When Academic Freedom Falls, Civil Society Is Next

Across the United States, universities are raising the alarm about what they see as a campaign by the Donald Trump administration to assert political control over higher education. Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Pennsylvania have all experienced withdrawn federal grants—part of a broader strategy to condition public funding on political compliance. Federal officials had previously warned 60 institutions that their civil rights policies could jeopardize their grants.

More recently, Trump also signed an executive order threatening to revoke the accreditation of universities that refuse to comply with his administration’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

For nonprofits—especially those working in civil rights, education, journalism, or public health—this should raise serious concerns. The suppression of academic freedom isn’t just campus politics—it’s a warning signal for civil society and for our democracy. As universities lose the freedom to teach, research, and dissent; nonprofits will lose critical allies needed to investigate injustice, educate communities, and imagine alternative futures.

[T]hese efforts are “the culmination of a decades-long attack on higher education.”

Organizations like PEN America, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the Scholars at Risk Network, and FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) have already sounded alarms—and taken action—against the threats to academic freedom.

Additionally, the private institutions targeted by the Trump administration are themselves 501c3 tax-exempt organizations. Advocates for nonprofit and academic freedom have pointed out that Trump is targeting universities first—including their tax-exempt status—as a precursor to using the same tactics against other nonprofit organizations.

“This moment is about more than one institution. It is about how thought, knowledge and expression are essential to our freedom and to our national identity, and must be protected,” the Council on Foundations, Independent Sector, the National Council of Nonprofits, and the United Philanthropy Forum said in a joint statement. “Our democracy depends on a strong, vibrant and independent civil society. Undermining it—for any reason, by any leader—is a threat we cannot and will not ignore.”

The Long-Term Blueprint

The Trump administration’s crackdown, though unprecedented in scope, isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s outlined in Project 2025, which draws directly from authoritarian playbooks to systematically dismantle academic freedom and centralized control of universities.

William Horne, a historian of White supremacy and Black liberation movements at the University of Maryland, told NPQ that these efforts are “the culmination of a decades-long attack on higher education.” He pointed to two motivations behind these attacks: first, “White conservatives see the study of the past, culture, and systems in the US as dangerous because they lead students and scholars to criticize ideas, institutions, and practices that are plainly unjust… The second major reason for targeting universities,” Horne told NPQ, “is that they are one of the last remaining vehicles of social mobility in our society.”

This dynamic is most visible in Florida, which under Governor Ron DeSantis has become a testing ground for authoritarian tactics. Gender studies programs were eliminated; DEI offices have been dismantled; faculty have been placed under surveillance; and political conformity has been enforced. Tactics first piloted in Florida  emerged later in states like Kentucky and West Virginia—and are gaining momentum federally.

“Trump is the ‘elephant in the room,’” one professor anonymously told NPQ, “but we’ve been under threat for a long time.”

From Budapest to the United States

Columbia University has come under scrutiny for complying with federal demands in what critics describe as a bid to reinstate its funding: increasing campus police, banning face coverings, tightening oversight of its Middle Eastern Studies, and a mandate toward “intellectual diversity.” Before Columbia capitulated, faculty in the school’s history department had sent a letter to the university’s leadership warning that “authoritarian regimes always seek to gain control over independent academic institutions.”

While the historians stopped short of naming specific countries, AAUP (in response to Trump’s demands on Columbia), drew a clear parallel to Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s government forced Central European University (CEU) out of the country in 2019, through legislation that dismantled academic freedom. Though the European Court of Justice later ruled against Hungary, CEU relocated most of its programs to Vienna and has not resumed its US-accredited degrees in Hungary. The Hungarian government also eliminated gender studies programs and centralized control of public universities to state-aligned foundations.

“Authoritarians attack these disciplines and the people who teach them because feminist, antiracist scholars and scholarship often challenge White supremacist and patriarchal fantasies of the ‘pure’ nation governed by a ruler vested with divine and natural authority,” Mary Reynolds, cofounder of the Gender & Authoritarianism Research Collective, told NPQ. “At the heart of feminist and antiracist disciplines and public education is the concept of equality, which is antithetical to authoritarian regimes.”

Learning from CEU’s case in Hungary is essential. In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, former CEU President Michael Ignatieff recalled a US college president who asked him directly “how a university fights an authoritarian regime.” As Ignatieff wrote, “I told him to frame his fight to gain as many allies as he can. Mobilize your alumni networks. Enlist families whose children’s lives have been saved in your hospitals; reach out to companies that have commercialized your research, make contact with universities in red and blue states, public and private, who face the same threat. Do it fast. Make sure your campaign is not just about you.”

Andrea Pető, a CEU professor and one of Europe’s leading scholars on authoritarianism and academic freedom, told NPQ that it’s “not much [of a] surprise” that Trump is targeting universities because illiberal actors have long invested in ideologically driven think tanks and academic institutions with the explicit goal of reshaping knowledge production. “They want to control the hearts and minds of the future voters,” she said, urging faculty to resist both direct pressure and subtle self-censorship traps.

Under Prime Minister Orbán, Pető noted, Hungarian faculty made the mistake of attempting to avoid controversy and prioritize job security over intellectual courage. “As the joke in communism said: If you think, do not say it out loud; if you say, do not put it in writing; and if you put it in writing, do not be surprised. In fact, self-censorship is a survival tool, both academically and financially.”

However, this chilling effect dulls innovation and trains students to follow rather than to question: “The students who are facing this right now are learning these survival reflexes instead of taking risks, and if they want to thrive in the system, they have to conform,” Pető told NPQ.

It has become clear that US higher education is not immune to these concerns. Columbia’s compromises echo Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University, which acquiesced to political pressure, undermining its own academic integrity.

Pető’s call to action for US nonprofits and funders is unambiguous: Recognize this moment as part of a global authoritarian playbook and act accordingly.

“Organize and network,” she urged. Without infrastructure to defend academic freedom, she warned, ideas alone won’t be enough. “With Lex CEU [the Hungarian law that pushed the university out of the country] in 2017, CEU was defeated, betrayed and humiliated,” Pető said. “This defeat sent a message that the supporting infrastructure in Europe and the US is weak. Nobody listened until it also happened in the US.”

Escalating Attacks Across the United States

Domestic attacks on academic freedom have intensified. In 2023, a nonbinary professor at a public university in Florida left their position—partly due to rising housing costs but also because of the increasingly repressive political climate under DeSantis. Florida’s takeover of the New College of Florida and sweeping laws targeting DEI programs, LGBTQ+ rights, and so-called divisive academic content, has created an environment of fear.

As one professor, who asked to remain anonymous, told NPQ: “When I left, university administrators were ordered to check faculty member emails for references to diversity. It was the craziest thing to realize that the classes I’d been instructed to teach by my superiors…courses in political communication…could suddenly get me in deep trouble with the government by virtue of me teaching students a basic curriculum—as democracy thrives in a diverse environment.”

After relocating to Texas, the professor faced similar threats, particularly after Texas passed Senate Bill 17, banning DEI initiatives in public universities and eliminating more than 350 related positions statewide. While the professor’s current job remains intact, they worry of what is coming.

“In class, I always try to present myself as though I was being recorded by a hostile actor, because that’s honestly a risk,” they told NPQ. “But in terms of what I teach? I’m not changing my research or my course content. I’m just being more mindful of who might be watching me and waiting for me to ‘mess up.’”

They also noted that while neoliberalism has long extracted value from contingent (or adjunct) faculty, previously privileged faculty are experiencing newfound vulnerability as tenure protections become a target. The ideological commitments of faculty are being put to the test. The question is no longer hypothetical—it is immediate and personal.

“We’re seeing if scholar-activists really believe what they espouse and are willing to fight for it,” the professor told NPQ, “or if they were just writing to get a tenure offer that might not exist tomorrow.”

How Nonprofits and Educators Can Resist

Nonprofits around the country face profound implications as states like Florida and Texas pass laws to censor curricula and defund public institutions, while Trump undermines academic freedom federally. Yet faculty, nonprofit leaders, and organizers are not powerless. Through concrete strategies, resistance remains possible:

1. Ground Resistance in Historical Memory

Organizers should draw on historical victories and movements. The civil rights protections that are now under attack were not benevolent gifts; they were, as Horne reminds activists, “direct responses to the protests, marches, boycotts, sit-ins… as well as to the urban rebellions and the more radical organizing.” These rights were granted not to upend systems of power, but to preserve them from more radical transformation.

“The regime’s dangerous attacks on scholars, researchers, educators, and public institutions show their importance to society,” Horne added.

This vision, however, has been steadily eroded by decades of neoliberal restructuring, which has prioritized market logics over public investment in education. Austerity public school budgets, tuition hikes, and the increasing precarity of academic labor have already undermined both the stability of academic workers and the democratic function of higher education itself.

Reynolds also noted that public education faces three current threats: the diversion of public funds to private institutions through voucher schemes, the erosion of the separation between church and state through legislative and judicial actions, and the suppression of dissent through funding threats—tactics designed to eliminate accessible, critical public spaces.

2. Think Globally, Act in Solidarity

Resistance must be globally minded. We need to learn from struggles in other countries, where scholars have faced similar forms of repression, and work in active solidarity with them.

Pető shared strategies from Hungary’s experience, emphasizing the need for US scholars to abandon assumptions of American exceptionalism. “Now colleagues in the US who used to blame the academics and NGOs under attack [in Hungary] for not resisting better are very silent when it comes to their work. When I asked a colleague what he was doing, the answer was: I keep my job,” she said. “Unless US colleagues recognize that the US is not exceptional and learn from other cases, resistance, if it happens, will require more resources and be doomed to fail.”

3. Build Intersectional, Community-Rooted Coalitions

Reynolds emphasized that the “most effective strategy is to build cross-class, multiracial movements and coalitions that include teachers, researchers, and faculty; students and parents; all campus and school workers; and local community members.”

As part of this, the resistance must remain adaptable—in some states labor organizing remains one of the most resilient, if embattled, protectors. In Florida, where DeSantis has aggressively rolled back freedoms, university unions have provided critical infrastructure for collective response.

However, states like Texas with deeply entrenched anti-labor sentiment have eroded workers’ ability to build collective power. “[W]e aren’t allowed to have real, meaningful unions as public employees,” the professor noted, citing legal prohibitions on striking and the absence of collective bargaining.

Still, faculty have found ways to resist, such as holding no-confidence votes, building coalitions with students and national organizations, and engaging in targeted legislative advocacy.

4. Do Not Self-Censor, Capitulate, or Comply in Advance

For many educators, the classroom itself remains one of the most critical sites of resistance—teaching with integrity and refusing to capitulate is itself an act of defiance.

“My advice, outside of joining ongoing lawsuits, protesting on the streets, or other more traditional forms of pushback, is to just keep teaching,” the professor in Texas said. “And I think this comes from my identity as a queer professor who is teaching in a state that doesn’t like me.”

Their commitment to teaching authentically—even in the face of hostile laws and surveillance—is an act of defiance that rejects the culture of fear authoritarian regimes rely on to enforce silence.

Institutions themselves must not capitulate or comply in advance either. As Reynolds emphasized, “University administrations should be responsible to the university’s faculty, staff, students, and host communities—not to donors, state legislatures, or boards of trustees. They should uphold democratic decision-making and shared governance, while ensuring academic freedom and critical thinking.”

“A society that values research free from surveillance and coercion is one that values truth and, with it, a vision of service to the public good.”

5. Reject Collaboration with Carceral Systems

In places where academic freedom has collapsed, state repression often escalates into the criminalization of faculty and students—a trend already taking shape in the United States.

Pető cautioned against complacency when states use taxpayer dollars for repression. She noted that these regimes thrive “by creating enemies with dehumanizing and taking resources from them to sustain their regime.”

Still, she remains clear-eyed about the stakes—and the possibilities. “This opens several possibilities for resistance, as it is informed by the lesson learned from history that these systems do not last forever.”

Academic Freedom Is About Defending Democracy

Defending academic freedom is not an abstract concern—it’s foundational to democracy. Nonprofits must recognize the direct link between academic suppression and broader societal repression. Reynolds reaffirmed that public education remains critical to democracy, recalling historical movements that successfully defended and improved public education from Reconstruction through the civil rights era to recent labor organizing campaigns.

Protecting classrooms and educators today may be essential to preserving democratic civil spaces tomorrow. Nonprofits face a choice: Proactively defend academic freedoms and democratic institutions now, or risk losing critical allies and resources crucial for future justice struggles.

As Horne stated, “A society that values research free from surveillance and coercion is one that values truth and, with it, a vision of service to the public good.” Protecting academic freedom ensures nonprofits and educations remain allies in the broader struggle for democracy, equity, and justice.