\n<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014Higher education can\u2019t afford to back down and surrender its independence. That\u2019s the message American Council on Education president Ted Mitchell sent at the opening plenary of ACE\u2019s annual meeting Thursday morning, calling on college leaders to resist a \u201cfederal takeover\u201d by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
At last year\u2019s meeting, in the early days of the second Trump administration, Mitchell struck a fighting stance in his remarks, telling attendees, \u201cWe\u2019re under attack.\u201d Now that the extent of that attack has become clear\u2014if not entirely successful\u2014Mitchell argued that colleges must remain true to their mission, even under fire from a federal government willing to target those who don\u2019t fall in line with their political priorities.<\/p>\n
Mitchell offered his thoughts during the first part of a panel titled Truth, Trust, and Leadership: Higher Education\u2019s Inflection Point. That was followed by a conversation between former education secretary Arne Duncan and David Pressman, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary from 2022 to early 2025, when Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n was further consolidating his power\u2014including by targeting higher education.<\/p>\n
Mitchell opened with the obvious: \u201cIt\u2019s been a hard year for higher education,\u201d he said. He argued that the sector has been insulted, demeaned and assaulted, which has \u201cdisrupted our work\u201d and \u201cthreatened our ability to do what we do for students, for communities and for America.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he also pointed to bright spots, including advancements on Pell Grants for short-term programs, enhanced conversations around accountability and Congress\u2019s role in protecting federal research funding from the Trump administration\u2019s attacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve defended our institutions\u2019 rights, We\u2019ve defended our faculty\u2019s rights, we\u2019ve defended our students\u2019 rights,\u201d Mitchell said. \u201cWe have opposed measures that would cripple our research enterprise, and we have defended the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n
But higher education\u2019s critics have made some fair points, Mitchell conceded, arguing that the sector must improve, innovate and increase connections with the public amid growing skepticism. Mitchell particularly noted concerns about student success and the need to improve graduation rates, \u201cthe scourge of antisemitism\u201d on college campuses and worries about free expression.<\/p>\n
\u201cFree speech is under threat,\u201d Mitchell argued. \u201cIt\u2019s under threat from the right, and it\u2019s under threat from the left. We need to improve tolerance and viewpoint diversity on our campuses. Let me just say\u2014cancel culture is wrong, whether it comes from the left or the right.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also credited institutions that rejected the Trump administration\u2019s proposed \u201cCompact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,\u201d which promised signatories preferential treatment from the federal government in exchange for far-reaching institutional changes. While he argued the sector could \u201cimprove in some of the areas noted by the compact,\u201d rejecting it was the right move because it represented \u201ca step toward the federal takeover of higher education.\u201d<\/p>\n
Duncan and Pressman took the stage after Mitchell, discussing the parallels between Orb\u00e1n\u2019s rule in Hungary and the way Trump has wielded power in his second term.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not saying the United States of America is Hungary, but what I think Hungary offers at this moment is a case study in what institutional and state capture looks like,\u201d Pressman said.<\/p>\n
He painted a picture of Hungary as a nation captured by an authoritarian promising to protect it from \u201cmarauding outside forces,\u201d only to impose his ideological agenda on universities and rule through a system of severe punishments and lavish rewards. <\/p>\n
Orb\u00e1n launched his attacks on higher education by demonizing university leaders. He then used funding to punish or reward universities, doxed and harassed faculty members, and finally forced structural change, including by transferring assets of public universities to foundations controlled by loyalists. Pressman described similarities between his conversations with Hungarian university personnel about why they conformed and last year\u2019s settlement between Columbia University and the Trump administration, which he saw as an example of capitulation.<\/p>\n
(That agreement restored frozen federal research funding and ended investigations into campus antisemitism in exchange for multiple changes at Columbia, including an overhaul of disciplinary processes and a review of academic programs.)<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I hear the president of Columbia University describe the rationale with respect to why Columbia took the decision it took, for instance\u00a0\u2026 I can hear the rector of [Hungary\u2019s] University of Szeged describing to me exactly why they made the decision that they did,\u201d Pressman said.<\/p>\n
He argued that while Szeged\u2019s leaders believed \u201cthey needed to save what they could\u201d and assumed \u201cthis was a passing blip,\u201d the move amounted to a fundamental surrender of their independence. Like Hungarian universities, U.S. institutions have demonstrated \u201ca lack of imagination about what is happening,\u201d Pressman argued. Alarmingly, they also show a \u201clack of imagination about where it can lead,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
But he noted a distinct difference between the two situations: speed. While it took Orb\u00e1n nearly a decade to remake Hungary\u2019s universities, it took mere months \u201cfor some of the most powerful, elite institutions to cave to the Trump administration\u2019s effort to undermine\u201d the sector, Pressman said.<\/p>\n
While he praised university leaders for rejecting Trump\u2019s compact, he argued there is more work to do. He also urged institutions to be careful not to confuse demands that weaken their independence with a meaningful dialogue.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know that there\u2019s some of you who believe that you\u2019re in a dialogue with the federal government about the future of education. I think when you start from that premise you have already lost,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause the reality is, it\u2019s not a dialogue that\u2019s focused on solving the problems that are identified; it\u2019s an action focused on trying to undermine your independence.\u201d<\/p>\n
As speakers advocated for the sector to push back on government overreach, college presidents and others questioned how they could do so, particularly at red-state institutions constrained by conservative boards and prevailing political realities.<\/p>\n
Hofstra University president Susan Poser said during the question-and-answer portion of the session that while private boards may support pushing back on the Trump administration, presidents at public universities face possible termination for speaking up.<\/p>\n
\u201cPublic boards are highly political, and so there are states now where the president can\u2019t possibly do any activism or they will simply lose their job, and they\u2019ll put somebody in who will then, you know, go with the political views of their board. And so this isn\u2019t a question about lack of imagination, in my view. It\u2019s a question of constraints, and they\u2019re different in every university,\u201d Poser said.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, she wanted to know how ACE can help organize the sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout putting too fine a point on it, that\u2019s one of our hopes today and going forward\u2014that we can stand together, that we understand that people are constrained by different environments, but that we have a set of values that we can speak to,\u201d Mitchell responded. He added that he sees ACE\u2019s role as being able \u201cto say things that presidents can\u2019t, or system heads can\u2019t\u201d and that by bringing people together, he hopes to create an opportunity for further engagement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014Higher education can\u2019t afford to back down and surrender its independence. That\u2019s the message American Council on Education president Ted Mitchell sent at the opening plenary of ACE\u2019s annual meeting Thursday morning, calling on college leaders to resist a \u201cfederal takeover\u201d by the Trump administration. At last year\u2019s meeting, in the early days of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[2372,3191,582,1511,637],"class_list":{"0":"post-45531","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-ace","9":"tag-annual","10":"tag-meeting","11":"tag-view","12":"tag-years"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}