The conversation between two Rutgers University professors that lit a fire in U.S. higher education circles lasted only about 10 minutes.
The professors — one teaches chemistry in Camden, N.J., the other psychology in Newark — said they were frustrated by the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to research funding and its efforts to dictate policy on some campuses.
They were also troubled by the lack of a unified response by university leaders.
“We needed to write something that had some meat,” said David Salas-de la Cruz, who directs the chemistry graduate program at Rutgers University-Camden. He likened the effort to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, a military alliance of 32 countries.
“This is not just about money,” he said. “This is about the essence of education.”
So late last month, Professor Salas-de la Cruz and Paul Boxer, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Newark, drafted a one-page “mutual defense compact.” It was a one-for-all, all-for-one statement of solidarity among schools in the Big Ten athletic and academic conference — 18 large, predominantly public universities that together enroll roughly 600,000 students each year. “An infringement against one member university,” they wrote, “shall be considered an infringement against all.”
Participating schools would be asked to commit to making a “unified and vigorous response” when member universities were “under direct political or legal infringement.” Faculty members might, for example, be asked to provide legal services, strategic communication or expert testimony.
The compact, now approved by faculty at more than a dozen universities, does not come with a commitment by school administrators to provide financial backing for a joint defense fund, and detractors have criticized the initiative as largely toothless.
Still, the Rutgers resolution, and the professors’ effort to galvanize a collective response, reflected a shift in strategy.
“Higher education, as an entity, is definitely worth fighting for,” Professor Boxer said.
“The idea of a country where generative research gets cut down to the point where it’s under the thumb of the federal government,” he added, “is contrary to everything I believe in.”
Throughout March, elite universities had been targeted, one by one, for large funding cuts as the Trump administration opened investigations into diversity policies and whether administrators were doing enough to protect Jewish students from harassment. Federal immigration agents began making a show of moving to deport international students who had spoken out against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Under President Trump, the National Science Foundation has canceled more than 400 awards that commonly fuel university research. And the National Institutes of Health, a major source of biomedical research funding in the United States, terminated roughly 780 grants, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group.
Rutgers itself was among 60 colleges and universities to receive a warning in March that federal officials had begun an inquiry into whether it had violated Jewish students’ civil rights by failing to safeguard them from discrimination.
Schools were struggling to navigate the broadside when Columbia University, in a remarkable concession to Mr. Trump, agreed to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department as it sought to avoid a $400 million federal funding cut.
It was against this backdrop that the faculty senate at Rutgers, New Jersey’s flagship state university, came together to vote on the professors’ hastily drafted resolution.
No member of the Rutgers senate criticized the compact publicly before it was approved on March 28, by a vote of 62 to 17, Professor Boxer said. But in emails, some employees expressed concern that it risked making Rutgers an even bigger target for the Trump administration.
“We had to accept,” Professor Boxer said, “that somebody had to be first.”
Since then, nine additional Big Ten schools, including the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and the University of Washington, have passed resolutions nearly identical to the one Rutgers adopted.
Outside the Big Ten, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the State University of New York, and at least three City University of New York schools — Hunter, Hostos and City College — have also adopted similar statements of solidarity. Faculty senates at several other colleges are expected to vote in the coming weeks.
Some faculty members are skeptical that the resolutions will make much of a difference.
“At most universities, faculty senates have very little power, if any,” said Keith Riles, a physics professor who was one of 214 employees at the University of Michigan who voted against that school’s compact. “I do not expect these motions to have much effect on what administrations choose to do.”
And, he said, he does not believe that President Trump’s critique of higher education is completely misguided. Professor Riles said he had long opposed university hiring policies that were based on diversity, equity and inclusion goals, which he believes are illegal and discriminate against white and Asian men.
“Choose your battles and your allies wisely,” he urged colleagues before Michigan’s faculty vote began on April 17, according to a written summary of his comments. “It is not a very sound strategy to die on a D.E.I. hill in a legal, mutual suicide pact.”
About 2,760 of his colleagues disagreed, and the resolution passed with 93 percent support.
Rutgers’s president, Jonathan Holloway, has said that while he supports the “ethos” of the initiative, he could not provide additional support because he was stepping down at the end of the academic year, according to the Rutgers student news outlet.
In a statement this week, a university spokeswoman reiterated Dr. Holloway’s “appreciation for the resolution” and said Rutgers would continue to support efforts to “reverse federal actions that are detrimental to our mission.”
Even without overt buy-in from administrators, supporters said the clear goals first laid out by the Rutgers faculty had already been instrumental in helping to shift the tone of the national debate.
Last week, Harvard University sued the Trump administration over billions of dollars in proposed cuts rather than accede to the president’s demands. And after months of silence, more than 500 university administrators have now signed a statement opposing “government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
John Verzani, chairman of CUNY’s faculty senate, credited Rutgers with having an “enormous” role in the evolving narrative.
“It definitely set off a rush within faculty senates to create this sort of alliance,” Professor Verzani said.
Todd Wolfson, a journalism professor, leads Rutgers’s faculty union. He is also president of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization.
He said he considered the effort to protect academic freedom and the independence of research institutions an existential battle.
“As goes higher ed,” Professor Wolfson said, “so goes the U.S.”
Michael Yarbrough, who contributes to a website called We Are Higher Ed, which has been tracking university responses to the Trump administration, noted that officials from community colleges, large research universities and Ivy League schools are now sharing information in a 60-person group chat.
Professor Yarbrough, who teaches about law and society at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, likened the value of the group chat, and the networks now forming among faculty members at far-flung schools with mutual defense compacts in place, to a sociology theory known as the “strength of weak ties.”
“It’s understandable that some people may be fearful,” Professor Yarbrough said. “But what we’ve done is to focus on something that’s within our control: to ally with each other.”
