For nearly 30 minutes, Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, walked a crowd of several hundred university leaders through a dizzying recap of the first few weeks of the second Trump administration. He touched on efforts to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; defund various grants; and abolish the U.S. Department of Education in slide after slide on a huge screen behind the stage of the Eisenhower Theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Then, one last slide popped up.
“Questions?” it said.
The entire crowd laughed nervously, perhaps in an effort not to cry.
The mood at the annual ACE gathering, one of higher education’s most prominent meetings for college leaders, seemed to mirror the Washington, D.C., weather — gloomy and subdued.
The normal rhythms of a national conference went on — hugs and handshakes between former colleagues, stale jokes delivered by speakers as they prepared to present — but the mood was muted as presidents kept one eye on cellphones for news alerts about decisions emanating from the Oval Office a mile and a half to the east.
In hallway conversations and chats over coffee, presidents seemed weary, battered by weeks of uncertainty about what money would continue to flow into their institutions, what programs they could still run, and who could do anything to generate change. The conference began just as a temporary restraining order took effect blocking the implementation of a blanket 15-percent limit on overhead costs for National Institutes of Health research.
There has been confusion and dismay, Ted Mitchell, ACE’s president, said in his opening remarks Wednesday morning, after thanking those presidents who spent Tuesday on Capitol Hill lobbying for their individual campuses and higher education in general. He acknowledged their efforts were met with skepticism by some in Congress, who wanted to hear how colleges were worth the investment.
Mitchell went on to issue a forceful denunciation of President Trump’s moves.
“I want to call the orders what they are, not pussyfoot around — these orders are an assault” on higher education, he said, adding that Trump was trying to impose “simplistic” frameworks onto complex issues. “Make no mistake: The flurry of these threats were designed to cow us into silence. When we face threats, we will not cower.”
America needs higher education to continue to lead research and to teach students, he said, including the “skills to tell truth from bullshit.”
Mitchell’s rhetoric was well received in the auditorium, but the applause was polite, not loud or enthusiastic.
Speaker after speaker acknowledged the difficulties of the last few weeks.
“Tumultuous is a nice way to describe it,” Fansmith said. “We are not used to the wheels of government moving this fast. This is occurring across multiple fronts. It’s easy to understand why people are so confused. There is very much an effort to move fast and break things. This is just the beginning.”
Fansmith’s session occurred while Linda McMahon was heading to Capitol Hill for her Education Secretary confirmation hearings. Her appointment was largely good, Fansmith said. While many other departments in the first Trump administration had morale problems and didn’t function well, the Small Business Administration, which McMahon ran, wasn’t one of those.
“She is a very pragmatic business leader,” Fansmith said. “She is not a firebrand; she is not the person coming in to blow things up. However, she might be directed to blow things up.”
Fansmith also had nice things to say about other appointees to the Education Department, noting they were people who had been around Washington and understood how things were supposed to work, even if ACE didn’t agree with all their positions.
Of course, Trump has made it clear he wants the department eliminated, and employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are already making changes, including moving to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in government research contracts.
“What’s happening at the Department of Education is very concerning,” Fansmith said. “These are not aligned efforts. It’s not always clear where the decision-making authority is coming from.”
