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Many American universities,\u00a0widely seen globally as beacons of academic integrity<\/a>\u00a0and free speech,\u00a0are giving in to demands<\/a>\u00a0from the Trump administration, which\u00a0has been targeting<\/a>\u00a0academia since it took office.<\/p>\n In one of his first acts, President Donald Trump\u00a0branded diversity, equity and inclusion programs as discriminatory<\/a>. His administration also launched\u00a0federal investigations<\/a>\u00a0into\u00a0more than 50 universities<\/a>, from smaller regional schools such as Grand Valley State University in Michigan and the New England College of Optometry in Massachusetts to elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale.<\/p>\n Trump ramped up the pressure by\u00a0threatening university research funding<\/a>\u00a0and targeting specific schools. In one example, the Trump administration revoked US$400 million in grants to Columbia University over its alleged failures to curb antisemitic harassment on campus. The\u00a0school later agreed to most of Trump\u2019s demands<\/a>, from tightening student protest policies to placing an entire academic department under administrative oversight \u2013 though the funding remains frozen.<\/p>\n Cornell, Northwestern<\/a>,\u00a0Princeton<\/a>,\u00a0Brown<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0University of Pennsylvania<\/a>\u00a0have also recently had grants frozen.\u00a0Harvard was sent a list of demands<\/a>\u00a0in order to keep $9 billion in federal funding.<\/p>\n Now, across the United States, many universities are trying to\u00a0avoid being Trump\u2019s next target<\/a>. Administrators are\u00a0dismantling DEI initiatives<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 closing and rebranding offices, eliminating positions, revising training programs and sanitizing diversity statements \u2013 while professors are preemptively\u00a0self-censoring<\/a>.<\/p>\n Not all institutions are complying. Some schools, such as\u00a0Wesleyan<\/a>,\u00a0have refused to abandon<\/a>\u00a0their diversity principles. And organizations including the\u00a0American Association of University Professors<\/a>\u00a0have filed lawsuits<\/a>\u00a0challenging Trump\u2019s executive orders, arguing they violate academic freedom and the First Amendment.<\/p>\n But these remain exceptions, as the\u00a0broader trend leans<\/a>\u00a0toward institutional caution and retreat.<\/p>\n As a scholar of comparative and international education, I\u00a0study how academic institutions respond<\/a>\u00a0to authoritarian pressure \u2013 across political systems, cultural contexts and historical moments. While some universities may believe that\u00a0compliance with the administration<\/a>\u00a0will protect their funding and independence, a\u00a0few historical parallels suggest otherwise<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the 1975 book \u201cThe Abuse of Learning: The Failure of German Universities<\/a>,\u201d historian Frederic Lilge chronicles how German universities, which entered the 20th century in a\u00a0golden age<\/a>\u00a0of global intellectual influence, did not resist the Nazi regime but instead adapted to it.<\/p>\n Even before seizing national power in 1933, the Nazi Party was closely monitoring German universities through\u00a0nationalist student groups<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0sympathetic faculty<\/a>, flagging professors deemed politically unreliable \u2013 particularly Jews, Marxists, liberals and pacifists.<\/p>\n After Hitler took office in 1933, his regime moved\u00a0swiftly to purge<\/a>\u00a0academic institutions of Jews and political opponents. The 1933\u00a0Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service<\/a>\u00a0mandated the firing of Jewish and other \u201cnon-Aryan\u201d professors and members of the faculty deemed politically suspect.<\/p>\n Soon after, professors were required to swear loyalty to Hitler, curricula were overhauled to emphasize \u201cnational defense\u201d and \u201cracial science<\/a>\u201d \u2013 a pseudoscientific framework used to justify antisemitism and Aryan supremacy \u2013 and entire departments were restructured to serve Nazi ideology.<\/p>\n Some institutions, such as the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart,\u00a0even rushed to honor Hitler<\/a>\u00a0with an honorary doctorate within weeks of his rise to power. He declined the offer, though the gesture signaled the university\u2019s eagerness to align with the regime. Professional associations, such as the Association of German Universities, stayed silent, ignoring key opportunities to resist before universities lost their autonomy and became subservient to the Nazi state.<\/p>\n As linguist Max Weinreich wrote in his 1999 book \u201cHitler\u2019s Professors<\/a>,\u201d many academics didn\u2019t just comply, they enabled the regime by reshaping their research. This legitimized state doctrine, helping build the intellectual framework of the regime.<\/p>\n A\u00a0few academics resisted and were dismissed<\/a>, exiled or executed. Most did not.<\/p>\n The transformation of German academia<\/a>\u00a0was not a slow drift but a swift and systemic overhaul. But what made Hitler\u2019s orders stick was the eagerness of many academic leaders to comply, justify and normalize the new order. Each decision \u2013 each erased name, each revised syllabus, each closed program and department \u2013 was framed as necessary, even patriotic. Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge \u2013 they served power.<\/p>\n It would take more than a decade after the war, through\u00a0denazification, reinvestment and international reintegration<\/a>, for West German universities to begin regaining their intellectual standing and academic credibility.<\/p>\n Other countries that have fallen under authoritarian regimes followed similar trajectories.<\/p>\n In fascist Italy, the shift began not with violence but with a signature. In 1931, the Mussolini regime required all university professors to swear\u00a0an oath of loyalty to the state<\/a>. Out of more than 1,200, only 12 refused.<\/p>\n Many justified their compliance by insisting the oath had no bearing on their teaching or research. But by publicly affirming loyalty and offering no organized resistance, the academic community signaled its willingness to accommodate the regime. This lack of opposition allowed the fascist government to tighten control over universities and use them to advance its ideological agenda.<\/p>\n In the Soviet Union, this control was not limited to symbolic gestures \u2013 it reshaped the entire academic system.<\/p>\n After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks oscillated between wanting to abolish universities as \u201cfeudal relics\u201d and repurposing them to serve a socialist state, as historians\u00a0John Connelly<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Michael Gr\u00fcttner<\/a>\u00a0explain in their book \u201cUniversities Under Dictatorship<\/a>.\u201d Ultimately, they chose the latter, remaking universities as instruments of ideological education and technical training, tightly aligned with Marxist-Leninist goals.<\/p>\n Under Josef Stalin,\u00a0academic survival depended less<\/a>\u00a0on scholarly merit than on conformity to official doctrine. Dissenting scholars were purged or exiled, history was rewritten to glorify the Communist Party, and entire disciplines such as genetics\u00a0were reshaped<\/a>\u00a0to fit political orthodoxy.<\/p>\n This model was exported<\/a>\u00a0across Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, ministries dictated curricula, Marxism-Leninism became mandatory across disciplines, and admissions were reengineered to favor students from loyalist backgrounds. In some contexts, adherents to older intellectual traditions pushed back, especially in Poland, where resistance slowed though could not prevent the imposition of ideological control.<\/p>\n By the early 1950s, universities across the region had become what Connelly calls \u201ccaptive institutions<\/a>,\u201d stripped of independence and recast to serve the state.<\/p>\n A more recent example is Turkey, where, following the\u00a0failed 2016 coup<\/a>, more than\u00a06,000 academics were dismissed<\/a>,\u00a0universities were shuttered<\/a>\u00a0and research deemed \u201csubversive\u201d was banned.<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s early and direct intervention into higher education governance echoes historical attempts to bring universities under state influence or control.<\/p>\n The administration says it is doing so\u00a0to eradicate \u201cdiscriminatory\u201d DEI policies<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0fight what it sees as antisemitism on college campuses<\/a>. But by\u00a0withholding federal funding<\/a>, the administration is also trying to force universities into ideological conformity \u2013 by dictating whose knowledge counts but also whose presence and perspectives are permissible on campus.<\/p>\n Columbia\u2019s reaction to Trump\u2019s demands<\/a>\u00a0sent a clear message: Resistance is risky, but compliance may be rewarded \u2013 though the\u00a0$400 million has yet to be restored<\/a>. The speed and scope of its concessions set a precedent, signaling to other universities that avoiding political fallout now may mean rewriting policies, reshaping departments and retreating from controversy, perhaps before anyone even asks.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has already moved on to other universities, including the\u00a0University of Pennsylvania<\/a>\u00a0over its transgender policies,\u00a0Princeton for its climate programs<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Harvard over alleged antisemitism<\/a>. The question is which school is next.<\/p>\n The Department of Education has\u00a0launched investigations into over 50 institutions<\/a>, accusing them of using \u201cracial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.\u201d How these institutions choose to respond may determine whether higher education remains a space for open inquiry.<\/p>\n The pressure to conform is not just financial \u2013 it is also cultural. Faculty at some institutions\u00a0are being advised<\/a>\u00a0not to use \u201cDEI\u201d in emails and public communication, with warnings to not be a target. Academics\u00a0are removing pronouns<\/a>\u00a0from their email signatures and asking their students to comply, too. I\u2019ve been on the receiving end of those warnings, and so have my counterparts at other institutions. And students on visas are\u00a0being warned<\/a>\u00a0not to travel outside the U.S.<\/a>\u00a0after several\u00a0were deported<\/a>\u00a0or denied reentry due to alleged involvement in protests.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, people inside and outside academia\u00a0are combing websites, syllabi<\/a>,\u00a0presentations<\/a>\u00a0and public writing in search of what they consider ideological infractions. This type of\u00a0peer surveillance<\/a>\u00a0can reward silence, incentivize erasure and turn institutions against their own.<\/p>\n When universities start regulating not just what they say but what they teach, support and stand for \u2013 driven by fear rather than principle \u2013 they are no longer just reacting to political threats, they are internalizing them. And as history has shown, that may mark the beginning of the end of their academic independence.<\/p>\nGerman universities: A lesson<\/strong><\/h4>\n
USSR and fascist Italy suffer similar fate<\/strong><\/h4>\n
History\u2019s warning<\/strong><\/h4>\n