state government. State legislatures allocate substantial funds to an institution—even more than federal agencies— and this leverage should be exploited when and where possible. Meanwhile, state bureaucrats should take advantage of their oversight role to press universities into avoiding rollbacks and capitulations on areas of federal policy by threatening regulatory or legal action. Finally, state attorney generals should be ready to provide political and legal cover to universities that choose to stand their ground—and to challenge institutions that don’t. One example of this outside of the area of higher education has already been observed, with New York Attorney General Letitia James threatening discrimination lawsuits against healthcare providers that obey federal orders to deny transgender children gender-affirming care. This is the type of action that is needed: only by pushing administrators to do the right thing can we be assured that they’ll actually do it, and in turn, only by pressing public officials to create accountability can we expect to see it.
Will this blueprint be successful? I must confess that I am not wholly optimistic. Even if everything goes perfectly, I expect that, given unlimited time and resources, the federal government will be able to achieve its every goal in higher education no matter what obstacles are thrown in its way.
The reality, though, is that the federal government does not have unlimited time and resources, and may not be willing to put them to use in the service of higher education goals that are not immediately electorally relevant. By constructing and implementing a forceful resistance to incoming attacks, we must do our very best to make collaborationism an increasingly untenable political position, build support on and off campus for a stronger movement, and do our best to live for a moment where positive changes in higher education—not just a return to the corrupt pre-2025 status quo—can truly come into force. To gratuitously extend the French metaphor: we must be ready to take to the maquis as political partisans against both the fascism from beyond and the Vichy collaborators from within, and to prepare for and await the day when both can be swept off their thrones.
There is much work of this nature to be done in the years to come, in nearly every sphere of public life. We must bring that work into the ivory tower of the academy, shake it to its foundations if we must, but above all we must make it clear that Vichy, collaborationist chancellors, presidents, and provosts should not expect us to go along with their sycophancy.
—coronabeth