Vanderbilt University students and faculty rallied against Chancellor Daniel Diermeier underneath the stately brick clocktower of Kirkland Hall on Wednesday morning. The event, organized by Indivisible’s Vanderbilt chapter, is the latest display of public opposition to Diermeier as campus tensions escalate following the chancellor’s noncommittal Oct. 20 response to a sweetheart funding deal offered by the Trump administration. The Trump compact, as it's come to be known, was offered to nine top American academic institutions in exchange for broad control over university life.
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Frustrated faculty and students spoke to a raucous crowd outside Kirkland Hall — the school’s administrative center, where Diermeier and other top officials have offices — to rally supporters against Trump’s university deal. Fiery speeches from students, professors and faculty members all bashed Diermeier. They see the chancellor’s equivocation on Trump’s proposed compact as an abandonment of academic freedom, bending the university to political influence and conceding the school’s power to hire and enroll whom it chooses.
“ We are here to fight the compact, but we are here as part of a bigger struggle,” said Jonathan Gilligan, a professor of earth and environmental sciences who arrived at the university in 1994. “The administration tries to divide us — they try to divide the students from the faculty, from the staff. But we are together in solidarity.”
Gilligan unfavorably compared Diermeier, who joined Vanderbilt as chancellor in 2019 (and whose contract was recently extended through 2035), to past chancellors Gordon Gee and Nicholas Zeppos. Diermeier’s reputation on campus has suffered from his perceived unilateral decision-making around the compact, with detractors casting him as an ivory-tower CEO rather than a consensus builder.
Other faculty, professors, undergraduate students and one law school student traded the bullhorn, filling 45 minutes with impassioned pleas and rallying supporters with chants. Jessie Hock, a professor of English, made an impromptu speech criticizing new “private property” signs lining campus entrances.
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“Here we are, fighting for this university, and we have to fight against the university in the form of this administration,” Hock told a cheering crowd. “They should be fighting with us. They don't see the federal administration as a threat — they see us as a threat. They don't see negotiating with bad-faith actors as an existential threat to this university and to education in general — they see us talking to each other as a threat.”
The Vanderbilt University Faculty Senate last month adopted a resolution to reject the Trump compact, and the Vanderbilt chapter of the American Association of University Professors also voiced opposition to the compact.
"We believe free expression and constructive debate are essential to a university’s mission of transformative education and pathbreaking discovery," reads a statement provided by Vanderbilt University. "Members of our community continue to share their thoughts and ideas, which help to inform continued conversation with leaders in government and higher education to restore trust in America’s great research universities.”
