Big Ten Michigan schools make moves to create a ‘Mutual Defense Compact’ against Trump policies

BY ANNA LIZ NICHOLS, MICHIGAN ADVANCE

MICHIGAN—It is the Trump administration’s strategy to pick off individual schools one-by-one, pulling research funding and threatening student visas until institutions are beaten into submission, supporters of a resolution to establish a “Mutual Defense Compact” for Big Ten universities said during a University of Michigan Faculty Senate meeting Thursday.

The hope is that creating an alliance between the 18 universities in the Big Ten Conference to defend “academic freedom, institutional integrity, and the research enterprise,” as the resolution reads, will make schools stronger together.

Just this week, the faculty senate at fellow Big Ten school Michigan State University adopted such a resolution, as have Indiana University and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Schools are already seeing the negative impacts of President Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and threatening executive orders, Sandra Levitsky, a professor of sociology and law at the University of Michigan said Thursday during the faculty senate meeting. The university’s administration quickly folded to Trump’s demands to shut down diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies, shuttering the doors of the school’s DEI office, Levitsky said.

“The University of Michigan abandoned DEI in-part to avoid the wrath of Trump and most schools, not just ours, have been cowed into this kind of preemptive capitulation. Most schools, not just ours, have gone silent, just when we need them to speak up,” Levisky said. “Hoping that our university is going to step out of this defensive crouch is not going to be enough, because the reality is, this is an existential moment for higher education and most schools, not just ours, are genuinely terrified about what might happen next.”

The United States is on the cusp of an authoritarian administration, Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies Yi-Li Wu said during the faculty senate meeting, and everyone must look themselves in the mirror and determine what they will do as democratic institutions like higher education are attacked.

And silence or eager compliance are not survival strategies, Wu said, noting that Columbia University, which has had hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding pulled and several Pro-Palestinian students arrested, is a prime example of the reality that compromising on core values will not save schools from Trump’s wrath.

In reflecting on U of M’s smothering of the DEI office, Wu said it would appear the administration is trying to play a quiet game to stay out of the spotlight, but it won’t work.

“They apparently think that the best course is to work behind the scenes with lobbyists and to avoid making any public noise that might draw attention to us. They apparently think that ‘do it to the other guy, not us’, is a viable strategy for survival,” Wu said. “But we have seen that complying and silence do not work.”

The university’s faculty senate will have until Sunday to vote on whether to adopt the resolution.

The resolution is a “mutual suicide pact”, physics professor Keith Riles said, urging his colleagues to vote against the the Mutual Defense Compact Thursday.

It’s important to choose battles and allies wisely, Riles said, and after years of the university disregarding anti-discrimination laws, faculty members have “provoked the understandable anger of voters for whom Donald Trump is a vehicle for retribution.”

“Many of you have deluded yourselves into thinking that discrimination against whites and Asian Americans, especially males, is somehow magically permissible,” Riles said. “The Trump administration is, yes, it’s attacking this university, I understand that, but the university has much to answer for…You brought this on all of us.”

Though the Thursday meeting of the faculty senate was in large part called in response to the university’s recent decisions on DEI policies, Fred Terry, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said the stakes are much higher and broader.

What the Trump administration has set into motion is a regime where any research area, public discourse or curriculum that the president disagrees with will be gutted, with universities risking severe consequences if they don’t give in to Trump’s wishes, Terry said. This defies academic freedom and defiles the university’s mission to serve the state and the world through research and cultivating citizens for the betterment of the future.

But that doesn’t mean that banding together will protect schools, Terry said, but the cost of not trying presents a greater danger.

“I do have to observe that with a unified effort, we may not win, particularly in the near term. This is not a low stakes game. There may be real suffering by many in our community. We cannot engage in this fight lightly, but we cannot give up without giving up our intellectual integrity. Measures like motion one are clearly our best hope,” Terry said.

Following the faculty senate meeting, Democratic elected officials gathered at the Diag on the Ann Arbor campus to rail against the Trump administration cancelling student visas in recent weeks at schools across the country, including U of M and MSU.

It’s two weeks until graduation at plenty of Michigan schools, U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Ann Arbor) told a small crowd at the Diag Thursday, and Democrats in Congress are demanding answers about why this crackdown on visas is happening just before students are about to have their hard work rewarded on the graduation stage.

“I’m here to make this promise to all of you. We are demanding answers. No one will silence my voice. Do not let them silence yours,” Dingell told students on campus, affirming the crowd that diverse students and diverse perspectives are what makes campuses and the dialogues that can happen richer.

After announcing his campaign Thursday morning for the 2026 race for the open U.S. Senate seat to represent Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed joined the rally on campus to encourage students to “fight back” against Trump’s fear tactics.

Trump’s policies prey on people’s pain, El-Sayed said. By coercing his followers into cynicism about the economy and creating divisions between people groups, El-Sayed said Trump has won back the White House where he is implementing policies that will help his billionaire friends like Elon Musk, while leaving the middle class worse off than before.

“If we’re not willing to protect our democracy, if we’re not willing to go back to back working with one another to protect what it means to be an American, the question we have to ask ourselves is, ‘who will’,” El-Sayed said.

While Trump has used his power to pardon January 6 protestors who vandalized the U.S. Capitol and assaulted law enforcement in support of him in 2021, he’s calling for the arrest and deportation of students who speak out against his policies, U of M Junior and member of the College Democrats group Amber Henson said.

The First Amendment rights of students are on the line, and as college campuses have long been the stage of social movements throughout American history, threats to these rights must be answered, Henson said.

Leading up to Thursday, as the U of M College Democrats were organizing the rally, Henson said there was one student in the group who was concerned that their visa status would be revoked if they attended. As the daughter of Polish immigrants and as an International Studies student, the pull to protect international students and speak against federal acts to attack them is strong.

Young people have a lot to lose right now for speaking out, Henson said, but they also have a lot to gain as they face what decades of ramifications of this current administration could mean for their lives.

READ MORE: Trump revokes visas, legal residency of international students at Michigan universities

This coverage was republished from Michigan Advance pursuant to a Creative Commons license.