Education
This State University Has a Plan to Take on Trump
The conversation between two Rutgers University professors that lit a fire in U.S. higher education circles lasted only about 10 minutes.
The professors — one teaches chemistry in Camden, N.J., the other psychology in Newark — said they were frustrated by the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to research funding and its efforts to dictate policy on some campuses.
They were also troubled by the lack of a unified response by university leaders.
“We needed to write something that had some meat,” said David Salas-de la Cruz, who directs the chemistry graduate program at Rutgers University-Camden. He likened the effort to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, a military alliance of 32 countries.
“This is not just about money,” he said. “This is about the essence of education.”
So late last month, Professor Salas-de la Cruz and Paul Boxer, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Newark, drafted a one-page “mutual defense compact.” It was a one-for-all, all-for-one statement of solidarity among schools in the Big Ten athletic and academic conference — 18 large, predominantly public universities that together enroll roughly 600,000 students each year. “An infringement against one member university,” they wrote, “shall be considered an infringement against all.”
Participating schools would be asked to commit to making a “unified and vigorous response” when member universities were “under direct political or legal infringement.” Faculty members might, for example, be asked to provide legal services, strategic communication or expert testimony.
The compact, now approved by faculty at more than a dozen universities, does not come with a commitment by school administrators to provide financial backing for a joint defense fund, and detractors have criticized the initiative as largely toothless.
Still, the Rutgers resolution, and the professors’ effort to galvanize a collective response, reflected a shift in strategy.
“Higher education, as an entity, is definitely worth fighting for,” Professor Boxer said.
“The idea of a country where generative research gets cut down to the point where it’s under the thumb of the federal government,” he added, “is contrary to everything I believe in.”
Throughout March, elite universities had been targeted, one by one, for large funding cuts as the Trump administration opened investigations into diversity policies and whether administrators were doing enough to protect Jewish students from harassment. Federal immigration agents began making a show of moving to deport international students who had spoken out against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Under President Trump, the National Science Foundation has canceled more than 400 awards that commonly fuel university research. And the National Institutes of Health, a major source of biomedical research funding in the United States, terminated roughly 780 grants, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group.
Rutgers itself was among 60 colleges and universities to receive a warning in March that federal officials had begun an inquiry into whether it had violated Jewish students’ civil rights by failing to safeguard them from discrimination.
Schools were struggling to navigate the broadside when Columbia University, in a remarkable concession to Mr. Trump, agreed to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department as it sought to avoid a $400 million federal funding cut.
It was against this backdrop that the faculty senate at Rutgers, New Jersey’s flagship state university, came together to vote on the professors’ hastily drafted resolution.
No member of the Rutgers senate criticized the compact publicly before it was approved on March 28, by a vote of 62 to 17, Professor Boxer said. But in emails, some employees expressed concern that it risked making Rutgers an even bigger target for the Trump administration.
“We had to accept,” Professor Boxer said, “that somebody had to be first.”
Since then, nine additional Big Ten schools, including the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and the University of Washington, have passed resolutions nearly identical to the one Rutgers adopted.
Outside the Big Ten, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the State University of New York, and at least three City University of New York schools — Hunter, Hostos and City College — have also adopted similar statements of solidarity. Faculty senates at several other colleges are expected to vote in the coming weeks.
Some faculty members are skeptical that the resolutions will make much of a difference.
“At most universities, faculty senates have very little power, if any,” said Keith Riles, a physics professor who was one of 214 employees at the University of Michigan who voted against that school’s compact. “I do not expect these motions to have much effect on what administrations choose to do.”
And, he said, he does not believe that President Trump’s critique of higher education is completely misguided. Professor Riles said he had long opposed university hiring policies that were based on diversity, equity and inclusion goals, which he believes are illegal and discriminate against white and Asian men.
“Choose your battles and your allies wisely,” he urged colleagues before Michigan’s faculty vote began on April 17, according to a written summary of his comments. “It is not a very sound strategy to die on a D.E.I. hill in a legal, mutual suicide pact.”
About 2,760 of his colleagues disagreed, and the resolution passed with 93 percent support.
Rutgers’s president, Jonathan Holloway, has said that while he supports the “ethos” of the initiative, he could not provide additional support because he was stepping down at the end of the academic year, according to the Rutgers student news outlet.
In a statement this week, a university spokeswoman reiterated Dr. Holloway’s “appreciation for the resolution” and said Rutgers would continue to support efforts to “reverse federal actions that are detrimental to our mission.”
Even without overt buy-in from administrators, supporters said the clear goals first laid out by the Rutgers faculty had already been instrumental in helping to shift the tone of the national debate.
Last week, Harvard University sued the Trump administration over billions of dollars in proposed cuts rather than accede to the president’s demands. And after months of silence, more than 500 university administrators have now signed a statement opposing “government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
John Verzani, chairman of CUNY’s faculty senate, credited Rutgers with having an “enormous” role in the evolving narrative.
“It definitely set off a rush within faculty senates to create this sort of alliance,” Professor Verzani said.
Todd Wolfson, a journalism professor, leads Rutgers’s faculty union. He is also president of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization.
He said he considered the effort to protect academic freedom and the independence of research institutions an existential battle.
“As goes higher ed,” Professor Wolfson said, “so goes the U.S.”
Michael Yarbrough, who contributes to a website called We Are Higher Ed, which has been tracking university responses to the Trump administration, noted that officials from community colleges, large research universities and Ivy League schools are now sharing information in a 60-person group chat.
Professor Yarbrough, who teaches about law and society at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, likened the value of the group chat, and the networks now forming among faculty members at far-flung schools with mutual defense compacts in place, to a sociology theory known as the “strength of weak ties.”
“It’s understandable that some people may be fearful,” Professor Yarbrough said. “But what we’ve done is to focus on something that’s within our control: to ally with each other.”
The 2025-26 academic year is coming to a close, and we have a post describing 10 ways to reflect on these last months and learn from them. But the 10 ways aren’t just for students — we also hope teachers can benefit from them. In fact, we would be delighted if teachers and students did some of the exercises together and told us what happened!
We invite you to post a comment reflecting on any aspect of this school year that you would like to make public, and we have provided some questions below to get you started.
We hope, too, that you will not only post your own reflections but also comment on the thoughts of others. As always, our staff will moderate comments, and we can’t wait to learn from you.
Students and teachers, read our related list of reflection ideas from which the questions below are drawn and then answer any of them that resonate with you. Please identify yourself as a teacher or a student when you post.
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What do you want to remember about this school year? Why?
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What are you especially grateful for this year? To whom would you most like to write a letter of gratitude if you could?
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What surprised you?
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What successes are you most proud of?
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What challenged you? What helped you face or overcome those challenges?
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What did you learn that most matters to you, whether in or out of school?
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What new skills, however small, did you acquire?
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How have you grown — as a student, a friend, a community or family member or a person?
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How could you build on that growth next year?
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What would you like more of in your life? What would you like less of? Why?
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What music would be on the playlist of your 2024-25 school year? Why?
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What books did you read this year that you would recommend to others? Why?
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About what, if anything, did you change your mind? How did that happen?
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If you were to collect and graph some data about your life this school year, what would you choose to graph, and what do you think it might show? What could you learn from it?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.
French: Can I stop you right there?
Gorsuch: No, let me finish three. Let me finish three. We can talk about two. Two is very important. But so’s three. He said: You write 10 times better than I do. And Jefferson said, oh, all right, I’ll do it. All right, now you can tap in.
French: OK. Well, was that humility or strategy or a combination to say that Jefferson writes?
Gorsuch: Well, I think No. 1 is humility, for sure, and probably true. No. 2 was strategic, for sure, right? I mean, you had had the Boston Tea Party, and all the goings-on in Lexington and Concord. What is it to a Virginian, right? You’ve got to drag everybody along, and you have to remember — everybody thinks we live in divided times, fine, we can talk about that, but back then, only about 40 percent of the colonists were backing the Patriot cause, even in June and July of 1776. Another percent were devoted Loyalists. And then the balance of the country was somewhere in between. Sound familiar? Yeah.
French: Yeah, absolutely. So, Virginia nationalizes this, in other words. It takes it away from being a Massachusetts rebellion, those ornery Puritans, and it turns into an American Revolution.
Now, the other thing that struck me is that Jefferson kind of squirrels away and does the writing on his own. And so, these really seminal words, this American mission statement, we’re “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” This really does seem to be Jefferson’s heart expressed on paper, not writing by committee.
Gorsuch: Well, there’s some of that too, right? This is later on, and he called the “mutilations” what people did to it, all right? You know, we think of the Declaration as this wonderful — “mutilations.” Anyway, but yes, he locked himself in rooms he had rented from a bricklayer on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and he did it in two weeks, and he said he didn’t consult any book or pamphlet. He tried merely to come up with an expression of the American mind. And I don’t think he was thinking about just his mind. I think he was thinking about how people were thinking at the time. And in that, he came up with three, I think, perfect ideas: that we’re all created equal, every one of us, and that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not privileges from government, and that we have a right to rule ourselves.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll find out how a cutting of a tree that Anne Frank saw while in hiding during World War II ended up on a college campus on Staten Island. We’ll also get details on former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was hospitalized with pneumonia in Florida.
From the window in her family’s hiding place in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Anne Frank could see a chestnut tree in a courtyard garden nearby. One day, she wrote in her diary that raindrops shone on the branches, “appearing like silver.” On another day, she noted that the tree was “thickly covered with leaves and much more beautiful than last year.”
In 2011, the tree — by then diseased and rotting — was knocked down in a storm. But cuttings have given rise to saplings. One has just been planted at Wagner College on Staten Island.
The view could not be more different. Lori Weintrob, a professor at Wagner, called the college’s 105-acre campus “an idyllic space up on a hill” with a view of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. She said the idea of a bridge was appropriate for the Wagner College Holocaust Center, of which she is the founding director. The center, she said, works to build bridges between the campus and the community and encourages dialogue among Jews, Muslims, Christians and Hindus.
“Staten Island, like New York City, is a melting pot,” Weintrob said, “so this is a great place to create these relationships, to inspire students by showing how you can connect people of different faiths.”
But the campus is also a place to teach Anne’s story — and the story of the people in her life who were “upstanders,” as Weintrob called those who did the right thing under extreme pressure.
Weintrob said the tree “symbolized the freedom she was longing for and that, if she hadn’t been deported to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, that she might have been able to attain.” And she mentioned Miep Gies, the secretary who helped Anne while she was in hiding — and preserved her diary.
“Sometimes Anne Frank’s story is interpreted more as being hopeful, but we have to put it in the context that she doesn’t survive, that there’s the reality of that and that the Jewish community in the Netherlands was obliterated by the Holocaust,” Weintrob said. “So the emphasis is that even though these people who resisted or did extraordinary deeds are the exceptions, they are the role models.”
Weintrob said that Leo Ullman — who, like Anne, spent time in hiding in Amsterdam during World War II — and his wife, Katherine, approached Wagner last year about donating a tree for the campus. “The significance to me is to keep the story of the Holocaust in people’s minds,” he said. “I believe that the tree is relatable.” He also mentioned Weintrob’s work and that of her colleague at the center, Laura Morowitz.
Ullman is a former chairman of the Anne Frank Center USA, which had made plans in the early 2000s to import 10 saplings from the tree in Amsterdam, then more than 150 years old and weakened by a fungal infection. Municipal officials in Amsterdam had decided that it needed to come down; the backlash that followed prompted them to brace the tree with a structural support, but it was no match for the storm in 2011.
The Wagner seedling’s path wound through the Midwest. One of the seedlings from the tree in Amsterdam was bound for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Lauren Bairnsfather, the chief executive of the Anne Frank Center USA, said that seedling was quarantined in a nursery in Indiana, where horticulturists “made grafts from the original tree” that grew into saplings, including the one for Wagner. Two others have been planted in New York City.
Bairnsfather said Wagner was a noteworthy site because the Holocaust center has focused on women’s experiences in the Holocaust, which she said were often neglected in scholarly studies and teaching. But she also said the spot where the tree was planted made a statement.
“They chose that location so when people come to campus, this is what they see,” she said. “We want the tree to become part of the identity.”
Weather
Expect sunny skies and a high in the low 80s. Tonight, there will be increasing clouds with a low around 63.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The building is going to be out of service, pending repairs.” — David Simms, an assistant fire chief, after an electrical fire damaged the Eugene O’Neill Theater. As a result, “The Book of Mormon,” which has run there for 15 years, has canceled performances today and tomorrow, and producers did not say when they would resume.
The latest Metro news
Giuliani remains in critical condition
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani remained in critical condition yesterday, recovering from pneumonia in a hospital in Florida, his spokesman said.
The spokesman, Ted Goodman, said that Giuliani, 81, had needed a ventilator to breathe after he was hospitalized. But Goodman said yesterday that the former mayor was now breathing on his own. Goodman also said that Giuliani “is the ultimate fighter — as he has demonstrated throughout his life — and he is winning this battle.”
Goodman announced on Sunday that Giuliani was in the hospital but did not say then what his symptoms were. Goodman said yesterday that Giuliani had been diagnosed with restrictive airway disease stemming from his proximity to ground zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The condition makes respiratory illnesses more threatening, Goodman said.
My colleague Jonah E. Bromwich writes that it is unclear whether Giuliani has publicly mentioned such a diagnosis before. But the former mayor has noted that he was a frequent presence at the Trade Center site, and in recent years his lawyers have alluded to potential lung disease related to toxicity from the attacks.
Last summer, Giuliani sustained a fractured vertebra when the car he was a passenger in was rear-ended in New Hampshire, where he had become a regular as he seemed to let his attachment to New York wane. He arrived in a wheelchair at the annual ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan in September. He was photographed that day smiling with a body brace strapped under his suit jacket, over his shirt and tie.
METROPOLITAN diary
Along the park
Dear Diary:
It was April Fools’ Day, and the weather kept changing from sunny to drizzle, as if the gusty wind was moving the sun back and forth behind a cloud.
I put my jacket on and off as I walked along Prospect Park. The trees were still bare, but spring was slowly awakening with yellow forsythias, and every child walking by stared at my new purple hair, hungry for color.
A guy in the bike lane yelled, “Hey!”
I turned to him.
“Sorry,” he said, pointing to someone else. “I’m talking to this guy.”
“But you actually look familiar,” I said.
“So do you,” he said, laughing.
I entered the park to hear pop music near the band shell. Two people with a portable speaker were dancing.
I wanted to join the party, but I realized that I hear the music, so I’m in the party. I danced along from a distance.
From high above, hundreds of blackbirds swooped down like falling peppercorn into the black-and-white woods ahead. As I got closer, I saw specks of tiny green buds emerging on each tree limb.
I left the park, passing three people who had converged because their dogs could not contain their joy. The people laughed like old friends, but within seconds they had walked off separate ways.
As I passed Seeley Street, I overheard a friend through the open window, cheering on a drum student.
I laughed. I should be getting home before the possible rain, I thought, but today, everywhere was home.
— Mare Berger
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
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