Silence Isn’t a Strategy: Academic Leaders Must Resist Assault on Higher Ed

Part of the Series

Challenging the Corporate University

Nearly five years ago, then-President Donald Trump released his first anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) executive order. The executive order, intentionally erroneous in its claims that DEI practices violated civil rights laws, sent shock waves through the academic community. Despite its false claims and eventual overturning, the executive order provided a playbook for right-wing state legislators to develop bills and laws that were not so much anti-DEI as they were anti-civil rights.

Upon returning to office, the Trump administration issued four executive orders. It also issued a “dear colleague letter” — a non-binding communication clarifying direction for offices and sectors of government — and withheld over $1 billion from two higher education institutions as part of a ransom-type takeover of higher education.

Today, the higher education ecosystem remains shocked, but hardly surprised. And many institutions, University of Michigan being the latest, have self-imposed restrictions on academic freedom and DEI in hopes of preemptively removing themselves from any targets the right-wing apparatus sets on them. However, over 55 universities are listed for investigation and action by the Trump administration; the Department of Education has been downsized; and more executive orders are in the works.

In this context, higher education’s collective stasis invites a scaled assault on our sector that extends beyond what we have seen.

Moreover, self-imposed restrictions miscalculate the multidecade history, scale and intent of the assault we are facing. For being safe today does not mean safe tomorrow; and tomorrow’s attack will be more refined and scaled than today’s.

The movement assaulting higher education, what I call the new white nationalism, is well-networked and well-funded. The new white nationalism uses legal, social and cultural apparatuses to perform the same work of the traditional skin-headed or white-hooded white nationalism. It acts covertly so that what is presented to the mainstream may often seem benign when it is anything but.

Strategies and Tactics That Higher Education Unknowingly Supports

Much of academia and the mainstream media fall victim to misdirection when it comes to the strategy of the new white nationalism. Executive orders, dear colleague letters or egregious retraction of federal funding create explosive stories for the mainstream media and public consuming it. The language in Trump’s executive orders and dear colleague letters, however, intentionally pervert reality of what is happening on college campuses for the mainstream to make it seem that civil rights are being upheld when in fact they are being decimated.

Their true purpose is to provide a road map for state legislatures to follow as they impose anti-academic freedom, anti-institutional autonomy, anti-civil rights, and anti-educational restrictions on their own state’s public institutions. We know this because of how Florida and Texas used the first Trump executive order in 2020 as a road map to decimate the operations and mission-centric values of their DEI offices, curricula and outreach. To be sure, the most significant damage has been and continues to make its way through state-level anti-DEI legislation — most recently seen in Ohio, Kentucky and North Carolina.

As states follow the Trump administration’s road map in their own legislatures, they also learn from one another’s lessons learned in court. Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, for instance, refined what was Florida’s anti-DEI bill, which was delayed because it originally violated free speech laws. That refinement avoids such constitutional freedoms but provides even more control by the state regarding curriculum and academic freedom, and eliminates DEI even more radically than in Florida.

Because right-wing legislators learn from one another across states, these bills are becoming increasingly extreme. For instance, an unprecedented bill in North Carolina would subject educators to misdemeanor charges for engaging in DEI. The fear such legislation creates — and subsequent alteration of policies, procedures and individual behaviors — cannot be underestimated. For example, despite the fact that the bill has not yet become law, institutions in North Carolina are already making changes to their operations, especially those that focus on marginalized students’ success. Faculty and staff in many states, North Carolina included, are prohibited from even using the language of DEI in email or texts for fear of repercussions.

Legislated fear is violating free speech and civil rights.

In a snowballing fashion, extremism is being normalized.

We may hope to avoid the assault on education by pretending that silence is a strategy. We may believe that inaction will allow us to survive for the next four years.

But we are in the middle of a movement, not a moment. We are watching as the snowball rolls, and soon we will be hit with an avalanche if we fail to act now.

Civil Rights, Higher Education and the Inertia of Complacency

Decades ago, the leaders of the new white nationalism concluded that individuals and institutions that comprise the American public, even the most well-meaning, will rarely (if ever) mobilize against legislation or policy that impinges on others’ civil rights. Only when legislation or policy impinges on these individuals or institutions directly will a defense mount against the new white nationalism. But by that moment it is too late. As a result, inaction and silence are not strategies. They are capitulations to the right.

Watching as the right actively clamps down on the free speech of students protesting for Palestine, to include their arrests, is not stasis — it is choosing to comply with such actions.

In short, our political context has placed higher education in a new partisan realm that is dangerous and that weaponizes academic freedom, institutional autonomy and DEI against us. Still, as a sector, we have not been transparent with the public or with each other about who is attacking us, how and why because we fear partisan retaliation. But partisan attacks permeate the country no matter what posture academia takes. And if we remain silent about the truth of who is attacking us, we are supporting that attack.

A right-wing movement counts on our fear and subsequent stasis and silence. Let us not fool ourselves, either: Many of us falsely believe we are being strategic but are actually complying with an assault on civil rights and our institutional missions. For instance, many institutions engage in what Liliana Garces calls repressive legalism because the consequences threatened for doing work central to higher education’s missions are so extreme. When Trump’s administration threatened students’ federal Pell grants, higher education leaders were faced with impossible choices of continuing the work of democracy and education, or losing funding. They often complied with demands predicated on perversions of what DEI is in order to secure already promised funding. While the need to secure funding is understandable, the sector’s quiet and inactive stance has left the forthcoming generation of students without the support they need and the knowledge a curriculum that teaches truth provides. We are trading our purpose for our temporary comfort; our moral contract for a false belief that this assault is momentary and will not scale further than what we allow in the moment.

But the threats are often leading us to do the work of the new white nationalism for them. For instance, Trump’s February 14, 2025, dear colleague letter continuously referred to “illegal” DEI or DEI that “violates” civil rights as reason to withhold federal financial aid from students. The same dear colleague letter indicated that further direction would come two weeks after the letter was published. That clarification, issued on February 28, 2025, can be summarized as stating the obvious: Segregation is illegal — a fact all of us in higher education both knew and agree with. But the clarification went one step further: It promised that institutions would have due process should the administration believe they were out of compliance with civil rights law. As Steve Robinson aptly pointed out, there was no need for the corrections many institutions made between the dear colleague letter on February 14 and the guidance on February 28.

Finally, the due process promised would include investigation into whether an institution’s policies disproportionately impact certain people or races more than others (to be backed up by statistics demonstrating such patterns); and whether the school was aware of or could foresee the effect of said policy or decision on members of a particular race.

Ironically, these factors underpin nearly all equity-based practices and policies in higher education. Indeed, it could be fairly argued that any orders or laws that prohibit DEI are now in violation of civil rights as defined by this dear colleague letter’s guidance — an irony for a court to hash out if a brave institution decides to argue it.

A Strong Reimagination of Higher Education Is Necessary

The erosion of civil rights coupled with the questioning of higher education’s value are capitalized upon and leveraged by an orchestrated, well-funded network of activists who are clear about their singular goal of eradicating higher education of DEI. From Chris Rufo to the Heritage Foundation, from Turning Point USA to Edward Blum, these individuals and think tanks attack higher education’s curricula and accessibility goals because they know that reimagining the world inclusively manifests a future that reduces racialized oppression.

While the attack is horrifying, the potential to reimagine our world is reciprocally great. For higher education is one of the few sectors well-situated to assert how civil rights, citizenship, justice and humanity intersect. And it is at this intersection that higher education leaders must imagine and act with urgency.

We must imagine in a way that pushes beyond the public discourse that perverts critical race theory for racist ends; or the futile desire to build bridges with those who have, as of March 2025, introduced legislation to make it a criminal act to teach, practice in or consider DEI.

We must move beyond the game of whack-a-mole that creates chaos nationally and within our sphere of influence. We must understand each individual federal order or state bill that attacks higher education is part of a larger anti-educational, anti-diversity movement with the goal of further marginalizing those who have historically been marginalized. Understanding this motive better informs our decisions to react.

There is no doubt that situating our moment and the landscape in this fashion is rife with danger. But it is also dangerous not to. Indeed, we must challenge the notion that academia must be overly careful and not provoke retaliation — for that is the way we arrived at the moment we are in today.

We need to separate the constructs of “partisan” from “political.” We need to make clear that while higher education has remained nonpartisan, only one party is actively engaged in an effort to dismantle the very missions of our educational institutions and civil rights of our students, employees and communities.

We have heard the cliché that silence is complicity for years now. We have now seen that complicity and complacence are choices that accept the decimation of our sector, the deportation of our students and the reduction of entire populations we serve to second-class citizens. Our silence is not a strategy. Our inaction is not wise.

We also must recognize that the tools to navigate this moment can no longer be reduced to finding the right words, the right logic, the right promises so that the new white nationalism will understand us differently. These lines of inquiry have begun to dominate the talks that should be strategic. Proclamations such as “equity is about more than race” or “change language, not values” indicate that we have already entered into a debate and negotiation we have lost by engaging in what Paul Gorski calls racial detours — a practice that voids race from discourse and strategy “under the illusion of progress.” The racial detours of our moment perform the right’s goals from the jump.

We need a national strategy in which higher education administrators in “safer” states pick up the mantle for all of us to save our sector, and indeed our democracy.

We must acknowledge that higher education leaders are not necessarily experts in U.S. history, politics and critical race theory, which are lenses necessary to lead — not manage — against the attacks we are seeing. Hence, our sector also needs training among leaders that provides background on the new white nationalist movement that seeks to dismantle higher education. Such training can provide academic leaders with theoretical and practical lenses to look at their own institutions, but also tools to collaborate with each other.

There will be detractors from what I suggest here. Some will claim that I am calling out too many of us, or that my argument is not timely. I would remind us what Martin Luther King Jr. taught us about remaining complacent when civil rights are on the line, and how timeliness is an argument made by those who benefit from time passing by.

The time is now for academic leadership to learn about the movement against us and why it threatens democracy.

Likewise, now is the time for us to consider a new view of what higher education can be if it is seen as a right, not a privilege, for all. A group I have been leading, Education for All, continues to do this work.

We are no longer facing a movement that an election could help us avoid; the landscape has significantly changed in just a few months. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the criminalizing of pedagogy, the yanking of federal grants and the threat of Pell dollars being voided all show we are in a dangerous moment. And while speaking out is important, a greater national strategy is even more so.