As much as I hate political alarmism, Rubicons have been crossed, and it’s time for our University administrators to take a decisive stance against this administration.

The incompetent, thuggish and brutish Trump administration is mounting twin assaults on America’s universities. Its equally careless and callous deportation efforts are a threat to the safety and lives of students, both international and domestic. Their extortion of universities nationwide is an attempt to hollow out institutions of higher learning into puppets of the federal government.

First, the assault on student safety: regardless of your opinion of American immigration policy, pro-Palestine activism or the ideology of the current administration, the sheer ineptitude of their deportation efforts should chill you to the bone. 

They banished a Maryland father with protected legal status to the extrajudicial shadow realm of an El Salvadorian mega prison because of an administrative error. ICE agents detained a U.S. veteran in New Jersey because he didn’t have a passport or a license on him. Trump himself has shown support for sending American citizens who are prisoners to El Salvador’s CECOT. He suggested that he was above the law in his quest to “save the country,” hunted down college students and used plainclothes agents to conduct daylight abductions on the street. The Vice President, supposedly the intellectual in this administration of dunces, thinks that hearings for people facing deportation are just impractical — after all, they are trying to deport so many people and have so few resources. In Vance’s eyes, he’s the real victim here; he just can’t afford to respect people’s rights. 

I must reiterate that I truly hate alarmism. To an extent, I believe in the modern political adage that “nothing ever happens.” However, this administration is inches away from permanently sending Americans to a Central American maximum-security confinement center under McCarthy Era legislation, just because. The legal “arguments” offered by this administration would allow them to “accidentally” abduct you, the reader of this article, fly you overnight to a staging area in the nefarious Fifth Circuit, hold a single hearing as you recover from the jetlag and then drop you in Bukele’s black hole. By the time someone could get in front of a judge and prove your citizenship, there would be nothing they could do to retrieve you. Sure, the courts might order your return, but this administration has already shown that they will ignore those return orders.

The threat of careless deportations is but one threat to our safety. Secondly, the Trump Regime’s attempted withholding of federal funds from universities unless they comply with outrageous demands is as criminal as it is concerning. They have withheld or threatened to withhold $1 billion from Cornell, $800 million from Northwestern, $650 million from Columbia and $9 billion from Harvard, plus suggested the potential removal of their tax-exempt status.

Make no mistake, these funding freezes are not a good-faith effort to promote intellectual discourse or combat antisemitism — things we all agree should be done, and I would argue are being done. The demands to Harvard from the Trump administration included structural changes to the University’s governance, stronger anti-DEI policies, third-party audits of student and faculty political viewpoints and an increased use of campus police forces against students.

In light of these potential horrors, it’s increasingly alarming that the Yale Corporation and Yale President seem to have forgotten the seminal contribution of our future former professor Timothy Snyder: do not obey in advance. 

The administration seems to have no plan for what to do if ICE agents black-bag a student on Beinecke Plaza. While DHS screens Yalies’ Instagrams for reasons to deport them, Yale guidelines for law enforcement interaction prioritise politeness and tell students to call YPD, if their hands haven’t been zip-tied by then. If there is an effort to find and detain a student, fortunately, Yale University prioritizes the law above all else — unlike Trump’s “law” enforcement.

The administration has been relatively passive on the funding issue as well. The faculty is clamoring for a strong response, but we’ve gotten only the most aggressive of shrugs. Harvard’s president stood up directly and publicly to the Trump Administration’s demands. Yale should join them as soon as possible.

I don’t wish to be overly critical of the University administration here. The political environment for elite institutions of higher education is botulinum-level toxic. The sword of government has become a scythe mowing just above our heads. To rise even a bit risks catching a blade to the skull at best, and decapitation at worst. For President McInnis specifically, I understand the trepidation. She has just been formally installed, and nobody wanted her to be a conduit for controversy. However, if the University’s President is unwilling to take a strong stance in defense of her students and her alma mater, why do we even have her? What was that 24-pound ceremonial gold mace from the inauguration for if not for Yale’s protection? 

We pay tuition to this institution, we live here, we will wear its mark for life, many of us will donate to it, teach here or work here. For now and after we graduate, we are the blood that keeps Yale alive. That’s all at risk now and we are getting, at best, tepid shows of support and promises of legal representation. This current regime is taking aim at universities nationwide, and it looks like we are waiting till a big red crosshair appears on Harkness Tower before we take drastic action.

The least we can ask is for our University leaders to go beyond trite comments on the value of process and articulate a strong, muscular commitment to our protection and the University’s protection. The law, process and the better angels of our nature are no longer reliable shields from this regime. Certainly, if the Yale Corporation takes a strong anti-Trump, pro-education stance on our behalf or the behalf of its research, it may lose funding, but if it doesn’t and we continue down this path, we will suffer much worse.

Those who would give up their students and mission to save their endowment deserve neither an endowment nor the power we entrust to them.

MILES KIRKPATRICK  is a sophomore in Saybrook College majoring in Classical Civilizations. His column, “Embattled Institutions,” focuses on the steps needed to preserve America’s political, social and educational fabrics. He can be reached at miles.kirkpatrick@yale.edu.