Last week, Stanford was one of 60 institutions to receive a letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they did not fulfill their obligations to protect Jewish students. This followed the government’s assault on Columbia University a few days earlier, with a letter issuing a set of unlawful demands (as members of Columbia’s law school faculty have explained), stripping the university of $400 million in federal grants as punishment for “antisemitism.” These accusations of antisemitism come from people who have long made political use of antisemitism themselves, from the promulgation of antisemitic conspiracy theories to Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes. After the Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting “the Jews will not replace us!” President Donald Trump insisted that there were “very fine people on both sides” and has continued to traffic in antisemitic tropes.

Against this pattern, the Trump administration’s charges of antisemitism levelled at Columbia and other universities conjure an Orwellian world in which the slogans of the totalitarian ruling party bamboozle the opposition by representing everything as its opposite: “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” “ignorance is strength.” Antisemitism is anti-antisemitism.

Let us not be fooled. The government’s war on the universities uses “Jews as a shield to justify a naked attack on political dissent and university independence,” as almost two thousand Jewish professors, students and staff members from universities all across the country have said in a public statement. Their statement protests the unlawful arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student who was involved in campus protests for Palestinian rights, and calls upon universities to demand his immediate release.

The phony war against antisemitism is just one front of the Trump administration’s war on American higher education (and even education abroad). The leaders of this war make no secret of it. In a 2021 speech, Vice President J.D. Vance proclaimed that “the universities are the enemy,” and Christopher Rufo, a far-right activist and key strategist for the government’s attack, told the New York Times that its purpose is to inflict “existential terror.”

But astonishingly, so far, no one has risen to the defense of these universities, not even the universities themselves. In response to directives to eliminate programs and sacrifice our pedagogical and scholarly autonomy to political control, universities including Stanford have been scrambling to comply instead of resisting and defying.

America’s universities are worth fighting for. As an unparalleled locus of learning, research, scholarship and social transformation, they are one of our country’s greatest achievements and most important contributions to the world. They have been at the epicenter of social and political forces, with a history containing both heroic and ignoble episodes. But as centers of free inquiry, critical thinking and dissent, they are essential to American civil society. It’s no surprise that the Trump administration regards them as its enemies. Free inquiry, critical thinking and dissent are anathema to any regime aspiring to authoritarian control.

This is also why obedience and compliance are not only cowardly, but will be fruitless. The Trump regime will not be satisfied until universities are reduced to empty husks that pose no threat to a corrupt and violent oligarchy. Shall we continue rushing to eliminate from our vocabulary everything on the administration’s list of taboo words and phrases, including “climate science,” “belong,” “historically” and “women”? Soon we too will be talking mindless MAGA gibberish.

The American Association of University Professors has issued a call for universities to fight back. Together with several other organizations, they have challenged the constitutionality of recent executive orders seeking to control the content of university research and teaching, resulting in a nationwide injunction from a Maryland court. But instead of taking on this struggle — or even waiting for definitive court rulings — universities, including Stanford, have preemptively begun removing language from websites, reviewing programs, suspending projects and shrinking graduate admissions, even though Columbia’s fate shows that compliance offers no safety.

We commend Stanford’s leadership for reiterating its commitments to free speech and free inquiry in its internal communications. But public speech and action are desperately needed. Stanford’s policy of institutional neutrality authorizes the university to take a position specifically when its very mission is politically threatened. That’s exactly what’s happening now: our core mission is under an unprecedented threat. Let us meet this moment with courage and determination. As Stanford’s signature “Why COLLEGE?” first-year course makes clear, education is about ethics and citizenship as much as skill acquisition. Let us model the integrity we work to instill in our students. 

We join a growing chorus of voices calling upon universities to stand up and fight, including Stanford law professor Shirin Sinnar who, in January, urged the University administration to resist. Last week, political scientists and scholars of autocracy Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky wrote in the Harvard Crimson that if one university tries to confront the Trump administration on its own it will lose, but if “America’s nearly 6,000 universities and colleges launch a campaign in defense of higher education,” we can prevail. Meanwhile, our struggle itself will represent the continuing vitality of all that we seek to defend. On the other hand, if we remain silent and cowed, and fail to support the few who have bravely taken a principled stand, we capitulate without protest to the forces of ignorance, prejudice, corruption and brute power.

The silence from the leaders of our university — at least in public — suggests the assault has already produced the intended chilling effect, but together we can overcome it. We call upon Stanford’s administration to join with other universities in publicly denouncing and defying the unconstitutional government attack on higher education, and making its dangers clear to the American public. As Yale professor Meghan O’Rourke writes in the New York Times, it is “an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.” If ever a moment called for leadership and collective action, that moment is now.

War is not peace. Antisemitism is not anti-antisemitism. And silence is not leadership.

Jessica Riskin is a Frances and Charles Field professor of history.

Priya Satia is a Raymond A. Spruance professor of international history.