Thanks to Trump, College and University Presidents Have Accrued Even More Power on Their Campuses

Austin Sarat ScheerPost

While the Trump Administration has suffered numerous defeats in its effort to punish America’s leading universities, it has succeeded in many ways in changing the prevailing culture of American higher education.  This fall, students, faculty, and staff will be returning to colleges that are coping with the new realities of American higher education 

And if we look back to the fall of 2020, when colleges began their work in the wake of the summer of George Floyd, the changes are even more dramatic. Some of them are obvious; some are more subtle. 

Here, I am interested in the more subtle ones, in particular, the reinforcement of administrative power and the erosion of faculty governance. To anyone who studies politics or complex organizations, the pattern unfolding on college campuses is a familiar one.

More power at the top. More top-down management. 

The question is, how can and should faculty react? 

In my view, simply repeating the time-worn laments, faculty need to decide how much they want to participate in college governance and develop modes of participating in decision-making that are needed in the Trump and post-Trump era in American higher education.

Before addressing that issue, let me note some of the more obvious Trump effects on colleges and universities. Among the most obvious: the heyday of social justice commitments is gone. 

At most places, you’ll search in vain for any trace of the anti-racism plans that colleges and universities rolled out after Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, MN.  And even where those plans can still be found, the wind has been taken out of their sails. 

Colleges and universities are no longer mandating that every academic and administrative unit roll out or refresh their anti-racism plans. They are neither offering incentives for faculty to offer courses on race and racism nor investing resources in campus-wide antiracism programs.

Some places, Yale University being the most prominent example, have even revised their mission statements to strip them of any hint of social justice commitments. Yale’s previous statement read: “Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”

The post-Trump version: “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”

As Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College, observed after that change was announced, “Give Yale credit for chutzpah. It isn’t often that any organization…openly to abandon the mission of improving the world… It is worth asking why an organization… declares no responsibility to advance the public good….”

I think the explanation is obvious. Trump.

“Absent a commitment to the public good,” Rosenberg added, “a university might be indistinguishable from a pharmaceutical or technology company. The very things that Yale has unwisely chosen to minimize are precisely those things that define the special place of a university in society. My hope—perhaps quixotic—is that few institutions will follow their example.”

Up the road, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard’s Medical School also revised its mission statement in a way that would surely please the president. The old version: “To nurture a diverse, inclusive community dedicated to alleviating suffering and improving health and well-being for all through excellence in teaching and learning, discovery and scholarship, and service and leadership.”

The new one: “to improve health and well-being for all through excellence and leadership in teaching and learning, discovery and scholarship, and service and care.” Gone is the phrase to “nurture a diverse, inclusive community.” 

But behind the scenes, other Trump-inspired shifts have occurred in higher education.

In the first blush of the president’s attacks, college presidents, at many of the places he targeted and at others that feared they would be attacked, sprang into action, convening emergency meetings, huddling with lawyers, enlisting support from alumni and members of their Board of Trustees, and hiring consultants and lobbying firms. 

Some initiated negotiations and settled with the Trump Administration. A few sued.

Those strategic decisions were made by administrators with little or no consultation with faculty. What else could they do? 

These were life-and-death moments for the institutions they led, and they called for heroic action. As Mt. Holyoke College President told the Boston Globe in April 2025, “(H)igher education faces an ‘existential crisis’ (in which) ‘the very values that higher education is built upon are under attack.’”

If we look beyond the present moment in higher education to how such existential crises play out, things generally go like this: A crisis requires fast and decisive action. Executives and administrators see themselves as guardians of the institutions in which they work. New structures and arrangements are put in place to address the crisis. 

As the Center for Creative Leadership observes, “Crises are inevitable, in life and in organizations…In uncertain moments, leaders set the tone through their example and their conduct…. Strong leadership is also important during polycrisis, when multiple crises interact and create complex challenges.”

Or, as Professor Allan Stan puts it, “Historically, powers invoked during a crisis have staying power….”

In most organizations, crises shift the locus of power. As Jenna Garden notes, in a publication of Stanford University’s Business School, “When a crisis hits, however, it’s as if a spotlight’s been turned on, and suddenly everyone is paying attention and looking to the leader to make sense out of what’s happened — and offer a path forward….”

“(T)he crisis,” she argues, “opens an opportunity in the form of a new platform for leaders….”

What is true in the world beyond universities is true there as well.

And if faculty and others on campus are not vigilant, the new arrangements become institutionalized.

That pattern will be one part of the legacy of Trump’s attack on universities. If it is not named and resisted, colleges and universities will have a new normal long after Trump has left the scene. 

Faculty have a choice.  They can either accept their increasingly marginalized roles in the governance of higher education or begin the arduous process of imagining new models of shared governance, appropriate for the current crisis and what it will leave behind.

I hope they choose the latter, lest Trump leave an indelible mark on how American colleges and universities are run. 

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