The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has occasionally referenced Wesleyan University president Michael Roth in this newsletter. And he is making headlines yet again! Inside Higher Ed’s Ryan Quinn covered his participation in the latest Heterodox Academy conference. Unlike most of the other participants, Roth called out the organizers for enabling the Trump administration’s unprecedented, illiberal assault on American higher education:

“Your complaints at the Heterodox conferences for almost 10 years now—about being too woke, about not having enough jobs for white people, about too many women in the academy—have found resonance with an authoritarian push to control our spaces,” Wesleyan University president Michael Roth said Tuesday during a plenary panel at the event.

“We can make nice and not say that and we won’t get investigated,” he said. “Or we can do our job, which is to call the indecent attack on our sector indecent, wrongheaded, lawless, authoritarian, fascistic—choose your words. But if you sit there and worry about the sociology department and whether Near East studies is really antisemitic, I think you’re doing their work of authoritarianism.”

When I posted this quote on Bluesky, there was a lot of responses that amounted to, “why can’t other university presidents be more outspoken like Roth?” The implication in the question is that Roth is an outlier in publicly calling out the Trump administration and its acolytes. Why have other university leaders been more reticent?

I offered one explanation for this three months ago:

Remember that an awful lot of university presidents — heck, an awful lot of university administrators, period — are interim at the moment. They lack leadership training. Furthermore, a lot of big university donors are sympathetic to the Trump administration’s actions… This set of circumstances will often push university leadership towards more risk-averse strategies. In the current moment that means not saying or doing all that much. The logic would be that getting attacked is one thing; getting attacked after speaking out invites recriminations from some stakeholders — especially if the attacks in turn trigger mass layoffs.

It is worth revisiting this question now. As the Trump administration’s war on higher education has come into fuller view, a few things have become increasingly clear:

1. The Trump administration is employing every tool of coercion in its arsenal;

2. The Trump administration is an extremely unreliable negotiating partner;

3. For some research universities, the choice to bargain seems like the best of a bad set of choices. I don’t think that is true, but I get why they are making that choice.

Let’s start with with the coercion, because the evidence is mounting that the Trump administration is placing enormous pressure on specific U.S. universities to toe their line — or else.

Consider the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt and Michael Bender’s story on the administration’s specific ask of the University of Virginia to settle a Justice Department investigation:

The Trump administration has privately demanded that the University of Virginia oust its president to help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The extraordinary condition the Justice Department has put on the school demonstrates that President Trump’s bid to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which he views as hostile to conservatives, is more far-reaching than previously understood.

The government’s extensive pressure campaign has stripped billions of dollars from elite universities, including Harvard, which has been the target of investigations from at least six different federal agencies. But this is the first time the administration has pushed a university to remove its leader….

The demand to remove Mr. Ryan was made over the past month on several occasions by Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, to university officials and representatives, according to the three people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Brown, a University of Virginia graduate who, as a private lawyer, sued the school, is taking a major role in the investigation. He told a university representative as recently as this past week that Mr. Ryan needed to go in order for the process of resolving the investigation to begin, two of the people said….

“This is a tactic you would expect the government to use when it’s playing hard ball in a criminal case involving a corporation accused of serious wrongdoing or pervasive criminal activity,” said Daniel C. Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia University and a former federal prosecutor.

The University of Virginia is hardly the only university facing significant vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the federal government. The NYT’s Vimal Patel notes that Johns Hopkins tried to pre-empt attacks by the Trump administration. As it turns out, however, making pre-emptive concessions does not seem to be working.

For years, [Johns Hopkins University president Ronald J. Daniels] has been warning that higher education should make efforts to attract more conservatives to the ranks. His school has pushed for more viewpoint diversity and has touted a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank….

Those efforts do not appear to have protected the university. Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the United States, has been one of the hardest hit by a Republican effort to reduce federal funding flowing to schools.

The Trump administration has not singled out Johns Hopkins with lists of demands or threats that it would be cut off from funding, as the administration has done with Harvard and Columbia. Still, Johns Hopkins has already laid off more than 2,000 people in the wake of an $800 million research cut. And officials of the university are bracing for deeper cuts to the $4.2 billion it receives in annual federal research money….

Mr. Daniels, who declined to comment for this story through a spokesman, has tried not to poke the federal bear. He did not join a letter signed by more than 600 college leaders urging resistance to the Trump administration.

Even Harvard University’s leadership, which has the resources and public sympathy to sustain a longer holdout against the federal government, has shown signs of buckling. Writing in the Harvard Crimson, Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky argue that what is being reported as negotiation looks more like extortion:

When presidents can determine whether or not private universities are behaving — as President Trump put it —“appropriately,” according to their own ideological criteria, we no longer live in a democracy.

Not only is the administration’s behavior authoritarian, but its current leverage over Harvard was attained through a series of illegal acts. As the University’s lawsuits clearly show, the government violated the law and the Constitution when it arbitrarily withheld billions of dollars in congressionally approved research funds. Using the power of the federal government to punish a university because you don’t like its politics is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

So the terms of any negotiation are these: The Trump administration’s illegal actions imposed severe hardship on Harvard. It is now offering relief from some of that illegally imposed hardship in exchange for Harvard’s adoption of policies that are aligned with the government’s ideology. This is not a “negotiation.” It is extortion. It’s like negotiating the terms of a mugging.

As with any case of extortion, it must be tempting for University leaders to seek a deal.

This is the environment that U.S. research university presidents are currently facing. They face a hostile administration that holds leverage over research funds and international student visas — and does not care that employing such leverage is likely illegal.

With that kind of negotiating partner, it is easy to see why so many university presidents are searching for the easy way out. Of course, what these stories also show is that there is no bargaining assurances when it comes to the Trump administration. Even schools like Columbia or Johns Hopkins that have met the administration more than halfway are finding themselves receiving minimal relief.

So why aren’t there more Michael Roths? There are — but they’re running liberal arts colleges, not not research universities. For example, my alma mater Williams College paused all NSF and NIH grants because of the confusing, contradictory mandates regarding DEI.

Williams and Wesleyan can afford to do this because they are liberal arts colleges that do not rely too much on federal dollars. For research university presidents, the costs of outspokenness are more visible. Research universities rely more heavily on Ph.D. programs and federal research funds. The Trump administration seems happy to rock that boat, and I suspect university presidents will attempt to bend over backwards to keep the boat afloat and not risk administration ire. I have interacted with multiple university presidents since the start of the year, and the inherent risk aversion radiating from them is palpable. The costs of resisting a vengeful federal government are immediately visible; the costs of attempted conciliation can stay hidden for a spell.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to see more university presidents emulate Michael Roth. But it is very easy for me to say that from the cheap seats when I have zero interest in running a multi-million dollar enterprise with thousands of jobs on the line. University presidents whose institutions need federal funding face far greater challenges than Roth — which is the biggest reason they have been quieter.