Trump is ‘catalyst, not cause’ of HE decline – Pasquerella

Although unsparing in her critique of United States President Donald J Trump and some of his key appointees, such as US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jnr, Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, is not blind to the contribution of American higher education to its own ‘crucible moment’.

“If you look closely at what Kennedy is trying to do, it comes down to eugenics, survival of the fittest,” she told University World News in an interview about her upcoming presentation at the meeting of the Magna Charta Observatory to be held in the United Kingdom in November.* “Let these kids have measles, COVID and other diseases we have vaccines for, like smallpox. And then those who survive are the fittest,” she said of Kennedy’s methods.

“Some of us will survive, but others literally won’t. They will die,” said Pasquerella.

Since being sworn in as secretary of health and human services in February, Kennedy has, among other measures, cut almost a billion dollars from the National Institutes of Health, issued guidance that healthy children and pregnant women should not be given the COVID vaccine, and dismissed the 17 members of the national advisory committee on vaccines with plans to replace them with vaccine sceptics.

These plans are being implemented alongside Trump’s many executive orders that ban diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programmes and the teaching of critical race theory (CRT), his order that the Department of Education does not contest a case against the decades-long grant programme for Hispanic-Serving Institutions and his withdrawal of federal research funds from Harvard, Columbia and other universities.

A ‘crucible moment’

The ‘crucible moment’ American higher education now faces, argues Pasquerella, is not due solely to the re-election of the presidency.

Pasquerella sees him instead as a catalyst, albeit of an especially reactive kind, and not the fundamental cause of why colleges and universities have fallen in public prestige.

Indeed, it is this fall in prestige that has allowed Trump’s attacks as well as those of a number of states that have passed bills dismantling DEI in public universities, gagged the teaching of “divisive topics”, and other measures that have undermined academic freedom, she says.

“This problem has been decades in the making. On the political side, you can look back all the way to Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California (1967-75) when he campaigned, saying it was wrong to send Berkeley and other state-run universities money when they were filled with pot-smoking hippies who were anti-American.

“More recently, there have been the attacks on DEI and CRT by right-wing media and politicians who criticise colleges and universities for being filled with left-wing professors trying to indoctrinate their students.”

American universities and colleges, she will tell the university presidents before her on 11 November, have much to answer for.

“I think we're complicit, to a large extent, in failing to address the fact that higher education is too expensive, too difficult to access, and is not teaching students 21st century skills. We have viewed curriculum-to-career initiatives as the commodification of higher education.

“We have reinforced the notion of higher education that's taking place within the ivory tower as a wilful disconnect from the practical matters of everyday life.

“We can't afford to continue to view things the way that we did in the tweedy past. Or that academe is a pastoral retreat where you don't have to be worried about what's happening in the world, and we have reinforced racial and economic segregation, especially in elite institutions,” she says.

Pasquerella said it was clear that the three female presidents – of Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania – were ambushed in December 2023 when they appeared before the US Congress to testify about antisemitism on their campuses – because they were women. You can tell this, she said, by the simple fact that “when male presidents of other universities were before Congress, they were treated very differently”.

Yet, she averred, the disconnect the public feels from these universities and colleges and universities in general made them “easy targets”.

Attacks on higher education around the world

Pasquerella is to speak at a session of the Magna Charta Observatory anniversary conference on the theme of “What are universities for? Higher education principles, values and responsibilities in a fragmented world?”

She is speaking in a session devoted to the impact of President Trump’s policies on higher education in North America and globally, which will be moderated by Patrick Deane, principal and vice-chancellor of Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), and include contributions from Robert Quinn, founding executive director of Scholars at Risk, and Brendan O’Malley, editor-in-chief of University World News.

First signed in 1988 by 388 rectors and university presidents, the Magna Charta Universitatum (MCU), has now been signed by of 975 university leaders from 94 countries.

By signing the MCU, universities commit themselves to three principles: the intellectual and moral independence of research and teaching from political influence and economic interests; the inseparability of teaching and research, including by students; and a commitment to the belief that universities are “sites for free inquiry and debate”, open dialogue and tolerance.

An update of the MCU in 2020 made it more explicit that “universities acknowledge that they have a responsibility to engage with and respond to the aspirations and challenges of the world and the communities they serve, to benefit humanity and contribute to sustainability.”

As do most higher education leaders, Pasquerella grapples with understanding how globalisation fits into an analysis of the perilous moment American colleges and universities are living through.

Early in the notes for her talk provided to University World News are a series of paragraphs that detail attacks on higher education and academic freedom in Poland, Türkiye, Brazil, Mexico and Britain, and which, together, form something of a template for “the swift intensification of actions taken against the academy in the US” after Trump returned to power.

Poland showed the way in 2018 when a law “reduced shared governance and increased the influence of external bodies through the creation of university councils with the power to appoint rectors, dictate strategic initiatives, and exert political influence,” Pasquerella wrote in the notes she sent on 1 September – ironically, the day that Texas’ law abolishing shared governance in its public universities and colleges came into effect.

Following a 2016 coup attempt, she notes, Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan centralised control of senior university appointments. Additionally, “police presence at universities expanded drastically, and student protestors were labelled as terrorists and traitors for voicing opposition to military actions against northern Syria or concern over the enhanced government control over their campuses”.

In the US, following Trump’s return to office, “limits were simultaneously removed from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ activities on college campuses,” Pasquerella plans on telling her fellow presidents.

Further, “partnerships were established with several institutions in Florida to allow campus security officers to perform immigration enforcement functions. In addition, despite First Amendment protections, the president threatened to arrest and deport international students and faculty who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.”

Pasquerella highlights the injunction issued a few weeks ago that prevents Virginia’s governor, Republican and vocal Trump supporter Glenn Youngkin, from imitating Erdogan and seizing control of George Mason University (Richmond) by stacking its board with like-minded appointees who would fire the university’s president, Gregory Washington, for his support for DEI initiatives in the state’s largest public university.

‘Twice-told tales’

Those familiar with the scale of the cuts made by Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, cannot help but see those Kennedy and other Trump appointees are presiding over as “twice-told tales”, she argues.

The loss of faith in higher education is, Pasquerella notes, evident on both sides of the Atlantic. The Americans at her talk might, however, be somewhat envious of their British counterparts.

According to a study conducted by the King’s College Institute in 2024, 31% of respondents felt that “university education was not worth the time or money”, up from 18% six years earlier. In America, among Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), 50% thought college was a “waste of time.”

The similar political trajectories traced by the countries she plans to discuss and the rise of authoritarianism in the United States have similar root causes unrelated to the country’s relative economic strength. Rather, she says, a central driver of these similar trajectories is because of the internet.

The point is not that before the internet newspapers and networks would avoid covering the actions of Bolsonaro or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Rather, the issue is the speed at which their actions become known, the online presence of their supporters and the ease with which foreign actors can send political templates and talking points to American right wingers.

Pasquerella quotes US Vice President JD Vance, a fan of Hungary's autocrat: “The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary.

“I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching … Whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made, and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture. And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.”

In my discussion with Pasquerella, “globalisation” had two meanings. The first described the nexus of states that are undermining academic freedom using the internet as a tool. The other was the more traditional economic meaning.

Accordingly, Pasquerella pointed out that even as globalisation has fostered the concept of the “global citizen”, for many who worked in heavy industry, globalisation has destroyed their livelihood as American industries moved plants offshore.

“For many, globalisation is regarded as anti-American because it is seen as contributing to the erosion of local economies through lower wages, closed factories, and displacement from rural areas,” Pasquerella told University World News.

“Critics contend that the new opportunities created for major companies by globalisation have inflicted disproportionate burdens on small farmers, local business, and workers facing job losses, wage stagnation, and reduced protections.”

Academic freedom

At last year’s Magna Charta Observatory meeting, when former president Joe Biden was still in office, the American university leaders must have regarded with some sympathy the speakers representing countries such as Venezuela, Türkiye and Belarus.

These presidents lived in political ecologies that required a conscious calibration of the speech and actions of the diktat of governments of countries in the bottom 15% according to the Academic Freedom Index, with Belarus having the fifth-lowest rating, 0.1.

After less than a week under Trump, this had become the lot of college and university presidents across America, irrespective of the American Association of University Professors’ more than century-old statement on academic freedom and generations of jurisprudence defining and defending academic freedom under the penumbra of the First Amendment.

At meetings of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which Pasquerella plans on referencing, the depth of the dilemma has been on display.

For public institutions, prior approval for any public statement was needed from state authorities or boards; presidents of private colleges and universities reported needing approval of their board chair. In some cases, approval of the entire board was required.

“Nearly everyone cited pressure from faculty and students to defend their institutions’ core principles and resist the governmental attacks, especially when they involved attempts to control the curriculum or limit speech.”

“But the higher education leaders were, Pasquerella also notes, wary of how the media would “frame their decision to be a signatory [to a public letter or petition] or, alternatively, their absence from the list.”

Pasquerella will report that: “In deliberating about the possibility of a unified defence and whether there was a willingness to speak collectively, there was widespread agreement that ‘the risks are there anyway – we can either allow them to render us silent or use our voice to uphold our values’” – a sentiment that echoes a signal moment in American history.

On 4 July 1776, as president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence. When finished, he said: “There must be no pulling different ways. We must all hang together.”

Moments later, another signatory of the declaration, Benjamin Franklin, the founder of the University of Pennsylvania, itself a founding member of the Magna Charta Universitatum, said: “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately.”

* The Anniversary of the Magna Charta Universitatum 2020 to 2025 is to be held at King’s College London from 11 to 13 November. Details of how to register can be found here.

This article is published in partnership with the Magna Charta Observatory. University World News is solely responsible for the editorial content.