A close friend who works at a nearby college asked me why, in 2025, there haven’t been student protests of the kind that we saw during the Vietnam War and after the killing of George Floyd.
She questioned why campuses seem eerily quiescent as events in Washington, D.C., threaten values essential to the health of higher education, values like diversity, freedom of speech and a commitment to the greater good. We also wondered why most higher education leaders are choosing silence over speech.
Deans and presidents seem more invested in strategizing about how to respond to executive orders and developing contingency plans to cope with funding cuts than in exerting moral leadership and mounting public criticism of attacks on democratic norms and higher education.
My students have their own lists of preoccupations. Some are directly threatened and live in fear; some see nothing special about the present moment. “It is just more of the same,” one of them told me.
And many faculty feel especially vulnerable because of who they are or what they teach. They, too, are staying on the sidelines.
All of us may be tempted by what a student quoted by the Yale Daily News calls “a quiet acceptance and a quiet grief.” None of us may see a clear path forward; after all, the president won a plurality of the votes in November. How can we save democracy from and for the people themselves?
I do not mean to judge the goodwill or integrity of anyone in our colleges and universities. There, as elsewhere, people are trying their best to figure out how to live and work under suddenly changed circumstances.
No choice will be right for everyone, and we need empathy for those who decide to stay out of the fray. But if all of us stay on the sidelines, the collective silence of higher education at a time when democracy is in crisis will not be judged kindly when the history of our era is written.
Let’s start by considering the role of college and university presidents in times of national crisis. In the past, some have seen themselves as leaders not just of their institutions but, like the clergy and presidents of philanthropic foundations, of civil society.
Channeling Alexis de Tocqueville, Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld explains that “the voice of leaders in civil society help[s] certify truth,” creating “priceless ‘social capital’ or community trust.” He asks, “If college presidents get a pass, then why shouldn’t all institutional leaders in democratic society shirk their duties?”
In the 1960s and ’70s, some prominent college presidents refused to take a pass. The University of Notre Dame’s Theodore Hesburgh became a leading voice in the Black civil rights struggle. Amherst College president John William Ward not only spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War, he even undertook an act of civil disobedience to protest it.
A half century earlier, another Amherst president, Alexander Meiklejohn, embraced the opportunity afforded by his position to speak to a nation trying to recover from World War I and figure out how to deal with mass immigration and the arrival of new ethnic groups.
At a time of national turmoil, he asked Americans some hard questions: “Are we determined to exalt our culture, to make it sovereign over others, to keep them down, to have them in control? Or will we let our culture take its chance on equal terms … Which shall it be—an Anglo-Saxon aristocracy of culture or a Democracy?”
Those questions have special resonance in the present moment.
But, especially after Oct. 7, college presidents have embraced institutional neutrality on controversial social and political issues. That makes sense.
Yet institutional neutrality does not mean they need to be silent “on the issues of the day when they are relevant to the core mission of our institutions,” to quote Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth. And, as Sonnenfeld notes, even the University of Chicago’s justly famous 1967 Kalven report, which first urged institutional neutrality, “actually encouraged institutional voice to address situations which ‘threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.’”
Do attacks on diversity, on international students and faculty, and on the rule of law and democracy itself “threaten the very mission of the university”? If they don’t, I do not know what would.
As Wesleyan’s Roth reminds his colleagues, “College presidents are not just neutral bureaucrats or referees among competing protesters, faculty and donors.” Roth urges them to speak out.
But, so far, few others have done so, preferring to keep a low profile.
The silence of college leaders is matched by the absence of student protests on most of their campuses. Recall that in 2016, when President Trump was first elected, “On many campuses, protests exploded late into election night and lasted several days.”
Nothing like that is occurring now, even as the Trump administration is carrying out mass deportations, threatening people who protest on college campuses, attacking DEI, calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, ending life-saving foreign aid programs and trampling the norms of constitutional democracy.
Mass protests on campuses can be traced back to 1936, when, as Patricia Smith explains, “college students from coast to coast refused to attend classes to express their opposition to the rise of fascism in Europe and to advocate against the U.S. involvement in foreign wars.”
They were followed by the University of California at Berkeley’s free speech movement in the 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, including those that occurred after fatal shootings of student protesters at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. There were anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s, and, more recently, students across the country organized protests against police brutality and racism after George Floyd’s death and against Israel’s military actions in Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Though there have been small protests on a few college campuses, nothing like what occurred in response to those events has transpired in 2025.
Students may have learned a bitter lesson from the crackdowns on protesters engaged in pro-Palestinian activism. And many of them are deeply disillusioned with our democratic institutions. They care more about social justice than preserving democracy and the rule of law.
Students may not be following events in the nation’s capital or grasping the significance of those events and what they mean for them and their futures.
It is the job of those of us who teach at colleges and universities to help them see what is happening. This is no time for business as usual. Our students need to understand why democracy matters and how their lives and the lives of their families will be changed if American democracy dies.
Ultimately, we should remember that the costs of silence may be as great as the costs of speaking out.
M. Gessen gets it right when they say, “A couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, it can feel as if we are already living in an irreversibly changed country.” Perhaps we are, but Gessen warns that there is worse to come: “Once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves.”
Gessen asks us to remember that “The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly.”
At present, college and university presidents, students and faculty must care about more than protecting ourselves and our institutions. We must speak out and bear witness to what Gessen describes and warn our fellow citizens against compliance.
This will not be easy at a time when higher education has lost some luster in the public’s eyes. But we have no choice. We have to try.
