Higher education can—and should—fight the Trump administration, but the age of lavish government support is coming to a close.

November 1, 2025, 7 AM ET

On first appraisal, the nine universities that the Trump administration singled out appeared to have no real choice but to concede to the administration’s demands. As set forth in the so-called Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, these include an oath to abide by the White House’s biological theories of gender and to show respect for “conservative” (but not liberal or centrist) values. Framed as a question of who is first in line for federal funding, the compact warns that nonconforming universities will have to go their own way fiscally. Such threats have bite because about half of universities’ $102 billion in annual research spending today flows from the federal budget. Federal Student Aid provides about $120.8 billion in grants, work-study programs, and loans to students. Federal regulation also shapes, mostly favorably until now, universities’ financial environments and helps sustain their educational mission—via the tax code, the antidiscrimination regime of Title VI, and (as Harvard found out the painful way) the federal government’s control over international students’ presence.

But seven of the nine universities have outright rejected the pact, with only the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt remaining noncommittal for now. This show of strength may indicate that universities are coming to accept a painful fact: The attack on higher ed will continue, and the era of lavish government support is coming to a close. Universities can weather this change by looking to the past.

At the end of the 19th century, without the benefit of federal support, a group of entrepreneurial leaders built universities—institutions that combined the best of Oxford’s and Cambridge’s system of college-based learning for undergraduates, and Bismarckian Germany’s research universities. The resulting amalgam of teaching and faculty-directed research had no equal in the world. American universities not only produced some of the best scholarship of the era, but also forged traditions of fearless speech and institutional independence that today offer guides for the fights to come. American universities must continue to aspire to these ideals; doing so will require being steadfast in their commitment to academic freedom, creative in their approach to funding and growth, and combative in their legal postures toward an overweening state.

Until the end of the 19th century, American colleges were, for the most part, dismal places of rote learning and doctrinal fidelity. Most were sectarian, and they enforced their doctrinaire beliefs as strict guardrails on academic inquiry. Not surprisingly, their offerings of regurgitated orthodoxy were hardly magnets for young minds. In 1826, one in 1,513 men of college age was enrolled—but by 1869, this figure had fallen to one in 1,927. Of course, demand for college-level skills has changed dramatically over time. Yet it is striking that in the late 19th century, just like today, colleges were facing a dangerously precarious, even collapsing, supply of students. And, just like today, many young people seemed to doubt the value of a degree.

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This sectarian ethos of the mid-19th-century university bears many similarities to what higher education will become if schools agree to President Donald Trump’s compact. Like colleges of that era, the compact demands ideological conformity, for example, when it speaks of “transforming or abolishing” all “units” that “belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Rather than encouraging research and teaching based on empirical evidence, it fixes boundaries to academic inquiry. The compact’s commands—insisting that universities “commit to defining and otherwise interpreting” sex strictly as a “biological” binary—may well mean in practice a ban on medical research on neonatal intersex interventions, and perhaps no more teaching of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. It is not hard to imagine future commands that require a certain approach to climate science or an absence of campus-wide vaccination policies. The compact, in short, is asking higher education to return to an era in which the goal of universities was the promulgation of a dominant ideology. But had universities continued down the rigid path set in the mid-1800s, they would never have become engines of learning, teaching, and wider prosperity.

Worse, even universities that accept the compact cannot be certain of reliable support. Take quantum computing—a field honored by this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. In August, Trump’s commerce department reneged on a major, multiyear semiconductor-research effort involving universities in Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California, and Texas. This will not just set back scientific research, but will also hinder American efforts to compete with China on strategic fronts such as quantum cryptography. If that kind of strategically vital research can be so easily derailed, universities cannot count on any stability or predictability from the federal government moving forward.

The American research university as we know it was born in the period from 1876, when Johns Hopkins was founded, to the 1890s, when the University of Chicago got its start. Leaders such as Andrew White (Cornell), Charles William Eliot (Harvard), G. Stanley Hall (Clark), William Rainey Harper (Chicago), and David Starr Jordan (Stanford) built or overhauled academic institutions without meaningful financial support from the federal government. By the beginning of the 20th century, American universities were “in ascendance” and small colleges were finding their footing, too. Larger universities grew in both size and research ambition. The expansion in the number and size of institutes of higher education led to the creation of the Association of American Colleges and the American Association of University Professors, both in 1915, and the American Council on Education, in 1918. In this era, these associations hammered out the key formulations of academic freedom as an ideal. Academia not only became a national force, but found its ethical identity, all without federal dollars.

Significant government funding did not start flowing until around World War II, when federal spending on scientific research shot up from $29 million in 1938 to more than $197 million in 1945. After the war, federal funds kept being supplied, and their availability became the new normal. The Soviet launch of Sputnik prompted Congress to enact the 1958 National Defense Education Act, opening the taps for millions more dollars to improve universities’ capacity in science and languages. In 1953, universities accounted for 5.3 percent of the nation’s total R&D expenditures; by 1975, this figure had reached 10 percent. These dynamics resulted in the age of the Cold War university—offering America the means to both leap over its Soviet adversaries technologically and lead the world economically.

This explosive growth in governmental support, however beneficial, skewed university incentives. In this new environment, universities prioritized applied research. They aggressively hoarded patents after the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allows universities to retain ownership of patents created using federal funds. Aggressive investing strategies have helped plump up concentrated assets in university endowments at a scale that many a hedge-fund manager would envy. Wealth, like any kind of power, tugged universities away from earlier visions of research pursued for the intrinsic value of knowledge.

With history in mind, everyone in and around America’s top-tier universities ought to reconsider the assumption that these schools cannot detach themselves from the IV of federal monies and still retain their standing as centers of global excellence. It is of course a logical fallacy to assume that because universities once thrived without government support, they can necessarily do so today. Yet this period can serve as inspiration.

Withdrawal from the embrace of the federal government, while painful, also is a chance to confront some latent, long-simmering weaknesses of the existing higher-education model. For one, universities were already falling behind on the applied research that drove their growth and financialization in recent decades. In AI research, for example, even educational leaders such as Stanford have small fractions of the computing power necessary to conduct novel research, and it’s doubtful that universities can remain at the bleeding edge of applied scientific innovation if they cannot tap the large reservoirs of computing power that firms possess. Leaning into federal funding to do applied work may be chasing yesterday’s prize.

Going forward, universities need to find alternative financial sources anyway, given the larger drawdown in federal spending, and they also need to better wield their existing legal entitlements. If important foundational research is going to thrive, for example, universities must look to partnerships with their home state’s governor and legislature and with industry—not with a federal government that discards years of investment in a bout of dyspeptic partisan spite. States might also band together, as they have done in providing vaccine guidance recently, to go a step further by creating joint funding mechanisms.

Some universities may also explore the possibility of new partnerships to teach students at non-U.S. institutions—building new transnational infrastructures that circumvent the federal government. Just this month, a consortium of cash-strapped U.K. universities that have been struggling even to maintain their ordinary offerings announced that they were opening branches in India, following in the path of U.S. institutions such as Yale and NYU that have opened facilities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Although British universities’ experiment is driven by a different financial squeeze, it offers an interesting path for U.S. higher ed to leverage its brand to create new profit streams immune from the federal government’s interference.

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Further, universities should not underestimate the legal and constitutional tools at their disposal to defend their tax status, student funding, and autonomous operation—all points of vulnerability even if they give up federal funding. The First Amendment’s free-speech clause still has force, and it seems unlikely that even the Roberts Court would give up on the principle that government cannot retaliate against private institutions based on what they teach or research. Universities are best off coordinating and working together when it comes to lawsuits, as they did in their challenges to sudden cuts of so-called indirect costs of science research, rather than going it alone. And if enough universities withdraw from dependency on federal funds, it will be harder for the government to play “divide and conquer” to thwart such collective action.

Some universities may also be able to recover long-standing religious identities as new defenses against state depredation—a strategy that would take advantage of the Roberts Court swing toward cultural conservatism. Columbia, for example, has Anglican origins. Brown, founded by Baptists, has long had a principled commitment to freedom of conscience. It is perfectly possible to invoke such faith traditions as a shield for decency and integrity. What once was a flaw in the academic enterprise can thus be transformed into a sustaining virtue.

Finally, blue states may have some power to protect and foster their universities. In the extreme case, it is even imaginable that private universities reincorporate as arms of those states—in effect, becoming something akin to a municipal corporation. This would be a way for higher ed to continue benefiting from its tax-preferred status and also gaining states’ immunity from “commandeering.”

None of this will be easy. The case for radical transformation taking inspiration from the early days of American research universities rests on the observation that the fiscal status quo of the late 20th century is dead and gone. The age of the Cold War university is over. The scale of federal funding is going to diminish. There is no return to the late-20th-century normal. Rather, preserving what those institutions have built demands finding the best of the past, channeling it through new forms to enable the institutions’ worthy traditions of research, and learning to once again thrive.

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