The administration is showing increased willingness to leverage federal funding against schools, said Todd Wolfson, president of the advocacy group American Association of University Professors.

“They are bullies pressing full strength on higher education to see where institutions break,” he said. “And where they break, they’re going to follow with a lot more force. What starts at Columbia doesn’t end at Columbia.”

“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Ellen Schrecker, historian and member of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom. “The damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education.”

“The reason why the United States of America has the most advanced research infrastructure in the world is because of its relationship to the federal government, and if we want to stay the most important nation in the world … there is no way forward without the federal government being intimately involved in the support of, not control over, but support of our research infrastructure,” said Todd Wolfson, national president of the American Association of University Professors.

“The Trump administration and their approach to higher education is probably the worst and most destructive approach to higher education I’ve ever seen in the history of this country,” said Wolfson.

“The workers and the unions, faculty, students, staff are leading and developing the fight in how to respond to the Trump administration, and we’re sort of dragging the universities along with us, slowly,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, which has led faculty organising efforts on many campuses and filed four separate lawsuits against the administration over its attacks on universities.

Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which filed a lawsuit earlier this month to block the Trump administration’s cuts, praised the university for taking legal action.

“It is high time for leading civil society institutions like Harvard to refuse and resist this federal government overreach and abuse,” said Kirsten Weld, a history professor at Harvard and president of the AAUP Harvard faculty chapter.

“College campuses have historically been the places where these kind of conversations, these kind of robust debates and dissent take place in the United States. It’s healthy for democracy. And they’re trying to destroy all of that in order to enact their vision and depraved agenda.”

“Institutions that stood up are remembered for standing up to that power & that coercion, they're remembered for their acts of bravery. Institutions that capitulated are remembered for their willingness to cave to autocratic demands.”

— Risa Lieberwitz, president of the Cornell chapter of the AAUP

"Researchers are receiving a stop work order for wanting to understand things like differences in infant mortality in ubran and rural communities. That's being labeled as DEI. The slash and burn approach to our research is unfair, unlawful, and fundamentally wrong." — AAUP president Todd Wolfson