No Secret Settlement or Appeasement with Trump's DOJ: Yale Must Defend Academic Freedom, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

No Secret Settlement or Appeasement with Trump's DOJ: Yale Must Defend Academic Freedom

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 6, 2026

Bravo to the Yale College Council for speaking with moral clarity at a moment when it is so urgently needed. President Maurie McInnis and Yale University should not capitulate to the Trump administration through a closed-door settlement with the Department of Justice (Nyberg & Lynn-Skov, 2026). To do so would not merely be a legal or administrative decision. It would be an act of appeasement with national consequences.

Yale need only look to Harvard to understand what is at stake. Harvard’s situation shows that resistance and capitulation can coexist uneasily within the same institution: even as Harvard sued the Trump administration and won important legal victories, it also renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging as federal officials demanded the dismantling of DEI programs (Giordano & Patel, 2025). 

That concession did not end the pressure. Soon after, Harvard College and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences replaced several diversity offices, a move The Harvard Crimson described as a “major concession” to a central demand of the Trump administration (Scharf & Patel, 2025). Reports also followed that Harvard and the Trump administration were nearing a settlement framework involving a $500 million payment to restore access to federal funding and end investigations (Binkley, 2025; also see Berbenes, 2025). 

Students, faculty, alumni, and public officials warned that such a settlement would not protect Harvard’s independence; it would teach the Trump administration that intimidation works. Yale must not repeat that mistake. A university cannot bargain away lawful holistic admissions, diversity commitments, faculty governance, student rights, or institutional autonomy and still claim to be defending academic freedom. If Harvard’s experience teaches us anything, it is that appeasement does not satisfy authoritarian power. It feeds it.

Harvard students, faculty, and alumni have repeatedly warned that so-called “settlements” with the Trump administration are not neutral acts of institutional pragmatism. They are forms of political surrender that invite more demands, not fewer. As Harvard student writers argued in The Harvard Crimson, a bad deal with the Trump administration would not protect students, faculty, or the university. It would hand the administration a political victory and encourage the same strategy against other institutions (Gerdén, Kaplan & Molden, 2025).

Their critique is devastating because it comes from those most vulnerable to institutional compromise: international students, students of color, Jewish students, pro-Palestine students, researchers dependent on federal funding, and students whose speech, safety, and belonging have been placed in the crosshairs of federal power. 

Harvard students have rightly understood that capitulation does not end the assault. It widens it. It teaches the federal government that threats work. It tells other universities that the path of least resistance is to trade away institutional autonomy, student rights, faculty governance, and academic freedom for temporary relief.

This is precisely what Yale must refuse. The Trump administration’s pressure campaign against elite universities has not been limited to one issue or one campus. At Harvard, federal demands reportedly reached into hiring, admissions, student discipline, protest restrictions, international student scrutiny, and oversight of academic programs. 

The Harvard Crimson’s reporting described demands that would have disempowered faculty leaders, punished student groups, imposed ideological screening, and subjected academic units to external review (Mao & Paulus, 2025). These are not ordinary compliance matters. They are efforts to make universities govern themselves according to the political preferences of the state.

Harvard students and faculty have also named the deeper danger: appeasement does not work. As Harvard professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky (2025) argued, the reward for capitulation is more extortion. Universities that concede do not buy peace; they make themselves and others more vulnerable (Enos & Levitsky, 2025). 

That lesson should be etched into Yale’s decision-making. Any settlement that restricts lawful holistic admissions, compromises institutional independence, chills political speech, weakens faculty governance, or allows federal officials to dictate university policy would not protect Yale. It would implicate Yale in the broader dismantling of higher education as a democratic institution.

Nor can Yale claim neutrality by calling such a deal “prudent” or “strategic.” There are moments when caution becomes complicity. There are moments when institutional self-protection becomes betrayal. A university cannot teach students to pursue truth, defend democracy, and act with courage while its own leadership quietly bargains away the conditions that make those commitments possible.

Yale’s students understand this. So do many faculty and alumni. They know that the issue is not whether universities are above criticism or beyond reform. They are not. Universities must confront antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, anti-Latinx exclusion, anti-Asian racism, attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, anti-immigrant hostility, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of discrimination with seriousness and integrity. But that work must be done through democratic, educational, legally sound, and community-accountable processes—not through coercive settlements designed to place university life under partisan control.

President McInnis should listen to the students. The Yale College Council’s statement reflects precisely what democratic education is supposed to cultivate: young people who can recognize authoritarian overreach, name the stakes, and call institutions back to their highest principles (Yale College Council, 2026). Yale should be proud of them. More importantly, Yale should heed their moral and ethical clarity as you can hear for yourself in this video and follow their lead.

Yale has the resources, stature, alumni base, faculty strength, legal capacity, and moral obligation to resist. If Yale bends, less-resourced institutions will be placed in an even more precarious position. If Yale concedes behind closed doors, the consequences will reverberate across public and private higher education alike.

But if Yale refuses to capitulate, it can help establish a different precedent: that universities are not instruments of the state, that students are not bargaining chips, that admissions cannot be dictated by political intimidation, and that academic freedom—meaning the right to teach and learn—is not for sale.

This is also a test of President McInnis herself. Before leading Yale, Maurie McInnis served as executive vice president and provost at The University of Texas at Austin, beginning July 1, 2016, and remaining in that role until May 2020, when she left to become president of Stony Brook University (Canizales, 2020). President McInnis should not meet this moment with managerial caution or elite institutional self-protection. 

Courtesy of UT Austin

She should meet it with courage. No secret settlement. No abandonment of lawful holistic admissions. No surrender of institutional independence. No chilling of student speech. No weakening of faculty governance. No appeasement of authoritarian power.

Yale must not do what Harvard students have warned against. It must not mistake capitulation for peace. It must not confuse compliance with leadership. It must not teach the next generation that even the most powerful universities fold when democracy needs them to stand.

References

Berbenes, M. (2025, May 2). Tracking Trump’s war on elite universities: Which schools have lost funding and what they're doing about it, Yahoo News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-trumps-war-on-elite-universities-which-schools-have-lost-funding-and-what-theyre-doing-about-it-200621655.html

Binkley, C. (2025, August 13). Harvard and the Trump administration are nearing a settlement including a $500 million payment, Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/harvard-trump-agreement-antisemitism-ivy-a84b88a8136a852aa305e508d012afb6

Canizales, A. (2020, March 26). Executive Vice President and Provost Maurie McInnis leaving UT-Austin, The Daily Texan. https://thedailytexan.com/2020/03/26/executive-vice-president-and-provost-maurie-mcinnis-leaving-ut-austin/

Enos, R. D., & Levitsky, S. (2025, June 26). This isn’t negotiation. It’s authoritarian extortion, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/6/26/enos-levitsky-harvard-trump-negotiation-extortion/

Gerdén, L. Kaplan, T. L. & Molden, K. N. (2025, July 2). President Garber, a bad deal with Trump will not protect us, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/7/2/harvard-negotiation-trump-garber/

Giordano, J. J., & Patel, D. T. (2025, April 29). Harvard renames diversity office as Trump demands dismantling of DEI, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/29/harvard-oedib-renamed/

Mao, W. C. & Paulus, V. H. (2025, April 15). Trump’s demands to Harvard, analyzed, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/15/trump-demands-analysis/

Nyberg, L., & Lynn-Skov, A. (2026, June 28). Yale seeks Trump deal as admissions inquiry reaches College, NYT reports. Yale Daily News. https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-seeks-trump-deal-as-admissions-inquiry-reaches-college-nyt-reports 

Scharf, A., & Patel, D. T. (2025, July 10). Harvard College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences replace diversity offices. The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/7/10/college-fas-end-diversity-offices/

Yale College Council. (2026, July 4). Public statement on behalf of the Yale undergraduate student body regarding Yale’s ongoing settlement negotiations with the Trump administration [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwX1FqqaqjY

The Wrong Crisis: What the Yale Report Misses in the Age of Manufactured Mistrust, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Wrong Crisis: What the Yale Report Misses in the Age Manufactured Mistrust

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 28,2026

Yale University’s Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education is a serious and welcome act of institutional self-scrutiny. It names real concerns: rising costs, opaque admissions, grade inflation, bureaucratic growth, and public skepticism about the university’s purpose. Its call to recommit to the creation and dissemination of knowledge is important.

But it is also incomplete.

Because what we are living through is not simply a crisis of trust in higher education. It is a restructuring of higher education itself.

When elite institutions diagnose declining public confidence, they tend to look inward—toward institutional practices, campus climate, and internal reform. These matter. But from the vantage point of Texas, where policy is rapidly reshaping universities, the problem is not only perception. It is power.

To its credit, the Yale report defends free speech and academic freedom. But it stops short of centering what is fundamentally at stake: the university’s role in a democracy. Universities do not exist merely to produce credentials or workforce skills. At their best, they protect society’s capacity to ask difficult questions, examine power, and cultivate the habits of mind necessary for democratic life.

And it is precisely this function that is under threat.

Today’s attacks on higher education are not simply expressions of public distrust. They are part of a coordinated political project to reshape what universities are, what they do, and who they serve.

This is not new. Since Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, universities have been understood by corporate and political actors as key sites in the struggle over ideas and public power. While not meant for circulation at the time, it suggested a broad, organized effort to shape public discourse. Here is a helpful succinct synopsis of it on Instagram.

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That vision has matured into a well-funded infrastructure aimed at influencing curriculum, research agendas, and public discourse (Stewart, 2025). It has been reinforced by ideological movements—such as the Seven Mountains Mandate—that explicitly frame education as terrain to be captured (Wallnau & Johnson, 2013).

Seen in this light, calls for institutional reform—however well-intentioned—cannot fully address the moment we are in.

Because the terrain has already shifted.

In Texas, the issue is not simply distrust. It is restructuring through law and governance that redounds to manufacture distrust. By this, I mean the deliberate erosion of public confidence in knowledge-producing institutions through the strategic production of doubt, distortion, and political intervention through a growing number of anti-democratic policies like SB 17 and SB 37.

Senate Bill 17 (2023), under the banner of neutrality, dismantles diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across public universities—removing not only offices, but the infrastructures that made institutions more accessible and accountable to historically marginalized communities. Senate Bill 37 (2025) goes further, weakening faculty governance and shifting authority to politically appointed boards, inserting new oversight into curriculum, hiring, and programmatic decisions.

Taken together, these policies do more than reform universities. They redefine them.

They narrow what can be taught. They reshape who has authority. They recalibrate what counts as legitimate knowledge.

This is the problem.

The Yale report gestures toward declining trust but largely avoids the political and economic forces driving these transformations—decades of public disinvestment, the rise of market logics, and, increasingly, the direct intervention of the state in regulating knowledge. What remains is a technocratic conversation about institutional repair.

But repair assumes stability.

In Texas, there is no stable baseline to repair.

“Free speech” here is not an abstract principle; it is a contested policy site. Faculty report self-censoring—not because of student protest or intellectual disagreement, but because of vague directives on “controversial topics,” the chilling effects of SB 17, and the structural reordering introduced by SB 37. Programs such as Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies—longstanding sites of scholarly inquiry—find themselves weakened, consolidated, or quietly marginalized.

This is what I and others describe as anticipatory compliance and shadow censorship: institutions narrowing themselves in advance of enforcement, reshaping academic life without the need for explicit bans.

None of this can be understood if distrust is treated as a matter of perception alone.

Nor can it be understood without acknowledging the racialized dimensions of this moment. When claims of “bias” are mobilized to target fields that examine race, inequality, and power, this is not a neutral call for balance. It is a struggle over whose knowledge counts—and whose histories are allowed to be told.

History offers a warning.

The Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research was forced into exile after the rise of Nazism (Jay, 1973; Wiggershaus, 1995). Its scholars understood that authoritarianism does not begin with book burning alone. It begins with delegitimizing critical inquiry, demonizing intellectuals, and disciplining institutions that produce inconvenient knowledge.

The echo today is not identical. But it is unmistakable.

Across states like Texas and Florida, we see efforts to dismantle DEI, restrict curriculum, weaken faculty governance, and recode academic freedom as ideological capture. These are not isolated developments. They are part of a broader campaign to remake higher education into a more compliant institution—less critical, less democratic, less public.

So yes, universities should reflect on how they have contributed to public distrust.

But that is not enough.

Because the more urgent question is whether we are willing to confront the restructuring already underway.

If higher education is to remain a democratic institution, it must defend more than its reputation. It must defend its purpose.

That means protecting academic freedom not just in principle, but in practice. It means sustaining shared governance as more than a symbolic ideal. It means refusing policies that narrow inquiry, erase histories, or subordinate knowledge to political agendas.

The crisis, in other words, is not simply that higher education is misunderstood.

It is that it is being remade.

And the question before us is not how to restore trust.

It is whether we are willing to defend the university as a democratic public good—before it is fundamentally transformed into something else.

References

Jay, M. (1973). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Little, Brown. 

Powell, L. F., Jr. (1971, August 23). Attack on American free enterprise system [Memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., U.S. Chamber of Commerce]. (Powell Memo)

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, Lies, and God. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Wallnau, L., & Johnson, B. (2013). Invading Babylon: The 7 mountain mandate. Destiny Image Publishers

Wiggershaus, R. (1995). The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories, and political significance (M. Robertson, Trans.). MIT Press.

Yale University. (2026). Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Yale University.

Yale Students Protest Halloween Costumes. Ignorance/Disrespect Follows

This video on the protests at Yale has gone viral.  Just came across this excellent reflection on this blog post titled, "The Student Demand," by  Tav Nyong’o.  She takes on the haters that say that the indignant student captured in this video is a "whiner."  Here's a link to an article that reduces this legitimate protest to students' being "crybullies."

Haters that say these thing are reinscribing white privilege by deciding to be power neutral and power evasive in order to trivialize the lives, experiences, and lived realities of the other half of society that they either disparage or ignore.  They individualize problems that are deeply historic and social in order to not have to face up to unearned privilege or deep-seated assumptions of merit in this society that this growing, student movement and counter-narrative threatens.

Incidentally, whiteness is an ideology; so anybody could be "white."  And whiteness is a dangerous and pernicious ideology that subscribes to individualism, individual merit, and the myth of white superiority.  It is a global problem.  It exists within minority communities, too.  More fair-skinned children are often preferred to darker ones.  "Marry well" sometimes means to marry white.  The sociological term for this is internalized racism.  I could go on and on.

No one on the planet is untouched by the myth of white racial superiority, my friends.  Until we acknowledge this—alongside the myth of male superiority ("patriarchy")—we will continue seeing conflict both within our families and between them, and in society as a whole.

Peace and blessings to all this coming Thanksgiving.  May we reflect on all of these things and act to make a better world.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

Missouri, Yale, and the UT System: A Call for Faculty Diversity and Other Opportunities

I can't help but think of UT System Chancellor McRaven's November 6, 2015 statement on diversity in the Daily Texan in light of what's going on at both the University of Missouri and Yale University.  While recent events at "Mizzou" are indeed "post-Ferguson," as the media frames it, not surprisingly, the stories coming forward reveal long-standing, cumulative kinds of grievances.  This November 9, 2015 PBS segment illuminates as much.  A "tipping point," with the involvement of the student-athletes, was reached.  Here is a good blog post that explains what led up to University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe's and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin's stepping down. 

The Mizzou students are making a specific call for educators to validate their struggles, and also for more faculty diversity.  Sadly, their hashtag captures it all:  #hateliveshere  Check out their list of demands here.

Here’s the list of demands from Mizzou’s protesting athletes, students

Things are heating up at Yale University, too. Essentially, Dean Burgwell sent out a note asking students to avoid offensive, disrespectful Halloween costumes, including "headdresses, turbans and blackface." He then caught some grief from a professor who defended “provocative” and “inappropriate” costumes.  So hundreds of students marched and here's a video recording of an emotional, angry exchange with that professor.

As the Mizzou students' list of demands express, there are a lot of things that we need to do to address systemic racism, microaggressions, white privilege, and other forms of oppression that are also further informed by the significant overlap of race and class in our country.  And a lot of this negligence stems precisely from the fact that our faculty are not diverse—not even in places like Texas universities, generally, where some might think that this would be less of an issue.  

I have not seen any data on this, but I sense that at least at UT Austin, our representation has declined. This would be due to incentivized retirements, faculty departures for positions elsewhere, and deaths.

Many of us faculty of color in the professoriate are aging, too, and we openly express our concerns to each other regarding who is going to replace us. Some of us run programs, policy centers, and carry out community-based research we wonder if upon retirement, our lifelong work and vision will be simply "absorbed" by our faculty administrations to "self-fund merit," as we are constantly required because of shrinking state budgets and a lack of political will among our state leaders to champion higher education funding.  These prospects are fearful and often discouraging, if not entirely overwhelming, to us at certain points in the year.

I am hoping that this call for more faculty diversity gets heard at Mizzou and Yale, as well as throughout Texas and the nation.  As the situation at Yale suggests, process is important. 

Our policies at our universities need to get re-visited if we are to make a positive difference.  Strategies for students and communities to influence policy should be developed if they are not present.  Regular contact with our stakeholder communities that convey a sincere desire for change within our institutions—a "more-than-once" kind of approach—would be taken ever so well.  Our students and our communities need to be heard and they deserve utmost respect.  Reciprocity and a little bit of humility that owns up to what's really problematic about our power-evasive, power-neutral, "ivory tower" mentality—not the least of which is a "possessive investment in whiteness," to use George Lipsitz' term from his book by the same name.

In any case, our numbers as faculty of color—and as Chancellor McRaven suggests below—should be trending in the opposite direction given the changing demographics in our state and nation.  Inasmuch as diversity is also about equity, it is also a moral issue, a matter of conscience.  As Ghandi once indicated, we can indeed be the change that we seek in the world.  Sí, se puede!  Yes, we can!

Angela Valenzuela

c/s 

McRaven: UT System vision includes research, faculty diversity

On Thursday, Chancellor William McRaven presented UT System with a plan to increase UT's academic competitiveness and bring more diverse faculty to UT campuses.

Photo Credit: Ellyn Snider | Daily Texan Staff

November 6, 2015 at 4:00 am
 

By Matthew Adams

Chancellor William McRaven presented new UT System projects and goals to produce top research and recruit diverse faculty members at the Board of Regents meeting Thursday.


McRaven, a former Navy SEAL credited for leading the mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden, said he wants to drive collaboration throughout the UT System using his experience as a leader of multiple units in the military. McRaven, who has been in office for less than a year, said the System has been conducting a strategic assessment of the system’s academic competitiveness since May.

The information discovered serves as a basis for ways the System must improve, McRaven said.

“Today, I come prepared to show you how the UT System will use our size, our talent and our diversity to solve the difficult problems that face us,” McRaven said. “A rigorous and disciplined process will help us prioritize our efforts.”

The Board of Regents approved a plan on the first day of meetings to develop a campus of approximately 332 acres, south of the UT Health Science Center at Houston. McRaven said a task force has been formed to assess the options for this property, but for now the land should be open to all UT institutions.

“It will have a footprint that will hopefully be very similar to a university,” McRaven said. “We don’t know what that property is going to be, but it is an opportunity for us to have access into Houston and tap into energy, aerospace and medical [fields]. I would like to see it as an intellectual hub to bring all the campuses to Houston.”

Chairman Paul Foster said he applauds McRaven’s initiative for acquiring this property in Houston and expanding UT.

“Houston has 30 percent of the population of the state of Texas,” Foster said. “Many of our institutions will establish a presence there, just like as many of our institutions have presences throughout the state already.” 

As part of the strategic assessment, McRaven said all institutions will adopt the “Rooney Rule” to diversify the faculty. For senior-level positions such as dean or higher, the position cannot be filled without interviewing a qualified woman or minority candidate sometime in the future, McRaven said.

“What was clear is we need our faculty to reflect more of our student population,” McRaven said. “Where we are now, we have a very large Hispanic population. We are doing a great job serving the Hispanic community, but our faculty does not necessarily reflect that. This will take decades to begin move the needle, but if we don’t start now, our faculty won’t look too much different.”

Student regent Justin Drake said he appreciated the boldness of McRaven’s speech and his dedication to leadership across the System. Drake said this was the first time he heard about UT’s version of the “Rooney Rule,” but UT is heading in the right direction.

“Faculty diversity has been really acknowledged as being poor,” Drake said. “I think one of the numbers I saw up there for African-Americans was pretty disappointing and in terms of gender equality, it’s also disappointing. It will draft a lot of criticisms, but at the same time it reinforces UT’s dedication to diversity.”