Faculty-senate leaders at several institutions are calling for the creation of “mutual-defense compacts” to guard against what they describe as “legal, financial, and political incursion” by the Trump administration.
Four senate bodies — at Rutgers University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Indiana University at Bloomington, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — have passed resolutions advocating for such an alliance, and several more will consider doing so in the coming weeks.
The idea, which has circulated widely on Bluesky in recent days, comes amid frustration from some corners of academe that presidents have not done enough to speak out against the Trump administration’s attacks on the sector — and concerns that any one institution singled out for funding freezes may not be equipped to push back.
The two Rutgers professors who wrote the original resolution compare the concept to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose member countries offer one another military and political protection in a collective-defense arrangement. The resolution at Rutgers, which the University Senate passed in late March, proposes that the Big Ten’s member institutions form a similar coalition, pooling money in a shared defense fund. “The preservation of one institution’s integrity is the concern of all, and an infringement against one member university of the Big Ten shall be considered an infringement against all,” reads the Rutgers resolution, which Nebraska’s and Indiana’s senates also adopted.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance is an ideal forum for such a collaboration because of its size and national reach, said one of the authors, Paul Boxer, a professor of psychology at Rutgers’s Newark campus. Of the group’s 18 institutions, all but two are public, and many are flagships, which Boxer said strikes a different tone than if, say, Ivy League institutions were to form a similar compact. “The easy response is, ‘Oh, those elite universities, they’re just protecting their elite status,’ but Big Ten is not that. Big Ten is Penn State and Rutgers and Michigan and Ohio State. These are great schools,” Boxer said, “but it’s a very different vibe.”
The symbolism of an organization like the Big Ten Academic Alliance “really standing up and saying, ‘Absolutely not,’” Boxer said, has resonated with other faculty members. He and his co-author, David Salas-de la Cruz, an associate professor of chemistry on the Camden campus, said they’ve heard from colleagues across the country interested in joining forces. Meanwhile, senate chairs at Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota, and Michigan State University told The Chronicle in emails that the bodies they lead would consider their own resolutions in the coming weeks.
Boxer, Salas-de la Cruz, and other supporters say the value of a mutual-defense compact goes beyond the symbolic by asking institutions to pledge financial support. The resolution lists other forms of help member institutions might offer, including legal representation, amicus briefs and expert testimony, legislative advocacy, and communications efforts. In doing so, the resolution goes further than other recent statements and open letters, including one that’s also circulating among Big Ten members.
That open letter, a “Statement in Support of the Core Mission and Values of Higher Education in the United States of America,” was drafted collaboratively by Big Ten senate leaders and is based on a February resolution passed by the University of Virginia’s Faculty Senate. It too has already been endorsed by faculty-governance bodies at several Big Ten institutions, including Ohio State, Northwestern University, and the University of Iowa. The statement affirms the importance of and support for research funding, international scholars and students, and academic freedom.
Boxer and Salas-de la Cruz are supportive of that statement but weren’t aware of it when they drafted the mutual-defense resolution. “It’s a very different tone,” Boxer said. “It’s a very different target and ultimately, a very different outcome should come of that.”
Strength in Numbers
It’s unclear to what extent the leaders of the institutions share their faculty members’ commitment to the idea of a compact.
The resolution at Rutgers calls on the president, Jonathan Holloway, to “take a leading role in convening a summit of Big Ten academic and legal leadership” to start the compact. Holloway appeared at the beginning of Thursday’s emergency Zoom meeting of the senate before heading, he said, to a second emergency meeting, this one of college leaders. While he supported the “ethos” of the resolution, Holloway did not formally endorse it, noting that he is stepping down at the end of the academic year. “I’m a president walking out the door in two months,” he said in the meeting. “Presidents going out the door have no lobbying power with their peers.”
Some in the meeting were not satisfied with that response. “Referring to himself as a lame duck sends the message of inaction,” Salas-de la Cruz said.
Holloway attended that meeting in part to “express his appreciation” for the resolution, a Rutgers spokesperson, Dory Devlin said in a statement. She added that Holloway encouraged faculty senators to “work with their colleagues in other university senates and shared-governance councils, whether in the Big Ten or beyond, to further test their thinking, understand what may or may not be possible, and identify the local constraints and freedoms that define the actions of peer institutions.”
Representatives for leaders at Indiana and Nebraska did not respond to requests for comment about whether they planned to act on their institutions’ respective resolutions.
The chancellor of UMass-Amherst, Javier Reyes, is supportive of the compact, according to two authors of that institution’s resolution, which was adopted on Thursday; faculty leaders held meetings Friday to discuss implementing it. A UMass-Amherst spokesperson said in an email that the institution was “grateful for the faculty’s engagement on these issues and efforts to preserve the mission of higher education at large,” adding that the campus is working with the UMass system, the state’s governor and attorney general, and legislators. “While much of what is proposed is already underway,” the spokesperson wrote, “we are reviewing the additional requests.”
Jesse H. Rhodes, a professor of political science at Amherst, and Mark C. Pachucki, an associate professor of sociology, said their group was inspired by the Rutgers resolution. The Amherst document contains similar language but uses the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities as an organizing mechanism for a “Public and Land-Grant University Mutual Academic Defense Compact.” On Friday, the group began circulating the Amherst resolution to the nearly 250 institutions in the APLU. (The APLU itself was not involved in writing the resolution, but the association did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Amherst resolution also calls for a second compact, among Massachusetts higher-ed institutions; Rutgers faculty senators said in their meeting that they were considering calling for similar coalitions among New Jersey or Northeast-based institutions.
Pachucki and Rhodes said they see strength in numbers to combat what Rhodes called “inevitable” scrutiny from the federal government. It’s a philosophy that’s already been embraced by higher-education associations that have led the sector’s legal challenges to the Trump administration’s actions.
“We can’t do this on our own,” Pachucki said. “Our institutions are going to be picked off one by one if we go down that route.”
