How will Hopkins respond to the Trump administration’s assaults on our country’s laws, Constitution, and universities? So far, our administration has largely avoided the question. The time for silence, however, has run out.
Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has fulfilled one of its campaign promises by coming after America’s most prestigious universities: bullying Columbia University into abject submission, and threatening many others, including Harvard, Princeton and Cornell. Last week, faced with a set of extreme demands, Harvard defied the Trump administration, taking its battle to the courts. The range of responses — from craven capitulation to principled resistance — has now been established.
There’s no doubt that Hopkins is in an exceptionally difficult position. As the top recipient of federal research dollars, we are uniquely vulnerable to the weaponization of government grants and contracts. Little surprise, perhaps, that our leadership has kept quiet. In the interests of avoiding financial calamity, they seem to have reasoned that the prudent path forward is for the University to keep its head low and its mouth shut, and hope the storm blows over.
That strategy has worked to an extent: so far, Hopkins has avoided the Trump administration’s direct crosshairs. On the other hand, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Last month, we made international headlines when Jhpiego — our nonprofit global health affiliate — along with various units in our world-leading School of Public Health and School of Medicine, lost more than $800 million after billionaire Elon Musk fed USAID “into the wood chipper,” as he gleefully put it.
Seeking, presumably, to protect core University interests, Hopkins yielded without a fight. The University filed no lawsuits, sought no judicial injunctions nor challenged flagrant violations of administrative procedure as international health programs were indiscriminately cut — even though a federal judge later ruled that the cuts likely violated the Constitution.
Hopkins’ retreat here seemed odd. In addition to violating the Constitution, the cuts reneged on innumerable contractual agreements. I’m old enough to remember a time, not so long ago, when parties went to court to have their contracts enforced. Indeed, some people might even think that our system of private property depends on that enforcement. Evidently, however, Hopkins lacked the stomach to litigate that issue.
Or maybe we were just picking our battles. In contrast to its quick decision to cut Jhpiego loose — along with the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who relied on it — Hopkins did join a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) challenging the cuts to funding formulas.
Now there’s a threat to the University’s bottom line. Last year, Hopkins received more $850 million from the NIH: a number that doesn’t count funding from the Department of Energy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NASA and untold billions every year from the Defense Department to the University’s Applied Physics Lab. The amounts here are eye-watering — and they put Hopkins in acute jeopardy. Federal funding accounts for 87% of our research spending. Tuition revenues pale alongside such sums. The interest our entire endowment pays out doesn’t come close.
Losing that money would create an immediate crisis — an existential crisis — for the University. Little surprise that Hopkins has kept its head low.
But what is the broader strategy here? How does Hopkins imagine it will navigate this new world, where government funding is weaponized to punish political enemies?
For the moment, we have no clear answers. President Daniels’ last message to the University, sent at the beginning of March, said little.
“We will continue to advocate to our elected representatives,” he wrote laconically, perhaps not yet noticing that our elected representatives in Congress have been completely sidelined by the Trump administration’s executive actions. We’ve heard nothing since.
Here is my guess. No doubt our extensive team of lobbyists immediately fanned out across Capitol Hill, explaining to anyone who would listen why the assault on our universities was a form of national suicide. Meanwhile, well-connected trustees have probably worked the back channels. Perhaps a hedge fund mogul here or a private equity titan there has the ear of one of the president’s advisors. Maybe Hopkins will be spared!
Meanwhile, the University has begun quietly signaling its willingness to play ball. For example, the Office of the Provost announced a new “collaboration” with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute: an effort that looks disturbingly like Columbia University’s coerced commitment to expand “intellectual diversity” by hiring more conservative faculty. Is this initiative an attempt to obey in advance the demands of a belligerent administration in Washington bent on political retribution?
Perhaps such strategic retreats can preserve the University’s core business model. University leadership probably believe that USAID cuts were a shame, but didn’t fundamentally threaten Hopkins’ fiscal stability. In any case, they would largely be borne by poor people in distant countries, while the associated job losses were concentrated among foreign contractors. As for the new affirmative action program for conservative academics: well, what harm can it do?
Facing a crisis of this magnitude, the University had no choice but to attend to its bottom line, keeping losses of federal funds to a sustainable level. Lose a limb but save the patient.
If these speculations do accurately reflect University strategy, there’s an obvious problem — something any of the Hopkins scholars who study authoritarian politics could have told our leadership. This isn’t how fascist politics work. Left unchallenged, authoritarians come for more until the ability to dissent is crushed.
It’s unfortunate that no one has thought to turn to our in-house experts. The knowledge accumulated by our world-class faculty could meaningfully contribute to developing a strategy that would be at once more effective and better reflect the broader Hopkins community.
What, after all, is the endgame of the current approach? Set aside the ethical calculus here, or any notion of what obligations a university might have to a democratic society under severe stress. Even by a purely fiscal reckoning, isn’t it obvious that capitulation is counterproductive?
The Trump administration seeks to rule by political power, not by law. Silence only empowers those who are coming after our universities.
As, indeed, it has.
Two weeks ago, we learned that the Trump administration abruptly cancelled the visas of “approximately a dozen” international students. By last week, the number had risen to thirty-seven, with more undoubtedly to come.
We’ve now arrived at the second stage of the assault on our universities. If the first focused on federal funding, the second focuses on the capricious cancelation of international student visas.
To anyone’s knowledge, no Hopkins student has yet been politically targeted. Indeed, University communications claim that there is “no indication” that our students’ visas have been revoked for exercising their rights to free expression.
I’m not so sanguine. Perhaps that hasn’t happened here, not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. We know that the Trump administration has targeted outspoken activists elsewhere. Is there any doubt that these visa revocations are intended to terrify and intimidate: to prevent international students from engaging in Constitutionally protected speech? Who do we imagine is next, once foreign nationals have been muzzled or deported?
Faced with this new assault, silence is no longer an option. Revocation of student visas raises immediate questions the University has no choice but to answer.
Will we keep international students enrolled when their visas are revoked? Will we allow them to continue their studies and their research remotely? Will we ensure that graduate workers whose fellowships require research or teaching do not lose their student status? Answers to these pressing questions will reveal whether Hopkins chooses to actively collaborate with the Trump administration’s policies.
Further questions present themselves. Will Hopkins provide legal assistance to our students whose visas have been unfairly and illegally revoked? Will Hopkins support a lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking an injunction to block them from revoking student visas without cause, or from arresting, detaining and deporting international students and faculty? Several other Maryland colleges and universities have backed the lawsuit. Will we?
These and other questions cannot be avoided. Silence has gotten us this far, but it can get us no further. To keep our heads down while our most vulnerable students are plucked away by the capricious exercise of political power is to collaborate in their persecution.
University leadership, trustees: I urge you to initiate a broader consultation about University policy. I suspect you will learn that, in times like these, silence amounts to complicity. Johns Hopkins will either side with lawless power, or stand on the side of students — and the law and Constitution.
We wait, all of us, for the next move.
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François Furstenberg is a professor of history.
