A short statement published by the American Association of Colleges and Universities last week signaled new coordination among school leaders to push back against President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to increase White House control over American higher education.
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While Nashville universities Belmont, Lipscomb and Vanderbilt are AAC&U members, they did not join the 400-plus signatories, which include Sewanee’s University of the South and Rhodes College in Memphis. No public university in Tennessee signed on. Fisk University, Trevecca Nazarene University and American Baptist College are not AAC&U members.
“As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” reads the statement, dated April 22. “We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses. We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.”
Without directly naming the president or invoking partisan politics, authors offer the note as a conciliatory overture arguing the importance of academic funding and institutional autonomy. Leading campuses including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke and MIT joined smaller institutions like Williams College and Amherst College on the statement. No SEC schools — all of which are AAC&U members — co-signed the message, making its signatory list an early proxy for emerging political battle lines in American higher education.
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Vanderbilt recently drew praise from U.S. Rep. Mark Green and U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, both Trump-aligned Republicans, at a national security conference hosted by the school. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier has defended the school’s equivocations on national and geopolitical issues as part of a “principled neutrality” doctrine. At the same time, Vanderbilt relies on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grant funding vulnerable to termination by the Trump administration.
“Over the last weeks, we have been actively engaged in personal advocacy, with and without university partners,” reads a statement provided by the university to the campus paper, the Vanderbilt Hustler. “We are also working through our primary association, the Association of American Universities, to advocate on behalf of America’s leading research universities. Last week the AAU issued a statement in support of Harvard [University].”
The AAU is a separate organization from the AAC&U.
