MSU faculty join call for Big Ten ‘mutual defense compact’ against Trump administration

Faculty at Michigan State University have become the latest in the Big Ten to urge conference leaders to create a “mutual defense compact” against the Trump administration amid its aggressive campaign to reshape higher education in its image. 

At its meeting Tuesday, MSU’s Faculty Senate passed a non-binding resolution calling on the university’s top brass to take a “leading role” in formalizing the alliance, a university spokesperson confirmed. 

Amid the Trump administration’s “legal, financial and political incursion” into higher education institutions — “designed to undermine their public mission” — the resolution suggests such collaboration is needed. 

“…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,” the resolution said.  

Under the compact, participating institutions would “commit meaningful funding to a shared or distributed defense fund” that would “provide immediate and strategic support to any member institution under direct political or legal infringement.”

Such support would entail things like “Legal representation and countersuit actions; strategic public communication; amicus briefs and expert testimony; legislative advocacy and coalition-building,” the resolution said.

The faculty senate of Rutgers University led the charge in calling on Big Ten leaders to form a mutual defense compact, passing a resolution late last month. It was subsequently joined by the faculty senates of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Indiana University at Bloomington. The faculty senate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — which belongs to the Mid-American Conference — also passed a similar resolution. 

Whether MSU’s leadership will heed the faculty senate’s calls remains to be seen. 

But faculty might find some hope in MSU’s leaders’ recent public pushback on certain actions of the Trump administration, like its abrupt revocations of international students’ visas, and attempts to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. 

MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant confirmed the faculty senate’s passing of the resolution when reached Wednesday night, but declined to comment further. 

Leaders of the other Big Ten universities with faculty senates that have passed mutual defense compact resolutions have been mostly quiet so far on whether they’d form the proposed alliance, according to reporting from The Chronicle of Higher Education. University of Massachusetts at Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes, however, is supportive of the resolution, the reporting said. 

Faculty senators at Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota, both in the Big Ten, told the Chronicle their faculty senates would be voting on mutual defense compact resolutions in the coming weeks, the outlet reported.

The MSU faculty’s action comes as the Trump administration — as part of its efforts to cut waste in the federal budget and eradicate “woke” ideology in higher education — moves aggressively to cut funding to universities across the country. It has also ramped up investigations into universities for their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as well as their perceived unwillingness to root out antisemitism on campus. 

Trump’s most aggressive targeting of universities has been confined, up to this point, to the country’s most elite, including mostly Ivy League schools. But actions like the one taken by MSU’s faculty senate demonstrate the looming uncertainty around the extent to which its scope might be broadened. 

MSU has largely remained above the fray so far, but it’s of note that one of its Big Ten peers hasn’t: The Trump administration last week froze $790 million in federal funding to Northwestern.

Whether MSU and other Big Ten institutions will ultimately form the mutual defense compact gets to a question being asked across the landscape of higher education amid the Trump administration’s higher education alteration campaign: Will institutions ‘fight back’?

While Columbia agreed last month to a set of demands from the administration after large amounts of federal funding was cut, its Ivy League peer Harvard, facing similar threats, recently dug its heels in by forcefully refusing demands that included the overhaul of academic programs and changes to admissions and hiring.  

That tact, though, can hardly be said to have curtailed the Trump administration: It froze $2.2 billion in funding to Harvard following the institution’s rejection of policy change requests.