After a year of Trump, fear is the dominant emotion on US campuses

One year into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, it hardly seems revelatory to describe the mood among US university staff as dismayed and fearful. But, as researchers based in the UK and Australia, we were not aware of the full depth of the fear until we were told that our research into that mood could not be published.

For a chapter in a book about resilience and leadership, we surveyed US university staff last year to examine attitudes and responses to the challenges thrown up by the Trump administration, compared with those posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Our interviewees came from both venerable universities with significant endowments and lower-status state schools with a heavier reliance on public funding. We spoke to people working in both “red” and “blue” states; both academics and those in professional services.

There were some differences in the responses. Colleagues from an academic background were generally more philosophical, and those at state schools felt more vulnerable. But every respondent cited the rapid and far-reaching changes introduced by the second Trump administration as a crisis.

“I do see echoes of what we experienced during the pandemic,” one respondent told us: “waves of disruption, threats to our core mission(s), a fatigued workforce.”

It is also a workforce worried for its future. Among the Trump-induced challenges are rapid reductions and cancellations in research funding – including cancelling grants already pledged, especially when the project brief contains keywords flagged by AI to indicate support for DEI.

One respondent reported an increase in tensions between colleagues “stemming from the question: where do we cut? There is going to be reduction in labour...and this seems to be increasing pressure on already challenging internal relationships.”

Another is worried that the difficulty of managing in such a febrile environment is such that fewer capable people will be willing to take on leadership roles. As one respondent put it, “Leaders often find themselves caught in the crosshairs of simmering tensions that might arise among internal and external stakeholders.”

In that sense, the Trump crisis is being experienced very differently from the Covid crisis. Though the pandemic also imposed financial pressures on the sector, posing a risk of cuts, it was seen as emerging from the “outside”: a common foe against which all levels of government united with the people and regarding which there was the potential for mitigation and a clear end point.

By contrast, Trump’s actions were voted for and supported by many fellow Americans – including, presumably, academic colleagues. The source of the challenge, therefore, is commonly perceived as being “from everyone – including our neighbours, our co-workers – who chose this”, one respondent told us. “So how can we have a [common] response to something that we ourselves are responsible for?”

Another observed that while government support helped stabilise higher education during the pandemic, “many of today’s challenges are shaped – or, at times, intensified – by government actions or policies, highlighting a more complex and strained relationship between higher education and government officials.”

It may be that these perspectives are simplified or intensified, as they were provided to us at the height of the initial wave of attacks from the administration, but the lived experience of the interviewees is genuine. They speak to a vastly increased level of uncertainty and, more insidiously, a pervasive distrust stemming from uncertainty about the political views of peers.

“Trust is breaking down within the institution,” one respondent said. “Who made this happen? Half the people in the country voted for this? Half the people I sit next to every day. This feels deeply angering. It starts with incredulity that it could have happened. But, with anonymous voting, people don’t know [how many colleagues voted for Trump, so] there’s no one to be angry with, which makes [the anger] unspoken and all the more challenging.”

It isn’t just the responses we received, but the way we received them, which is striking. Some respondents declined to use certain technologies out of concerns about surveillance. Others worded their responses very carefully, noting that they were expressing individual views and not speaking on behalf of their institutions. This level of concern is not our usual higher education experience.

Consequently, even those who, in the past, would have vocally opposed attacks on higher education have “gone quiet”, one respondent noted. “They may feel overwhelmed or afraid. In Covid, we unified against an enemy [with a sense of] ‘there is a thing; it is no one’s fault’. Today, it is politically precarious for a university president to assemble a committee and say, ‘We need to respond to this.’”

If we search for a positive note, some respondents described the upheaval as an opportunity for institutions to frame themselves differently, as any industry might do when faced with changed societal views. However, most responses reflected trepidation about the future, reflecting that, whatever happens, there will be no easy way back – particularly given Republican gerrymandering of congressional districts and what one respondent called “a very strong sense that Trump is not going away at the end of the second term” despite the two-term constitutional limit.

Hence, fear was the dominant emotion. As one respondent put it, “Fear seems to be a desired outcome [of Trump’s actions]. It feels like a retribution.”

The level of fear is such that respondents were insistent that we could only publish the book chapter with a guarantee of anonymity for all – even for us as researchers, via whom, otherwise, they worried they may be traced. And though we agreed, even this turned out not to be enough because when we submitted the book chapter to the editor, an academic on the path to US citizenship, he was not comfortable publishing it at all, for fear that it would affect his visa status and his family’s livelihood.

The irony is heavy. And as the first anniversary of Trump’s second term comes around, we can’t help but wonder how many other stories remain untold – and how long US universities will be able to claim to still pursue the truth without fear or favour.

The authors are university staff members based in the UK and Australia. They have asked not to be named to protect the identities of the individuals referred to in this piece.