Higher Ed Experts Want to Create “NATO for Universities”

Washington, D.C.—While the Trump administration certainly hasn’t stopped its war on higher ed, the attacks have lost a little of the intensity that marked the president’s first nine months in office. “It just doesn’t quite seem to have the same focus in terms of making … life miserable as it did in July of 2025,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work programs at New America, speaking on a panel the think tank hosted Tuesday titled “The Fifth Pillar: Where Higher Ed Goes From Here.”

“The compact that was being put forward … it kind of came and went.”

The relative reprieve makes this the perfect moment for institutions to regroup and forge a united front against the onslaught. “We need a NATO for universities,” said Lee Bollinger, president emeritus of Columbia University and former president of the University of Michigan. “When one university is attacked, everyone commits to coming to their defense. We need less capacity of individual institutions to make decisions about where we should go in defending universities and more power in a system.”

Bollinger’s recent book, University: A Reckoning, argues that if the press is the unofficial fourth branch of the American democratic system, universities should be the fifth. His framing inspired the title and focus of Tuesday’s panel, which also featured Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware (and an Inside Higher Ed columnist). Mike Gavin, president and CEO of the Alliance for Higher Education and former president of Delta College, served as moderator.

The challenge of creating a “higher ed NATO,” Baker said, is that it needs to represent such a wide range of institutions. “We need to think from a broader perspective than the Columbias and Michigans of the world,” she said. “How do we create a coalition that works for the good of community colleges and … highly resourced research universities?”

Though the discussion was short on concrete answers, it placed the current moment in historical context. Bollinger said universities were caught “flat-footed” by Trump’s relentless assault on higher ed; Baker said she wasn’t surprised, given her prior experience in Texas, where the Legislature sought to control university operations in an all-out effort to win federal research funding. “A lot of the authoritarian policies that we are seeing nationally have actually been tested in states previously,” she said.

Her experience sent her to the library archives to study the Red Scares—in Bolshevik Russia and McCarthy-era America—when societies were paralyzed by fears of communist influence. Bollinger drew comparisons to Hungary and Turkey, which have seen “a very steady erosion of independent universities and an independent press,” saying it really wasn’t clear whether the U.S. would continue to follow the same path.

None of the panelists expressed much enthusiasm for the institutional neutrality policies that have gained popularity among college presidents since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The panelists argued that some events are so dangerous that they require everyone—including college leaders—to speak out. Baker said she often asks herself, “What did institutions do in the 1930s in Germany, and how different is that from what we see at present?”

While she acknowledged there are certain things university presidents shouldn’t weigh in on, she asked, “At what point is every member of our society supposed to say something? Is it the point when U.S. citizens are murdered in the street? Maybe university presidents have a moral responsibility as human beings.”

Carey offered a cautionary lesson about Germany’s universities during the Nazi era. “What happened was they led the world, and then they didn’t. The end,” he said. “And other universities around the world, particularly the ones here in the United States, essentially stepped into the void that was created by this authoritarian regime.”