After the Election, a Chance to Correct Our Course (opinion)

When Texas A&M University’s spring semester began in January, a philosophy professor was told to remove passages from Plato’s Symposium or teach a different course. Professor Leonard Bright’s graduate seminar on ethics in public policy was canceled after its first meeting. The incidents resulted from policies adopted by the Texas A&M System Board of Regents restricting how faculty could teach about race and gender. Roughly 200 arts and sciences courses were affected.

On Election Day, Texas voters ousted Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, electing Gina Hinojosa in the first election of a Democratic governor since 1990. The election will not automatically restore the Plato readings to the syllabus. But it presents an opening for university leaders who have spent years accommodating inappropriate and sometimes unlawful political demands to reclaim the independence they are entrusted to safeguard.

The Democrats’ midterm triumph has transformed the political landscape in Washington and beyond. In Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas, voters replaced Republican governors with Democrats. Democrats also captured both legislative chambers in Wisconsin and flipped the Houses in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, plus the Pennsylvania Senate, among other gains. Twenty-two states now have Democratic trifectas, with Democrats controlling both legislative chambers and the governor’s office. These shifts offer universities new political allies and, in some states, a path toward reversing policies that have curtailed academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

In another sign of changes afoot, Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned her post last week. Dhillon spearheaded investigations of universities over admissions, diversity policies and allegations of antisemitism. Her tactics helped turn the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, historically a bulwark against discrimination, into an instrument of ideological pressure on American higher education.

While higher education was not a leading ballot issue, voters’ repudiation of Trumpian rule should nonetheless prompt a reckoning within university leadership. The political pressures that led some presidents and trustees to make costly concessions and accept intrusive federal oversight are shifting. With the Trump administration’s political leverage diminished, university submission to government coercion must also subside, lest it become an enduring feature of American higher education.

Since Trump’s return to office, universities have faced an extraordinary campaign of federal intimidation. Billions of dollars in research funding were frozen, student visas threatened and civil rights investigations wielded as leverage to compel changes in institutional policies and leadership. Allegations of wrongdoing became grounds for demanding settlements before any adjudication of the underlying claims.

Courts have repeatedly found the administration’s tactics illegal. In September 2025, a federal judge ruled that the termination of more than $2 billion in research grants to Harvard University violated federal law and the university’s First Amendment rights. The judge concluded that antisemitism had served as a pretext for sweeping demands aimed at bringing Harvard into ideological conformity. The administration has appealed. Separate court orders also blocked Trump’s efforts to bar international students from Harvard.

Other institutions chose negotiation over litigation, afraid to take on a vindictive and powerful government. By this fall, at least seven prominent universities had entered into agreements of varying scope with the administration, including Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Northwestern Universities; the Universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia; and, most recently, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Four of these institutions committed a combined $406 million in payments and designated spending, without a court judgment establishing liability. The policy concessions are at least as consequential. Columbia agreed to a comprehensive review of its Middle East–related academic programs, including leadership and curriculum. Brown accepted federal definitions of sex for women’s athletics and specified housing provisions. And just last month, UNC Chapel Hill agreed to federal restrictions on admissions and recruitment partnerships, including prohibitions affecting certain programs designed to help students from underrepresented groups gain access to college.

University leaders have insisted that their settlements preserve academic autonomy and largely reaffirm existing obligations and commitments. Presidents and trustees argue that they protected research programs, employees and students from potentially devastating losses and disruptions.

University leaders faced difficult choices, with the livelihoods of researchers and the future of lifesaving work hanging in the balance. Institutions without Harvard’s financial resources could reasonably fear the consequences of prolonged confrontation.

But the contention that little of substance was conceded does not hold up to scrutiny. If a university has done nothing wrong, paying tens of millions of dollars to end an investigation smacks of extortion. If admissions or curriculum changes were already justified, they should not have happened via talks undertaken under financial duress. Even if understandable, universities’ decisions to submit undermine their role as vital, autonomous institutions of civic life in a democracy.

Changes to university life have spread well beyond the short list of prominent institutions that signed on the dotted lines. Others have changed policies, pared back support for diversity efforts and policed curriculum to avoid attracting negative scrutiny. University leaders need to own up to the fact that such accommodations normalize an approach whereby political officials—both overtly and tacitly—threaten independent institutions into accepting government-defined ideological constraints.

Universities now have an opportunity and an imperative to correct course. Universities contemplating concessions should stiffen their spines and resist the threats and the arm-twisting. Those that have changed policies should distinguish changes reflecting genuine institutional judgments from those made due to coercion. Existing legal commitments must be honored, but apart from those obligations, institutions should resist interpretations that restrict inquiry or campus life. Government has a legitimate role in enforcing civil rights laws. But its authority to investigate discrimination does not confer a license to dictate a university’s intellectual or social life.

The state-level election results create additional possibilities. In Texas, Gov.-elect Hinojosa will have opportunities to reshape university governing boards through appointments. In Ohio, Gov.-elect Amy Acton can challenge the restrictive approach embodied in Senate Bill 1, which imposed sweeping controls over DEI programs and university governance. The new Texas House majority and newly Democratic chambers in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin can scrutinize state policies that have subordinated institutional decision-making to political priorities. Repealing existing laws will require legislative action, but the space for resistance and reconsideration has expanded.

None of this suggests universities should reverse legitimate reforms undertaken during these difficult years. Campus antisemitism demands serious treatment. Admissions practices must comply with applicable judicial rulings, which prohibit race-conscious admissions. Debates over viewpoint diversity, faculty heterogeneity and the right approaches to diversity and inclusion should be shaped by academic expertise, student perspectives and public accountability, not by a sword of political peril dangling over the campus.

Some institutions demonstrated that resistance was possible. Harvard went to court. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped lead the rejection of the administration’s proposed “compact” for higher education in 2025, emboldening other universities to follow suit. But over all, rather than uniting in defense of the principles of free expression and open inquiry for which they stand, universities have run scared and scattered.

The new Congress will not take office until January, and President Trump will retain substantial executive authority. Universities should harbor no illusions that political intimidation has ended. Their independence must rest on convictions and structures sturdy enough to withstand pressure from any political quarter.

The universities that negotiated their way through the last two years may have protected important interests in the short term. They also risked teaching Washington that draconian threats would bring even the country’s most prestigious institutions to heel.

University presidents should use this electoral turning point to convey a different lesson. Their institutions answer to the law and to the public interest, but their academic missions belong to the communities entrusted with fulfilling them. Just as voters have pivoted, so should university leaders abandon their defensive crouch and stand up together in defense of the institutions they lead and the values they represent.