Mientras la administración Trump cuestiona casi todos los aspectos de la educación superior, los expertos se preguntan: ¿dónde están las universidades ? Según un artículo reciente del New York Times , las instituciones académicas prominentes y sus líderes “no han hecho mucho públicamente”. De hecho, la tibia respuesta del sector sugiere que James Carville podría haber tenido razón al calificar a los académicos de “presas fáciles” en las batallas políticas.

Las medidas de la administración para recortar drásticamente la financiación federal son solo una parte de un esfuerzo concertado para obligar a las principales universidades de investigación a cambiar la forma en que llevan a cabo sus misiones fundamentales. Sin embargo, la respuesta más contundente del sector —una declaración de la Asociación Americana de Colegios y Universidades firmada por más de 600 líderes académicos— solo hace una vaga referencia a una “reforma constructiva”, al tiempo que rechaza el uso coercitivo de la financiación pública. Las resoluciones del profesorado, ampliamente adoptadas , que exigen pactos de defensa mutua no son más que sugerencias que aún no han dado frutos. Los ejemplos más exitosos de resistencia colectiva hasta la fecha son cuatro demandas que impugnan las políticas de costes indirectos de las agencias. Según mis cálculos, 23 universidades se han unido al menos a una de esas demandas.

Es tentador concluir que la respuesta tímida de la academia se debe a la cobardía, el pensamiento colectivo, el egoísmo, la complacencia o la sensación de privilegio. Cada una de estas explicaciones se ha ofrecido como posible explicación, y todas podrían tener un papel, pero se pasan por alto dos puntos esenciales que ayudan a revelar la causa más fundamental: la simple incertidumbre sobre la mejor manera de abordar una situación compleja y desafiante, protegiendo al mismo tiempo a las universidades y sus contribuciones a la nación.

First, the financial pressures being brought to bear on major research universities are truly existential. Some may be able to survive without public support and subsidies, but they will not be able to accomplish the missions that our society expects of them. Second, the enormous stakes of the Trump administration’s attack require quick, coherent responses, which universities are simply not set up to provide. The organizational changes necessary to enable more effective action could come at the cost of universities’ defining features, making them less fertile ground for discovery and education.

Ill-suited as they may be to today’s politics, America’s research universities have been remarkably successful because of the flexibility and ambiguity they maintain and the intellectual tensions they harness. This is part of what makes the administration’s pressure campaign so devilish. It turns many of the universities’ strengths into weaknesses. By doing so, it transforms longstanding academic fault lines into zero-sum contests that can pit fundamental values and institutional missions against each other in new, destructive ways.

Research universities are “loosely coupled systems” — their parts and activities often respond to each other but are not truly interdependent. A dean of engineering and a professor of molecular biology may occasionally have to come to agreement in a committee, but the details of their daily work will generally be completely different and disconnected. This explains part of why universities have trouble speaking with one voice: They are organized to ensure autonomy and support for many voices that often disagree. The resulting cacophony contributes to academic freedom, boosts innovative capability, and provides the rationale for institutional neutrality articulated in the Kalven Report.

Different parts of the university pursue different goals and rely on different funding sources. Clinical revenue from hospitals can fund institutional investments in biomedical research. Undergraduate tuition typically sustains colleges of arts and sciences. Other parts of the institution may rarely interact with undergraduates and depend instead on public and private investments that support research or public service. Research in some fields proceeds comfortably with little to no external funding. In others, substantial grants and contracts are required tickets for entry.

A decentralized organizational structure puts resources and decision-making authority nearer to the ground, allowing different units of the university to prioritize the things their work requires. Faculties in business, social work, or law can make curricular, hiring, and promotion decisions largely independent of each other and of colleagues in arts and sciences, each tuning their activities to their specific needs, goals, and vision. Decentralization also explains why universities rarely articulate detailed, actionable principles that unequivocally guide institutionwide decision-making — or at least why, when they do proffer strategic plans or mission statements, the results are often anodyne.

Even the overarching priorities that different parts of the institution emphasize can disregard or contradict one another. Patient care may serve as the north star in medicine, undergraduate teaching in the liberal arts, field-specific research advances in institutes and centers, impact through contributions to professional practice, community engagement and agricultural extension in yet other units. To successfully pursue multiple missions, universities must organize to deny the very possibility of a sole focus or intellectual monoculture. Such organization is a more nuanced and productive step toward “viewpoint diversity” than the narrower political or representational terms to which ideological debates tend to default. But it also makes the kind of strategic response Larry Summers calls for — “resist and reform” — difficult by forcing explicit tradeoffs that contemporary universities are configured to defer.

Universities are organized to hold contradictions, not to resolve them. Typical academic decision-making processes manage the ambiguities that multiple goals create in lieu of picking winners in the underlying conflicts. That works well in normal times, but it is disastrously bad for reaching, communicating, and acting on common priorities under threat. Yet universities’ public missions may now require them to do just that.

Prominent conservatives generally agree that hardball tactics are necessary to compel desired changes in academe. JD Vance advocated for “honestly and aggressively” attacking universities. Leo Terrell, who heads the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, wants financial pressures “to bring these universities to their knees.” As the conservative commentator Heather Mac Donald puts it: “The concept of academic freedom should be scaled back to allow funders — especially taxpayers — a say in how universities are run, including in what is taught.” The activist Christopher F. Rufo believes “existential terror” will provide the leverage needed to make an ultimatum stick: “Reform, or lose billions in funding.” That threat is now being carried out, and the administration’s will to back it up has been on clear display.

As Robert Kelchen put it, “Every revenue source is at risk.” Federal research grants and contracts are just the beginning.

The new endowment tax will significantly affect finances on some campuses. Threats to nonprofit status could dramatically raise costs and remove the tax deductions that help spur philanthropic giving. Actions on student visas, efforts to eliminate an institution’s ability to enroll non-U.S. students, and aggressive foreign and immigration policies all have large financial implications through tuition, not to mention what Medicaid cuts will do to academic medical-center revenue. The same cuts will shift additional health-care costs to states, which are likely to balance their budgets by decreasing public-university appropriations. To top it all off, tariff-induced cost increases, financial-market instability, and slowed economic growth will likely curb both corporate and foundation investment, curtailing the already relatively small alternatives to federal support for academic missions.

According to my analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data, the Trump administration’s policy barrage could create significant uncertainty in up to 73 percent of a typical research-intensive institution’s revenue. Those that operate hospitals are especially vulnerable, with as much as 84 percent of revenue at some degree of risk. Universities as varied as the New Mexico Institute of Mines and Technology, Rice University, Oregon Health & Science University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Georgia Tech, and Northeastern University are among the more than 60 institutions that must now contend with administration policies that raise questions about the stability of at least 80 percent of revenues.

The consequences are becoming clear. Stanford University recently announced a $140-million budget cut and layoffs. Boston University will eliminate 120 staff positions and another 120 vacancies. Eli Capilouto, president of the University of Kentucky, warned his institution that hundreds of millions of dollars of funding are at risk due to recently approved Medicaid changes. At the University of Virginia, an unprecedented and ultimately successful political and financial pressure campaign led to the president, James E. Ryan, stepping down.

These federal actions remove the budgetary flexibility a decentralized university needs to work. More importantly, they create complex, institutionwide risks that can tightly connect once largely independent units and missions. The result is a recipe for destructive intramural conflict that universities have no existing means to resolve.

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have sought to make new grants dependent on institutions’ certification that their campuses are free of programs that, in the NIH’s language, “advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws.” The policies have been challenged in the courts, but the NSF’s governing rules for grants still include language around “discriminatory equity ideology.” In response, the Universities of Michigan and of Minnesota paused acceptance of new NIH awards to allow time for evaluation of the terms. Harvard and Northwestern Universities have announced freezes on subawards from their grants to collaborating researchers at other institutions.

Recently filed suits challenging faculty-hiring practices at Northwestern’s law school, and the selection and decisions of student law-review editors at the University of Michigan suggest the ways that academic decisions in one part of the institution could shift the grounds for the work of distant colleagues. A Department of Justice announcement encouraging use of the False Claims Act could open the floodgates of such suits by allowing private citizens to file suit on behalf of the federal government if they believe certifications such as those proposed by the NSF and NIH have been violated. The potential for exorbitant penalties and the cost of defense could further strain institutional resources, increasing the pressure on universities to constrain academic decisions in one part of the institution, such as law schools, to protect the grant funds other units, for instance medicine or engineering, require to pursue their research missions.

How should a university respond to a situation where allegations of antisemitism sparked by campus protests could bring students’ First Amendment rights directly into conflict with an engineer’s need to secure federal support for a robotics project or with a data-science master’s program’s need to recruit international students willing to pay full freight? No matter the decision, the trade-offs will be painful and strike near the heart of what makes universities effective.

Columbia and Harvard offer examples of how different choices might play out in the face of external pressure and internal conflict. At Columbia, federal arm-twisting increased pressure on administrators, amplified tensions between faculty and leadership, and generated new conflicts among faculty. The university acquiesced to key administration demands, and The Wall Street Journal reported on a “faculty civil war that pits medical doctors and engineers against political scientists and humanities scholars.” Similar intramural conflicts seem likely to heat up and spread as the pressure grows and more permanent, painful budgetary decisions become necessary.

The Columbia example shows that the decisions institutions targeted by the Trump administration face have far-reaching, complex implications that take them far outside the standard mechanisms of academic leadership. The most easily defensible choice for any institution may be to protect its interests by negotiating for the best individual deal. But, as one Harvard professor pointed out, “that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.”

At Harvard, faculty frustration from having no “direct line” to “secretive” top leadership and seemingly ad hoc communications from “out of touch” administrators led to calls for stronger partnership and a faculty “seat at the table where decisions are made.” Efforts at organizational change are underway to address the Harvard Corporation’s levels of responsiveness to faculty, as is a move to convene a new Faculty Senate, which, predictably, faces some significant disagreement among faculty.

The administration’s policies are unified by their appeal to questionable readings of civil-rights law, which provide a basis for complex, institutionwide financial risks. They are likely to further empower general counsels and chief financial officers relative to academic administrators. But legal and financial calculi are not enough because there are broader ways to conceptualize the risks. Protests and open letters from faculty, students, and alumni at Harvard all framed the situation and thus the expected range of university responses in much wider terms. A letter signed by more than 800 Harvard faculty calls for institutional leadership in defense of “bedrock principles of a democratic society.” President Alan M. Garber’s letter announcing the institution’s decision to sue the Trump administration sang harmony by emphasizing the traditional values of higher education. But unity and harmony tend to crack under stress if steps aren’t taken to bolster them — and the pressures seem unlikely to lessen.

The Harvard case has, so far, revealed this administration’s willingness to flip every policy lever available to them to reshape universities. It suggests a more complex landscape and more wrenching decisions are in store — choices that will certainly pit a university against itself, further fragmenting and undermining coordinated responses.

How can other universities prepare? Some relatively simple steps might help. Administrators should be more transparent about the conceptions of risk that frame their decisions and the process by which those decisions are made. Engaging faculty in articulating broad conceptions of what’s at stake may avoid dangers that accompany narrow, institutionally focused choices. But the clear, strategic thrust of administration policies and the very real financial and legal threats they rest on may enforce tactical needs for speed and discretion that require faculty to accept more limited deliberation and fewer, more careful public statements than they might desire. Defining risks on multiple scales — financial, legal, reputational, sectoral, societal — and selecting decision-makers who can assess that full range of risks in advance of an acute crisis could help form a more unified strategy when the next destructive attack lands.

The things that have made America’s research universities such spectacularly effective contributors to the well-being of the nation and its people are at risk. They will no longer be research universities if the government succeeds in dictating what they study and teach. But they will also cease to be research universities if they cannot work at the scale and scope that public investment alone allows.

Incluso si pudieran sobrevivir, renunciar al apoyo público supondría la pérdida de gran parte de lo que hace que valga la pena invertir y proteger las universidades de investigación: la investigación y la formación de posgrado en prácticamente todos los campos del conocimiento humano, la atención médica, la extensión agrícola y la preservación del conocimiento mediante museos y archivos. Reducir las grandes instituciones de investigación del país al alcance y las aspiraciones de campus centrados en la docencia universitaria, como Hillsdale o Williams Colleges, garantizaría su autonomía a un enorme coste social. Para evitarlo, tanto la administración Trump como el mundo académico tienen un gran trabajo por delante.

La administración necesita determinar y articular medidas satisfactorias hacia la reforma. Si solo basta con un motor de innovación y oportunidades, limitado y fragmentado, atado a la ideología de esta administración, entonces no estamos hablando de reforma; estamos hablando de destrucción, y las universidades no tienen nada que negociar.

La academia también debe articular vías para un cambio significativo que preserve las características esenciales de la universidad. Si las únicas opciones aceptables son instituciones financiadas con fondos públicos, exentas de rendición de cuentas al público, o la retirada total de la financiación pública, entonces, insisto, no estamos hablando de reforma; estamos hablando de destrucción, y el gobierno no tiene nada que negociar.

Las grandes instituciones de investigación del país no pueden seguir siendo excelentes si se nacionalizan o privatizan. Para evitar los desvíos que conducen a cualquiera de estos desvíos, debemos construir coaliciones capaces de llegar a acuerdos y reconstruir una universidad de investigación autónoma y responsable, una administradora transparente de los fondos públicos para el bien común.