Image by Duncan Shaffer.
Signs of our Trumpian Times
Speaking, protesting, teaching, learning, simply existing on campus in a marginalized identity has become increasingly difficult since the first Trump administration (Trump 1.0). University administrations have either quietly enabled or publicly championed Trump’s curtailments. They have done this by moving from espousing compulsory civility to performing cowardly compliance. Meanwhile, those of us who constitute the undercommons have been meeting in basements and Zoom rooms, sending (smoke) Signals, passing (encrypted) notes, and posting (disappearing) signs.
In what follows, I consider some signs of our Trumpian times and what they say about administrative collusion and scholar-activist existence/resistance. I do that by looking at two types of guerrilla flyers posted during Trump 1.0 and 2.0. But first, a clarification: this is not an essay about saving higher ed, not a call for an enlightened, liberal notion of academic freedom. Those of us who were never meant to be in the academy have never breathed easily there. If “freedom is a measure of breathability” and if “freedom is a place,” academia has never been our liberation zone. We have honed our skills at lighting fires in administrators’ trash cans, seeking to build a decolonial education in the soft underbelly of the institutional beast.
During Trump 1.0, higher ed experienced an up tick in calls for “civility” and “dialogue.” This was part of a larger narrative identifying political polarization as the problem and suggesting people just try harder to get along. Post-election, serious concerns were expressed by university leadership that Trump supporters could feel “marginalized” on campuses (ironic, given their guy won). This morphed into battles over institutional free speech policies as far right actors spread out across the country on campus speaking tours/crusades.
I dubbed this administrative rhetoric “compulsory civility” – a tool used in the denial of belonging and access to the academy. I wrote about the chilling impact it had on speech, obscuring real harm to vulnerable campus communities from Trump 1.0 rhetoric and policies. I discussed the anonymous posting of “Dear Student” signs on campuses immediately following the 2016 election as displays of (un)civil disobedience. A few days post-election, in early morning hours, I stealthily taped up ten of my own “Dear Student” signs in my campus building. Compulsory civility kicked in quickly and two additional statements were added below mine overnight. The twelve statements appear in the photograph below.
[Photo]
As is clear, my “Dear Student” statements were meant to counter Trump 1.0 campaign rhetoric, meant to speak back to the violence and exclusion it produced by declaring simple truths about, and belonging for, those being targeted. It is telling that, instead of removing or defacing my signs, someone (likely one of my more civil colleagues) mimicked them adding two signs of their own. I analyzed the signs that were added in this way:
The “Dear Trump Supporter” statement is telling in its circular uncertainty: You shouldn’t be hateful or intolerant, but we know you are not all hateful or intolerant. Out of context, one would be left pondering what exactly the point of the sign was. In context, the point was clearly to correct a perceived imbalance, an incivility in the original signs. In a campus climate in angst over the comfort of Trump supporters—an anxiety exacerbated by a compulsion to be “civil” at all costs—my original statements were seen to be exclusionary. They did not recognize Trump voters, placate their egos, and assure them no one would call them out or hold them accountable.
The “Dear Everyone” sign is classic diversity and civility talk: “come together,” “common ground,” “positive action.” This benign rhetoric is meant to gently cover injustice and radical inequality, prodding us back in line. This soon became a dominant narrative in the election aftermath…
While imperatives for civility remain, my Trump 1.0 concerns now seem quaint given the full-frontal attack on all of us, well-behaved or not. Since Trump’s second inauguration, experts in totalitarianism have been urgently emphasizing that one of the first moves of would-be autocrats is to take over and eviscerate higher education. This is because universities are the backbone of an engaged, innovative, critically thinking civil society. Campuses, despite themselves and because of the undercommons, are central to developing transformative knowledge and building social justice movements in often messy, disobedient ways.
Project 2025 laid out the multi-pronged attack on higher ed: eliminate student aid; privatize universities; eliminate federal workforce training programs; defund and criminalize DEI; eliminate the Department of Education; vilify vulnerable communities on campus (immigrants/refugees/non-citizens, trans and gender expansive people, Black and Native students; disabled people); ban public employee unions; attack free speech; and much more (Walker). This playbook is being implemented at breakneck speed, and with a few exceptions, academic leaders have quickly and cowardly complied, to devastating effect.
Scholar-activists read Project 2025 and Project Esther, so we saw this coming. Some of us came together in November 2024 to begin building a national grassroots Sanctuary Campus Network to protect the most vulnerable on our campuses, including those whose scholarship, research, and community engagement makes them targets. We split the network into regions, and I am lead coordinator for the northwest region and Hawai‘i, which has over 240 members.
Networking in the northwest region has been critical, as many of us feel isolated. Except for Idaho, our states are blue, but many campuses are in, and/or draw from, rural areas and have conservative, insular, campus cultures. Most of our institutions do not have the deep histories of scholar-activism and free speech organizing that exist in California, the Midwest, or the northeast. This leaves us vulnerable in the current academic firestorm.
Washington and Oregon are sanctuary states, so we do have strong protections against federal immigration overreach, as well as anti-discrimination laws, but our state and institutional leaders have been frustratingly slow to provide guidance, protocols, and training on how to implement these laws. Vulnerable, anxious students, faculty and staff have been looking to leadership to speak and act to protect them. Instead, lacking clear direction from state leadership, many of our administrations have hidden behind neutrality policies, quietly eroding/scrubbing/sunsetting long-standing institutional protections, DEI units and executive positions, and GWSS/Ethnic Studies academic programs.
It is not just administrators who are pushing for silence and compliance, but also our colleagues. At my regional state university, colleagues are self-censoring their curriculum and course titles (removing “sensitive words”), signing anti-DEI vows to keep federal grants, and insisting we follow “Trump’s laws” or “lose the university.” One way we’ve addressed this through SCN is hosting a “Safety through Solidarity” webinar last spring with critical legal scholars Dean Spade (Seattle University law school) and Angélica Cházaro (UW law school). They emphasized the principle of “leave no one behind.” They encouraged us to use law and policy as a tool, but to recognize we keep each other safe by collectively speaking and organizing, teaching and writing, against authoritarian violence.
In February 2025, I organized with others in Washington state to launch a petition to Attorney General Nick Brown and Governor Bob Ferguson asking for guidelines and protocols for higher education and statements of support for our vulnerable communities. The petition garnered 470+ signatures from faculty, staff and administrators and was endorsed by 16 unions and immigrant advocacy organizations. When state leadership refused to act, we developed the Protect Washington’s Campus Communities Toolkit, which groups have been successfully using to organize.
This brings me to the signs of Trumpian 2.0 times. Following models from other parts of the country, campus groups in the northwest developed and started posting privacy signs on classrooms and offices. The signs have varying amounts of information on them, but all have the purpose of protecting people against abduction/harm from immigration agents. Below is a classroom sign developed by the faculty union at University of Oregon.
[UO Private classroom sign]
While we have not yet seen the abduction of a person from a classroom or office, people have been detained on or near campuses, and we expect those instances to increase. It is telling that the first campus kidnapping we know of nationally happened at a community college near where I live in early February 2025. Local reporting stated the abduction “occurred without incident” when a former student was taken from the parking lot at Spokane Community College. Campus police issued a statement lauding the agents as “professional” and implied the incident was a success because they were not asked to participate and did not assist.
Silently watching a former student be kidnapped should never be characterized as success. This incident was an early sign of the times exposing cowardly campus leadership, in this case using sanctuary policy’s non-cooperation mandates as cover. It has taken us time to organize, but privacy signs are now posting, and rapid response networks are growing.
The contrast between the “Dear Student” Trump 1.0 signs and the Trump 2.0 private classroom signs says a lot about escalating authoritarian violence. Whereas the earlier signs were meant to challenge largely rhetorical state violence, today’s signs anticipate the moment when state violence is literally at the classroom door. Significantly, they uphold institutional policy (where it exists) that gives authority to general counsel’s offices, not campus police. We know from long histories that calling the police does not lead to safety for marginalized people.
The privacy signs may or may not be effective when ICE is roaming our hallways, but, like any other campus emergency, we are more likely to mitigate harm if we are prepared. Along those lines, some faculty are approaching these discussions with students as similar to active shooter preparedness. Furthermore, due to political pressure, some states have passed (California and Oregon), and others are considering (Washington), legislation mandating campuswide alerts if immigration enforcement is on campus.
Still, following Cházaro and Spade, those of us building sanctuary networks recognize that “only the people save the people” (solo el pueblo salva al pueblo). We are posting signs to mitigate harm when ICE shows up, but of equal or greater importance, we are posting signs of resistance and in solidarity. We are signaling publicly (and Signaling in encrypted chats) that non-citizens belong on our campuses, that we/they are equal and valued members of our communities, and that we will do what we can to protect us/them from state repression and harm.
We know the history: silence and compliance only fuel authoritarian violence. We know that we are stronger when we are organized and stand together. We also know that when people lead, politicians and administrators often follow. But we are not waiting. We will be neither civil nor compliant. We have always been thorns in the side, irritants in the guts, of the colonial institution. We know that it will take all of us to carve out breathable, liberatory places. We will keep posting signs pointing toward freedom.
