Neither Silence nor Compliance Will Save Harvard From Trump. Resistance Might.

Let us begin by making one thing clear: There is no such thing as “woke ideology.” That’s a fantasy.

Popularized by Erykah Badu’s 2008 track “Master Teacher,” the phrase “stay woke” entered widespread usage around 2014, during the Ferguson uprising, as a slogan urging activists and others to maintain focus in spite of the inevitable set of temptations and distractions that would emerge in the wake of the struggle in the streets. There is not and never was a “woke” policy platform. Ironically, the idea that there is has become the biggest distraction of all.

Here are some things that do exist: racial inequality, economic precarity, and gender-based entitlement and animus. As critics both within and outside the University hunt for witches, we must protect the individuals, academic units and bodies of knowledge devoted to rectifying these injustices. If we do not, it seems almost certain that we will all go down together.

Not long ago, it appeared as if universities would lead an effort to reckon with these problems. In response to uprisings inspired by high-profile killings of Black people from 2012 to 2020, universities began to acknowledge their historical legacies of slavery and admit some responsibility to redress the downstream effects of the wrongs from which they had benefited.

These efforts were consequential for the way that many of our colleagues and students felt about their lives and work at Harvard. But they rarely seemed to reach beyond the walls of the institution; they were generally limited to the imperatives of inclusion in the existing forms of university life rather than the transformation of the role of the university in society more broadly.

Instead of addressing the fundamental problems that had been brought to light by the demonstrations in the streets, institutions, including our own, chose to pursue a form of “diversity” that looked more like corporate personnel management.

And yet, even as universities were moving one way, the mood among many politicians was shifting decisively in the other direction. Numerous states passed laws restricting teaching on gender studies, race, and racism. These attacks continued after the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard barred the use of racial identity as a factor in college admissions.

This decision seemed to be a death knell for the role of “diversity” in institutional decision-making and social transformation in the United States. One might have expected the race panic would abate. Instead, it intensified.

Since the 2025 presidential inauguration, attacks on “DEI” have sought to reverse the gains of the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. This assault has absolutely nothing to do with restoring merit, talent, experience, or even competence in hiring practices. Instead, as has been pointed out by journalist Adam Serwer, among others, these executive orders clear the way for “policies intended to sustain a de facto segregation that is more durable and less overt, one in which Black access to the middle and elite strata of American life will be ever more rare and fleeting.”

Black progress has been the measure of civil rights gains since Reconstruction. Its reversal augurs not just resegregation, but along with it, a dangerously misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic political culture. By demonizing a set of institutional practices in educational institutions — practices that, according to many legal experts, remain lawful under Federal Civil Rights Law and Supreme Court precedent — Trumpism has given itself license to attack the most vulnerable among us.

Not a small measure of this recent history, it must be said, was made at Harvard. In the wake of Oct. 7, 2023, a growing chorus blamed student protests for associating Israel with the history of colonial racism. Criticism of Israel, they argued, resulted from a simple-minded “oppressor/oppressed” worldview or “identity politics” that “have too often had the effect of driving discrimination against groups whose members have been most committed to the values of rigorous study and intellectual inquiry.”

Accusations of insufficient institutional support of Israel and Jewish students were then projected onto Harvard’s beleaguered soon-to-be ex-president Claudine Gay. The proxy attack on Gay soon broadened into an attack on Black women at Harvard more generally and has now been swept up in the tide of Trumpist derogation and retaliation.

Throughout all of this, the University administration has remained largely silent, while its bureaucracy has subtly shifted to the goal of fostering “understanding across differences” (i.e. intellectual diversity). Yet Harvard’s repeated efforts to pacify its critics over the past fifteen months, including the failure to defend Black women on the faculty from unprincipled attacks on their scholarship and its embrace of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, have only yielded broader attacks and a hostile Department of Justice investigation along with the threat of jailing pro-Palestinian activists participating in “illegal protests.”

Cowering does not stop bullying, and no matter how much we wish it were otherwise, Harvard and other universities are not going to be able to hide in plain sight. That’s why the American Association of University Professors has been fighting back.

On Feb. 21, the AAUP successfully joined several other organizations in challenging the constitutionality of two executive orders targeting DEI practices. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland granted a preliminary nationwide injunction, preventing the Trump administration from using federal grants and contracts as leverage to force colleges and universities to comply with their agenda, for the time being.

It is possible to resist the purges, spiteful persecution, and racist social engineering ordered by the Trump administration. We know because we are doing it.

As members of the executive committee of the AAUP’s Harvard Faculty Chapter, we urge the Harvard administration to forthrightly join us in defending all of our colleagues from racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic (and just plain uninformed) thought policing.

Sacrificing the principles and independence of the University in the short-term hope of pacifying the administration will not work. By abandoning our most vulnerable and stigmatized colleagues, we would simply invite further threats and the eventual destruction of things that are worth fighting for.

Now is the time for the richest University in the world to live by its principles, to draw a line and stand its ground, while it might still make a difference.

Vincent A. Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and a professor of African and African American Studies. Walter Johnson is the Winthrop Professor of History and a professor of African and African American Studies. They are members of the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors-Harvard Faculty Chapter.