8/1/25

A VOICE OF CAMPUS CAPITULATION
What it sounds like when higher-ed
kowtows to the schoolyard bully

BROWN UNIVERSITY's campus. Brown recently reached a "settlement" with the Trump administration: CREDIT: Brown University

 STUPID ME. It’s taken me years to figure out what’s wrong with our country, or, more to the point, who is wrong with the country.
     And it’s not Donald Trump, the psychopath and the most accomplished extortionist-gangster-bully president in American history; nor, for that matter, is it one of the slavish, suck-up enablers of Trump's Republican cult; nor is it one of the Trump whisperers, like the loathsome aide Stephen Miller, the presumed architect of Trump's racist immigration pogrom.
     The people who are undermining the country are outwardly the  most respectable, admired and upright people among us. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s call this convocation of thugs, traitors and turncoats by their official titles: college presidents and trustees.
     What a disgusting, repugnant bunch.
     While the rest of us are wringing our hands and self-flagellating about “what can we do” to reverse Trump’s assault on America and democracy, we are being double-crossed by this supposedly  articulate, well-dressed, highly credentialed, and probably decent-smelling gang of academic betrayers.
      They are allowing Trump to extort their institutions of higher education by reaching “settlements” that are nothing more than shakedown demands in which power, not money, is the extorter-in-chief’s most favored kind of tribute.
     By caving in to Trump to protect their own interests, the compliant campuses trigger a chain reaction of capitulation throughout the educational eco-system, which then extends to businesses, non-profit organizations, religious institutions and other sectors in the rest of the country. 
     You’d think that the university and college royalty would be in the best position – due to its vast intellectual and institutional resources – to confront the most common kind of educational outlaw: the schoolyard bully.
     But instead of teaching the rest of us about how to neuter and defeat the schoolyard bully, the higher-ed crowd is conducting a national seminar in capitulation and humiliation, empowering the bully to succeed beyond his wildest expectations.
     Recently, I actually heard an actual Voice of Capitulation, spelling out the rationalizations, defeatism and doublespeak that threatens not only the leafy campuses of academia, but the country itself.
     The forum was the weekday midday radio program, “Boston Public Radio,” (*see correction at end) produced by GBH, the Boston public broadcasting superpower and featuring long-time co-hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braudy, who have an engaging sweet-and-sour chemistry and a relentless liberal focus.
     One of their interviewees this day – July 29 – was a regular guest of the show, M. Lee Pelton, former president at two campuses, Willamette University in Oregon and Emerson College in Massachusetts and, since 2021,  CEO of the Boston Foundation.
     I don’t know anything about Pelton, who may have a personal history of educational accomplishment and social heroism, but on this day, he gave a shocking, if candid, rationale for kowtowing to Trump.
     What follows is a transcript I made of a portion of the interview, which you can hear for yourself on the station’s podcast, at this link:  https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/boston-public-radio/bpr-full-show-7-29-such-as-it-is
     I apologize in advance for the awkwardness of translating a verbal exchange into a printed format. And I’ve edited some of Braude’s typically long-winded question/lectures.
     The co-hosts were concerned about a report in the New York Times that Harvard University may be edging toward a huge financial settlement with the Trump administration. They were obviously worried that Harvard might follow the lead of Columbia University, which earlier had caved into Trump’s demands for tribute to correct alleged anti-Semitism.

LEE PELTON CREDIT: The Boston Foundation

 MARGERY EAGAN:   . . .  Now, shortly after closing their diversity offices at Harvard that serve minority students, LGBTQ students and women,  they've closed that over there at Harvard, now, they may be open to spending up to $500 million to get Trump off their back and making some concessions to the president. So what do you think?

JIM BRAUDE: Can I break up your questions? So I’m interested to hear first what you think of the done deal of the Columbia thing and then we can move on to what we're reading in the New York Times this morning, what do you think about what happened? 

LEE PELTON: Well, you know, when Bart Giamatti stepped down as the president of Yale, he said that being a college president is no way for an adult to make a living. And this is especially true these days. So the paradigm shift, which has been in existence for quite a while, but which the Trump administration has taken advantage of, is it's private universities are really not private anymore. 

EAGAN: Right. 

PELTON: They're not private, because they're beholden to federal funding of, you know, the billions of dollars, that's for Columbia, that's for Harvard. And so you find yourself in a position of having to capitulate and, you know, I think unfortunately that's just where we are. And they're just, they're, they're not the beginning, but they're one of several private universities that I think will not be able to survive with the withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal funding to support their research and other aspects of the university. 

BRAUDE: So would you've done the same thing – you were president of Emerson –  if you were confronted with the same situation… you're being accused by somebody who hangs out with neo Nazis, the President United States, of anti-Semitism? We know there is is anti-Semitism being  dealt with; we know he blows it out of proportion. And they say to you, not only do we want money from you, not only are we gonna limit your academic freedom, you have to agree to a monitor, an outside monitor to oversee your compliance. Would you agree to that? 

PELTON: I don't know. I mean, I can't speak . . . .

BRAUDE: I think you do know. 

PELTON: No, I know I can't because I can't speak to the particulars of this, of this, only what I read in the press, so I don't know what else, what are some of the other aspects of this. But you know, we live in an authoritarian, of the authoritarian federal government.

BRUADE: So you give into authoritarianism. Is that what? Because you have no choice? Because they . . . . 

PELTON: Maybe, yeah, maybe.  I don't, I don't know. I don't know what I would do in that situation, because I'm not confronted with it. I don't know all the facts, the details and so on and so forth. I think it's unfortunate. It, it upsets me to no end.

And, but, should I be upset with the fact that they  capitulated, or should I be upset because we have this authoritarian regime that is using all of its tools to bring colleges and universities to their knees? 

BRAUDE: This may be totally naive, because I've never had a job at that level of responsibility like you did when you ran Emerson or (Claire) Shipman  (acting president at Columbia)   or (President Alan) Garber over there at Harvard. But it's, there's no question that if you don't cut a deal and you lose –  well, you know, even if you win the litigation, it's about short term funding – Trump legally will probably deny billions in the future . . . . 

PELTON: Right. But it's not just money that –  this is not money. This is about people. And so, you know, dozens, hundreds of people will no longer be able to work there. Or be able to do their, you know, the lifesaving research that we all depend on. So it's not, you know, we can talk about it in terms of, of, you know, monetary perspective, but it's, it's much more than that, it's really about,  it's really about people. 

EAGAN: But you know what? You're, you're much more of an historian than I am. You're certainly much more of an expert  on  civil rights struggles than I am. It seems to me that in every kind of struggle, particularly in the civil rights struggle, there were people that were willing to say “No, I'm not   . . . . I’m gonna to stand up . . . “ at risk of their own lives, and people lost their lives,  never mind their jobs,. And it seems like that's sort of, I mean I'm quite a coward myself, so I'm not, you know,  (if) I could stand up to this kind of pressure. Do you know what I'm saying? But this doesn't; this doesn't work. 

PELTON: Yeah, but it's, maybe it doesn't, we'll see. But it's a massive, massive scale, and it involves hundreds of thousands of people. It involves giving up the search to do lifesaving research for millions of people. So you know…. 

EAGAN: So you don’t think he won’t  back down? You don't think he’ll get his  capitulation, and then he’ll say: Ha, ha, ha?

PELTON: I don't know. I, I, I have no idea whether or not he will back down. We'll, we'll see. The history is, of course, he will change his mind and some quixotic moment. So you know, we'll just, we’ll see, so . . . .

BRAUDE: Can I ask you one more thing here on this deal,  and by the way, I, I… It's very hard to say what you're saying. I know it is,  because I know you, and I know how you feel about fights, and you are a guy who fights.  But you've also been a university president . . . . 

If the most powerful university in the world gets accused of anti-Semitism. They think they have a legal case against what Trump is doing; they decide to drop it to make a settlement that  at least in part gives in to Trump. Then it seems to me that the message to Donald Trump is that you should send a letter to every single college and university that gets a dollar in federal funding, accuse them of anti-Semitism – no hearings, no nothing, no due process – and say, if it turns out you don't cut a deal with me like Harvard and Columbia did, next week, you're never getting another federal dollar. I mean, that's not a ridiculous extrapolation from the Columbia and potentially the Harvard situation. Is it? 

PELTON: No, it's not. But this is not just about anti-Semitism, this is about the erasure of DEI.

BRAUDE: Exactly! Exactly!  And the anti-Semitism thing is the cover. 

PELTON: Yeah, this is what this is about and it's,  it's – the scale it,  of the encroachment of it is really frightening and disturbing. 

BRAUDE: You talk to some of these presidents; you talk, you talk to some of these people, I assume, is that right?

PELTON: No, not so much.

BRAUDE: Really, is that true? You're not making eye contact with me? 

PELTON: No, no, I know,  I mean, I've got my own gig. . . . 

(They all  laugh at Pelton’s joke that his current job is running the community foundation, not a college or university.)

JIM BRAUDY & MARGERY EAGAN in screenshot from a 2022 video CREDIT: GBH

 I THINK EAGAN AND BRAUDY asked the right questions, and Pelton gave the wrong answers.
     Most distressing was Pelton’s defeatism.
     He  deemed that the fight is over and that, as the saying goes, resistance is futile; that the universities are out-gunned by the federal government; that the bully has all the cards.
     Further, Pelton says there’s simply too much to lose to warrant resistance – billions of dollars, vital research, hundreds and thousands of employees and their jobs..
     And that complexity confounds a solution: the “problem” has deep historical roots; the facts, unknown and known, differ from place to place.
      All of which is nonsense.
     Bullies, whether they haunt the schoolyard or the White House, succeed when the rest of us let them.
     If enough universities stand up to Trump, he cannot succeed. But if one university after another makes an individual “deal” with Trump, it  encourages the rest to fall into line.
     As of this writing, the latest cave-in is Rhode Island’s homegrown member of the Ivy League. 
     Brown University announced a “settlement” that doesn’t seem as egregious as Columbia’s. But Brown  still gave Trump his due: spending money that’s in short supply at the university for Rhode Island workforce development.  Brown also agreed not to do something it doesn’t do anyway: provide medical treatment to transsexual minors. But, by failing to robustly defend transsexuals, the agreement opens the door to Trumpian scapegoating of other minorities.
      Still, the details of the Brown agreement aren’t as important as that fact that the university agreed to a settlement in the first place. That betrayed the rest of us and encourages others to follow its example.
     In dealing with bullies, what counts is what the crowd does: stand up to the bully or give in.
     Lee Pelton, of course, is not the source of the problem. He’s not promoting Trump; he’s not  currently a college president. 
     But, chillingly, he gives voice to the quisling  mentality that is empowering the schoolyard bully.
     His voice is what capitulation sounds like.

The following links were used in preparation of this post:

• https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/boston-public-radio/bpr-full-show-7-29-such-as-it-is
• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/nyregion/columbia-trump-funding-deal.html
• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/nyregion/columbia-trump-settlement-what-to-know.html
• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/politics/trump-harvard-payment.html
• https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/30/metro/brown-university-deal-trump-research-federal-funding/
• Go to brown.edu, then "news."

* Correction: The original version of this post wrongly identified the program on which Lee Pelton appeared as "Greater Boston." The correct title is "Boston Public Radio."