Ever since President Donald Trump has reclaimed the Oval Office, higher education has been heading down a slippery slope. Students, faculty and the administration alike have to come together before we slide down too far.
Messages have filled the community’s inboxes about the Trump administration cutting funding for universities and targeting pro-Palestinian protesters and immigrants at some of the most prestigious schools in the country, including deportations and arrests. A week ago, federal immigration agents detained former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil for his involvement in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring. Shortly after, Columbia officials agreed to a string of federal demands, like placing restrictions on protests and reviewing its Middle East curriculum, to restore $400 million in funding that the Trump administration recently revoked over its campus protests.
GW stands in the eye of the higher education hurricane. The University could lose millions of federal dollars if they don’t comply with Trump’s rules. Officials are under close scrutiny by the Department of Justice as the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism investigates last spring’s pro-Palestinian protests, and they’re already revising demonstration policies and placing signs on campus outlining rules on free expression. This past weekend, GW Law removed their diversity page from their website. We need GW to reassure us they won’t bend further to Trump’s will, and students and faculty have to come together to make sure they don’t.
Our editorial board has urged GW to stand up for their students. With their initial concessions to Trump, they haven’t. What’s happened so far at the University is relatively small, sure — one web page being removed doesn’t redefine higher education. But that’s just the first step onto a very long, very slippery slope of ways the Trump administration could hack away at GW. We have to make sure that as a community, we’re not letting anything slide. We have to do our part to push against threats to our University by spreading awareness of changes at GW to fill the voids that our leaders have left vacant.
The problem we’re facing is that so many of the ways GW has caved to Trump are hard to notice. We might not all be able to tell when a particular web page gets removed or a particular department loses funding. But someone will: a chemistry professor will know when their department suddenly loses its resources. We need all the community stakeholders — professors and students to talk about what’s happening so we don’t let too many unnoticed events pass until its too late. If we let ourselves happily give in on the small issues, there won’t be any networks to fight back if Trump tries to engage in more drastic attacks.
Right now, campus is silent. There are no protests or marches or any sort of public outcry directed at the Trump administration from GW students, with the exception of ongoing activism from pro-Palestinian groups — who are currently banned from hosting events for not allowing officials to attend their events. Instead, we have the GW College Democrats and GW College Republicans holding panels on how to get a job on Capitol Hill, turning a blind eye to the tumult unfolding in the federal workforce. Even our more politically active schools, like the law school or the Elliott School of International Affairs, haven’t offered panels or town halls to discuss Trump’s executive actions as a community.
Our professors, regardless of whether they teach chemistry, literature or economics, have an inside look as to what’s currently unfolding in higher education and what we can do to stay afloat. They’re in a unique position to guide their students about which headlines are worth worrying about or even simply offer a listening ear. STEM professors could be unpacking how the National Institutes of Health funding cuts could impact students, and our Middle Eastern studies professors could be talking about what it means for Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department going under receivership because of Trump. The end goal isn’t always finding a solution or conclusion, it’s the notion of sitting down and starting the conversation that is crucial.
Even if our professors are also struggling to understand what’s going on or the full effects of the multitude of executive actions, it is always better to have those conversations and figure it out together. And to our faculty, many of us want to know and understand what is going on. We’re in need of a forum to discuss what’s happening, especially when our University isn’t stepping up to the plate. We already have events like “Community Listening Circles,” at GW, but we need to make sure that we’re actually going to these events and having those conversations. We might not be able to hold a town hall meeting or dedicate a whole hour every class to Trump’s administration, but it can start with simply making more space for those conversations, spreading information about all the little but worrying ways the University has been affected in the first two months of the second term.
These are pressing times for the GW community and for higher education as a whole. Right now, we are all trying to figure out how to move forward, individually and collectively. But the way to move forward is to first start talking about the issues in front of us rather than sweep them under the rug. And as we keep moving forward, we need to remember history has its eyes on us.
We have to ask each other how we want GW to be remembered in this administration.
The editorial board consists of Hatchet staff members and operates separately from the newsroom. This week’s staff editorial was written by Opinions Editor Andrea Mendoza-Melchor, based on discussions with Contributing Culture Editor Caitlin Kitson, Research Assistant Carly Cavanaugh, Copy Editor Lindsay Larson and Culture Editor Nick Perkins.
