The Campus With a Front-Row Seat to Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed

One Monday evening this month, around five George Washington University police officers stood outside the university’s international-affairs school, while two sat inside, making sure nobody entered without scanning their student IDs. Inside, a lecture hall was filled with dozens of students and a few faculty members, attending a town hall put together by the Socialist Action Initiative, a campus organization. When the leaders of the meeting, three students wearing keffiyehs, asked attendees to volunteer their concerns with the university, the first five students all said some version of the same thing: GW has a problem with policing.

The officers screening the event’s attendees is just one category of law enforcement often seen on the Washington, D.C., campus. There’s the city’s Metropolitan Police Department. And, since last month, there are members of the U.S. National Guard, who wear camo fatigues and carry guns.

The influx of officers and troops can leave the impression of a campus under siege, an impression also reinforced by less visible interactions. The day after President Trump announced the deployment of the National Guard in Washington, GW received a letter from the Justice Department announcing it had found the campus administration responsible for “deliberate indifference” to the “hostile environment” for Jewish, American-Israeli, and Israeli students and faculty.

As it has at other campuses, the finding seemed to presage private negotiations between the institution’s leaders and the government. The letter invited the university to enter into a “dialogue” to settle the matter.

In a statement to The Chronicle, the university confirmed that it told the government it was willing to talk. “We have responded to the Department of Justice that we are willing to meet with them to discuss their conclusions and share the many measures we have put in place to combat antisemitism and foster an environment that is respectful, accountable, and safe for all,” the university said. “We await the opportunity for that discussion.”

On campus, a lack of explicit information about the university’s standing with the government has contributed to a sense of frustration among students and some faculty members.

It “leaves us in a position of uncertainty only in relation to how they’ll respond — there is no uncertainty in relation to what needs to be done,” said Taytum Wymer, a senior and student organizer. Wymer is part of a student group advocating for GW to become a sanctuary campus, asking the administration to ban external law enforcement, including immigration authorities, from campus, and refuse to capitulate to the Trump administration’s political pressure.

“What will be of question is how GW decides to respond to a moment where they could become a forward institution in the fight against these attacks, or they could be another list of the names of universities that have been kind of turned into, kind of shells of their former selves,” Wymer said.

A ‘Political Football’

Following the examples of students at campuses nationwide, protesters opposing the war in Gaza formed an encampment on the Foggy Bottom campus in the spring of 2024. But GW’s location brought outsized attention. Republican lawmakers from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability visited the site and called publicly on the city’s mayor to clear “the radical, antisemitic, and unlawful encampment.” When campus and city police cleared activists from the lawn 14 days into the protest, 33 people were arrested. Some demonstrators vomited from the use of pepper spray, the campus newspaper reported. Only six of the arrested demonstrators were GW students.

In the following year, university leaders spoke of a commitment to protect students from antisemitism and foster an environment for respectful discourse and dialogue. (In its statement, the university said it has “introduced new and strengthened existing measures to foster understanding and respect for the Jewish community, its traditions and the historic challenges of antisemitism,” among other things.)

Alongside statements, community members say the university doubled down on its security, closing buildings earlier and pushing forward an already controversial initiative to arm about 20 officers, despite community pushback. (The police chief and captain of operations for the university’s police force both resigned last fall amid reports they had both carried unregistered firearms.)

GW first publicly landed on the Trump administration’s radar in February, when the government named the campus as one of 10 that would be visited by the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Since early March, the university has released weekly “Federal Updates,” which pledged to give information about “key policy changes and their implications for GW.” The majority of the updates do not have information specific to the university, instead summarizing executive actions concerning higher education.

In a message publicizing the weekly updates, among other things, President Ellen M. Granberg wrote they were meant “to keep our community informed of the latest developments.” But some students and faculty say they’re in the dark about how the university is maneuvering under the White House’s watchful eye. Neha Darsi, a student organizer and senior at GW, said she suspects the university has been trying to quietly capitulate to the Trump administration’s demands and avoid further scrutiny.

Darsi cited the fact that Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice for Palestine, two student groups, were both suspended this year. (The student newspaper reported that the university said the former group had contributed to a hostile environment for Jewish students, while the latter had been found to have committed “disorderly conduct,” among other things. The university said in its statement to The Chronicle that it had held “individuals and organizations accountable” under university policy to fight antisemitism.)

Darsi also pointed out that the university has halted the registration of all new student organizations for the entire academic year, with officials saying they did so to “improve the support structures” for existing groups. “There are these overt mechanisms and more subtle mechanisms,” Darsi said. “Not only are we banning your org, but no new orgs can also be formed. It’s this abundance of red tape and I also think it’s an attempt to isolate students.”

The biggest sign of trouble for the university came with the Department of Justice’s “deliberate indifference” letter in August, which gave the university until the 22nd to indicate whether it was open to negotiations. The university announced that it was “reviewing its content to respond in a timely manner” on the same day. Two days later, in the weekly federal update, it announced that it was not asked to participate in any investigations or specific actions but was still considering the letter.

As the August 22 deadline passed and the fall semester started, most students and faculty say they still felt in the dark. To Darsi, the continued scrutiny despite the changes GW has already made “is a reflection of the fact that no amount of capitulation, no amount of repression, is ever going to be adequate to the state.”

Dara Orenstein, an associate professor of American studies and president of the university’s chapter of the American Associaton of University Professors, described the lack of specificity as confusing and troubling. She said she has heard two main concerns from her AAUP chapter when discussing the silence.

“One, we wonder, then, what kinds of discussions are happening privately between our administration and the DOJ, not on paper or off the record. Two, even if no talks are underway, we worry what the vagueness invites. GW might offer up far more than the Trump administration expects or imagines.”

Orenstein said the timing of the letter, and the federal takeover, combined with the location of GW’s campus in the capital makes the university especially vulnerable to becoming a “political football.”

“We’re mere blocks away,” she said. “University Yard, where the encampment took place, is a 10-minute walk to the White House. And why would President Trump and his lackeys not delight in an opportunity to stage the theatrics of a kind of inquisition on our campus — to bring to heel all of D.C., from the city council to the neighboring R1 research university? That’s the problem with any kind of settlement, the message it sends to the federal government and to all of us as to who’s calling the shots and what voice we might expect to have.”

What Orenstein, Wymer, Darsi and the students at the town hall said they’ve seen clearly has been more police presence. “It feels like a continuation of our university’s response to the encampment,” Orenstein said. “I’m walking around the campus now full of fences and gates and locked doors and various uniformed people with guns and tasers and other tools of violence.”

This has left Orenstein with the impression that “the administration is focused on security as its answer to the crisis, but it’s not clear you know who these fences are for, and to keep in or to keep out,” said Orenstein. “I appreciate that doors are locked to prevent ICE from entering without invitation. And I understand that open communication about these policies is tricky for the administration. Necessarily the situation poses real challenges around communication and coordination, especially on such a large campus.”

The university did not directly answer questions about increased security on campus in the past year but said that “maintaining a safe and secure environment for our community remains our top priority.”

‘It’s Eerie’

A week after the DOJ letter was published, the GW student socialist organization released its own demands, co-signed by 45 student organizations, and posted an open letter about them.

The six demands include banning all external law enforcement from campus, refusing compliance and capitulation with the Trump administration, and calling for the university to publicly declare its support for free speech. The demands also call for more communication and guidelines from the university regarding interacting with ICE and immigration authorities.

“GW has a responsibility to make sure that Metro Police don’t respond to a smoke alarm in a dorm or a noise complaint, and are then able to issue a citation that would then get directed to ICE and bring federal presence onto campus,” said Wymer. “It also has a responsibility to set up clear guidelines and responsibilities of members of administration, staff, faculty, and officers and security on how to respond if and when ICE or federal agents are on campus.”

In each edition of its weekly federal updates, the university links to guidance for employees if they encounter immigration-enforcement agents on campus, which advises them to connect agents to campus police and states that GW officers will not participate in joint operations based on immigration status alone. The university said in its statement that it provides “guidance and support through a variety of mechanisms to members of our immigrant and international communities.”

GW would defend free speech, both Wymer and Orenstein said, by refusing to meet demands by the Trump administration, even though it is currently unclear what exactly the administration is demanding of the university, if anything.

“If GW chooses to fight back against the federal government, it can win,” said Wymer. “It obviously is not a good position to be in, and it is an imminent danger to our university, but our university has a responsibility to turn the tide nationally against these attacks and to join other universities who have fought and make fighting a viable action for universities to follow. And to unite with other universities in responding to these attacks, not with compliance, but with resistance.”

Resistance could come with a heavy price. Last week, the Trump administration turned up the heat on Harvard University, which has taken it to court, by making it more difficult to preserve access to federal financial aid. But a resolution with the government, and a potential multimillion-dollar fine, could take a toll as well. The GW students at the town hall said they were worried about specific departments being cut or defunded, or certain student resources shrinking if the university chose to work with the Trump administration. (The university has already implemented a hiring freeze, among other steps.)

Orenstein said the worst part of waiting was simply not knowing what was going to be cut, if anything, or what the outcome of the conflict might be.

“It’s eerie. This sort of absent presence of the federal government a few blocks away and is looming over us. I have little idea how each person I pass on campus is experiencing or perceiving what’s happening. It feels very atomized. It feels as if people are whispering to each other or conferring circumspectly. The vibe is one of caution, or overall, maybe of a sort of waiting, a kind of suspended animation. Life goes on, but it feels quite ominous.”