$15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President

President Trump has declared that this country’s leading universities are sites of “anti-American insanity.” He has tried to cut their funding for scientific research. His administration has announced investigations into diversity programs and floated new taxes on university endowments. Brown and Columbia have had faculty or former students detained and threatened with deportation. On Thursday, the administration suspended $175 million of funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies on transgender athletes.

Fearing sanction or retribution, universities have already begun to placate the administration, banning diversity statements in faculty hiring or weighing whether to strip “trigger words” like “diverse” from their hospital system’s websites. In doing so, they risk abandoning their roles as centers of free speech and critical debate in the name of appeasement.

Top universities must instead exercise the financial independence afforded by their endowments, which are commonly valued in the tens of billions. Their leaders should collectively declare they will not suppress lawful free speech, diversity programs or campus research to appease any president. The wealthiest universities, in particular, must pledge to use all available endowment funds as a backstop for any federal funding cuts to research, educational programs or student financial aid at their schools, barring any donor restrictions. Endowments could even fund legal defense for students and scholars who are threatened with deportation.

Thus far, university presidents have largely kept their heads down rather than uniting to oppose Mr. Trump’s assault. That is a mistake. A key authoritarian strategy is to single out prominent individuals or institutions for repression so that others, afraid, forgo legitimate criticism of the authoritarian leader. Often, universities are some of the first institutions that authoritarians attack. Make no mistake, the Trump administration’s punitive cuts to federal research grants and detention of university students or faculty, couched under the President’s grievances over diversity programs and campus protests, are early signs of this strategy at work in America.

The most egregious example of this strategy was the administration’s decision to cancel $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, in part because the school officials had not reigned in campus protests about the Gaza War last year. The administration promised to negotiate with the university to restore that funding if the campus complied with nine preliminary demands, which included expelling or suspending students, centralizing its disciplinary process and placing the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership.” On Friday, the university conceded to some of the administration’s demands.

But what if, instead, Columbia chose to weather the storm?

The university has an endowment of nearly $15 billion. The $400 million in federal cuts would have been distributed across multiple years. However, even if Columbia were to freely spend $400 million more from its endowment in a single year to make up for the funding shortfall, its withdrawal from the endowment that year would increase to just under 8 percent from around 5 percent. Several universities engaged in similar extra spending during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.