The Point: Capitulation or Complicity

4/3/2025

Dear Colleagues,

For this week’s Point we wanted to share excerpts from (and a link to) an essay that former FSU President Steve Striffler just published in Common Dreams—essentially a bracing reminder that our organizing in the current context should not be slowed down by an expectation that university leadership is going to join us in fighting back the current administration’s attacks on higher education and free speech. As Steve rightly points out, the recent shenanigans at Columbia University make clear that we must understand administrative acquiescence not as realpolitik or fearful capitulation, but rather evidence of the shared goals of the corporate class that now runs universities and the Trump administration. While we rightly tout our urban mission at UMB and draw strength from our history of, and commitment to, engaged teaching, scholarship and community service on Columbia Point, it is important that we not confuse that all with what is happening (or not happening) in Quinn or at 1 Beacon Street. The relative silence of top administrators here and around the UMass system as our most vulnerable students are put in the sites of a hostile government in DC is an important reminder that the real we of UMass Boston is constituted by students, faculty, and staff.

From the article:

The question we should be asking ourselves—especially those of us who live in academia and should know better—is why would we expect universities, or more accurately the administrators who run them, to protect free speech, academic freedom, and dissent at all, especially during moments of crisis when doing so entails taking real risks?

Columbia’s leaders accepted Trump’s demands not so much because they were forced to (capitulate), or because they saw fighting as either futile or potentially disastrous, but because they welcomed the opportunity and political cover that Trump’s order provided—to get rid of “unruly” students, increase the university’s capacity to limit protest and discipline students, staff, and faculty, and (bonus!) gain control over a department that by its very subject matter might prove troublesome.

To be sure, we should not downplay the distinction between Trump’s authoritarianism, which tends to see those on college campuses as dangerous radicals who need to be removed, from the liberal “course correction” that pushes reforms to “take politics out” of higher education. And yet, as soon as one starts to accept Trump’s fascist tactics for getting there, which increasingly embraces a grab-them-off-the-streets approach reminiscent of Central America paramilitaries in the 1980s, the distinction probably feels a bit like splitting hairs to those on the wrong end of it. Complicity, not capitulation.

Put another way, to suggest that there is no reason to expect university administrators to be natural defenders of free speech and political dissent, and that history tells us that many of them will in fact be complicit with Trump’s brand of fascism, is not to say that we should not try to hold them accountable or that the fight is over and universities have been politically neutered. It is to say that we—“the university”—have to continue the fight that so many of us are already engaged in.