Tag: Standing

  • What Ruth Simmons Taught Me About Standing for Something

    What Ruth Simmons Taught Me About Standing for Something

    Those who know me are well aware that I have a professional crush on Ruth Simmons. I have talked about how much I admire her career and the bold stances she has taken publicly and taken opportunities to ask others about how she has encouraged and mentored them. When presented with a chance to meet her, I quickly bought an airline ticket and counted down the days.

    For those who are unfamiliar with her career, she was the first Black president of an Ivy League institution; holds the title of president emerita of Smith College, Brown University and Prairie View A&M University; and as of this past weekend, has been awarded 41 honorary degrees.

    The last of these degrees was conferred by Southern Methodist University, which is where I earned my doctoral degree. Michael Harris, a professor at SMU, was the Faculty Senate president who nominated Simmons to receive the award. As a result, he was invited to the dinner given in her honor, and it was my great fortune his wife was unable to attend. He jokes that only one person references Simmons as often as I do, and he felt obligated to ask if I was interested in attending.

    Prior to the dinner, Simmons was the speaker at a campuswide symposium, where signed copies of her book, Up Home, were distributed to attendees. She spoke about her childhood and career, offering advice to all in attendance.

    Her final statement felt like a follow on to my last “Call to Action” piece, which encouraged everyone to fight on behalf of higher education:

    “It’s in those moments, even when you’re wrong or when people think you’re wrong, that you’re elevated. It’s in those moments that you stand for something and know what is beyond the pale, in the things that you see before you. And so if, like my mother, you see somebody being unfairly treated, how dare you be silent? How dare you if you see someone doing something that trespasses. What should we be doing as human beings? How dare we not say something?

    “So the question I get when I do my book events, from students and everyone else, is ‘What should I be doing in this moment?’ Everybody’s question is ‘What should I be doing now?’ I don’t have an answer for everybody, but I do know that at 80 years old, I get up every day ready to do something, and that’s what I always answer. ‘You’ve got to do something.’ It is not a moment to sit on the sidelines and be comfortable and say, ‘Oh, let everybody else worry about that.’ Shame on you if you draw that conclusion right now.”

    I couldn’t agree more.

    Like Ruth Simmons, I’ve received many questions from people who are unsure how or if they can fight, having read my recent piece. Some colleagues feel they can’t fight because they are in red states, or they worry they could put themselves or their institutions at risk through their actions. Others feel they lack the credibility or the authority to lead a fight. Still others worry they need to take on the fight on behalf of the whole industry and are already exhausted.

    Fighting on behalf of higher education isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. I would encourage, as Simmons notes, that this can include addressing mistruths, defending those who are being treated unfairly and speaking out when the moment demands it. I believe that fighting for higher education means that we each defend the academy within our spheres of influence in big and small ways.

    For example, arm yourself with facts and be prepared to address misinformation you may hear about the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was just approved by the House GOP and has been sent to the Senate. As passed by the House, it includes limiting Pell eligibility and eliminating subsidized student loans.

    Know what the impact of the House’s proposed endowment tax will be on the institutions that will be impacted. Be versed in how institutions are reeling from the elimination of research grants and how the bill will now further impact them. It is clear to me that these are the first cuts for institutions, but they won’t be the last. The goal is to have fiscal death by a thousand cuts. I would argue it is our responsibility to speak out—to fight— when we hear people discussing the federal budget and grant cuts and explain the impacts these cuts are having on student persistence, on campuses, on research, and on everyday people.

    Despite my choice of language and the traditional connotation associated with it, I don’t think of fighting as only a negative concept. Or, at the very least, I was raised in a Hispanic household where the duality of challenge and support was viewed as a given, rather than a negative. A colleague of mine said that he felt my language was solely confrontational. I suggested in response that fighting to me means asserting an alternative, which includes sharing expertise, data and information, and serving as a sense maker. I believe it covers addressing falsehoods and defending the truth. It is up to each of us if we view and live this only as a negative.

    It’s possible that Simmons’s advice feels aligned with my thinking because I want so dearly to be aligned with her, but the reality is that there’s something about a fighter that is always aligned with another fighter, and for that reason I hope you’ll see yourself in her words and in mine. Once again, I invite you to fight.

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  • How Harvard Is Standing Up to Trump Means Everything

    How Harvard Is Standing Up to Trump Means Everything

    When it comes to fighting the current authoritarian threats coming out of the Trump administration, it’s important to remember that the symbol is the substance.

    Frankly, this is always true of politics generally, but it’s more true and more important than ever in this moment.

    We have an object example of this principle at work presently in the different responses from Harvard and Columbia when it comes to the threats to funding and demand for control by the Trump administration.

    Columbia appeared to capitulate, forging an “agreement” to take steps sought by Trump, ostensibly to address antisemitism on campus, but this fig leaf was unconvincing, and Trump himself quickly dropped the pretense, as we all understand he has no interest in combating antisemitism and every interest in sending signals of domination and stoking fear that turns into pre-emptive compliance from other institutions.

    Columbia looked unprincipled and weak in the face of the authoritarian threat, and the internal and external backlash against Columbia has been significant.

    In contrast, once Harvard received the Trump administration demands, it crafted a careful public response, producing multiple public-facing communications meant to speak to different audiences (press, public, students, faculty, alumni) with different needs, including a letter from Harvard president Alan Garber to the university community that invoked a shared responsibility to defend the core values of the institution specifically and higher education in general.

    To be fair, the call was much easier for Harvard than Columbia for several reasons. For one, Harvard had seen what happened to Columbia, where what looked like capitulation to outsiders still proved insufficient, because, again, Trump is interested in subservience, not reaching a mutual agreement. When Trump-world figures like JD Vance and Chris Rufo say they intend to destroy higher education, we should take them seriously.

    The Trump administration demands of Harvard were also so extreme—amounting essentially to a takeover of the university—that it had no choice but to resist and take every possible step to rally others to the fight. The public thirst for an institutional response to Trump’s lawless power grabs has been so great that even the New York Times editorial board has weighed in with its approval of Harvard’s actions and the university’s explicit pledge to stand against violations of the rule of law.

    An interesting bit of information in the form of an op-ed by Columbia history professor Matthew Connelly has come out that perhaps sheds additional light on Columbia’s actions. Writing at The New York Times, Connelly laments the hapless situation his institution finds itself in, first receiving blows from Trump and then being subjected to the “circular firing squad” of those who oppose Trump signing on to a collective boycott of Columbia.

    Connelly argues that we should not view Columbia as “capitulating” to Trump because, “In fact, many of the actions the Columbia administration announced on March 21 are similar to those originally proposed last August by more than 200 faculty members.”

    In other words, in agreeing with Trump, Columbia is only doing what it was possibly going to do anyway. Connelly goes on to argue that Columbia would never give in on key principles of institutional operations, and acting Columbia University president Claire Shipman has subsequently declared that Columbia would not sign any agreement that would “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.”

    Columbia’s actions look similar to those taken by some of the big law firms that have reached vaguely worded “agreements” with Trump that have them pledging not to do “illegal DEI hiring” and to donate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to pro bono causes favored by Trump. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has gone digging into some of these agreements and found that there’s not much of specific substance to be found, the wording often so generalized and vague that it would be easy for firms to fulfill the agreements without doing anything beyond their usual patterns and practices.

    I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Connelly’s irritation or the decisions by the big law firms; they thought they could make Trump go away with a little performative minor supplication and get back to their substantive work.

    They’ve obviously misread the moment badly. I don’t know what more evidence we need to conclude that Trump intends to govern as an authoritarian. In both the cases of these law firms and Columbia University, the entire battle was over Trump being allowed to claim a symbolic victory over these institutions, to get them to be seen capitulating.

    It is strange to say that the symbolic fight is the genuine battle over principles, but this is obviously the case. Trump wants to make others fearful of standing up to his authoritarian aims, so he will simply defy the rule of law until someone forces the victims to fight. There is no choice but to test the administration’s resolve. Trump’s response on Truth Social following Harvard’s action shows a lot of bluster aimed at tearing down Harvard’s reputation with a lot of right-wing tropes, but the rhetoric shows how nonexistent his substantive case is.

    Any capitulation, real or even perceived, is a loss. Either choice will come with costs. Trump is going after Harvard’s funding and nonprofit status, and there will be significant turbulence for the university in the foreseeable future. But turbulence is not the same thing as a plane heading for the ground.

    Harvard had its legal strategy prepared before the fight even went public. Law and precedent appear to be on its side, though this is not a guarantee of success. Trump seems determined to hold back whatever money he can in his ongoing attempts at coercion.

    What we are learning is that there is no such thing as accommodating or reaching an agreement with an authoritarian project. Harvard’s stand is an important symbolic illustration of this, and because of the symbolism, it is proving to be hugely substantive.

    Let’s hope it’s only the first example of how to fight back.

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