Resistance to President Donald Trump’s threat to deny billions in federal funding to universities that do not bend to his list of demands has finally gotten off the ground. Over four hundred academic leaders have signed the statement denouncing the Trump administration for its “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in higher education.

I say “finally” because, when Trump launched his undemocratic attack on the independence of the universities, many institutions remained silent or were slow to act. In March of this year, Columbia University was not alone in capitulating to the government in order to retain funding.

Having worked for over 40 years at a large university, I was not surprised at the readiness of some university administrators to compromise. It was during these years that academic presidents tended more and more to act as managers, rather than educators, becoming as adept at compromise as any politician or corporate executive. And because they are frequently hired to fundraise and increase endowments, they tend to place money matters above intellectual and ethical imperatives.

One red-state president of a private university, when asked to sign the petition, said candidly to The New York Times, “I saw absolutely no upside — none.” Presumably he meant no financial upside. The threat of students’ being arrested and deported was not on his radar screen.

A similar obtuseness was evident when Harvard’s president Claudine Gay answered questions from Congresswoman Elise Stefanik in a 2023 congressional committee hearing on institutional responses to antisemitism on campus. Gay seemed to be wholly unprepared for Stefanik’s crude, misinformed, and entirely predictable attack on her institution.

Gay’s moral ineffectiveness in a crisis is fortunately not representative of all college presidents. Leon Botstein, who heads Bard College, would have spotlighted the anti-intellectualism motivating Stefanik’s questions, and would have defended the fundamental importance of education in a democracy. As early as 2017, during the first Trump administration, Botstein called on universities to join together to resist the existential threat posed by the government. In recent weeks, we have seen more college presidents stand up to Trump’s demands. When Alan Garber, who assumed the presidency of Harvard after Gay resigned, defied Trump in a powerfully written letter, other academic leaders followed suit.

Well and good, but people had to wait with baited breath to see what Garber and others would do. Why was it that no one ever doubted what Botstein would do? Botstein is not only a world-famous conductor and musicologist, he is also a true educator, as his widely praised educational initiatives at Bard and around the world demonstrate. Botstein’s annual salary of $441,537 is well below that of presidents at comparable schools. When Robert Brown, former president of Boston University, retired in 2023, he was making over two million dollars a year, roughly five times the salary of the president of the United States. (Like Bard, BU is a non- profit institution.)

In my years teaching at BU, I watched as students became increasingly overwhelmed with debt. The majority of students worked part-time to help put themselves through college. I remember Jennifer, who, in addition to carrying a heavy course load, worked five nights a week at the GAP to help her mother finance her education. She had two younger siblings. The lines of exhaustion were evident on Jennifer’s face. When it became known that some students were skipping meals to save money, faculty began taking students to dinner on a regular basis. If academic presidents were to take from their salaries anything in excess of $400,000 (the salary of the president of the United States) and give it back to their institutions in the form of financial aid scholarships, some credibility to their office within the university community would be restored. If they find it impossible to imagine meeting their needs on a mere $400,000 a year, perhaps they are too out of touch with students’ lives to be administrators.

It will take more than a strongly worded letter to the Trump administration to inspire students and faculty to make the necessary sacrifices to keep the resistance alive. As it stands, the petition contains no concrete action. Once the full extent of the cuts in funding is felt, many students and faculty will likely lose heart and call on their administrators to appease the government.

Only presidents who set an example by their own sacrifices will be able to inspire others to stay the course. The battle is just beginning.

Julia Brown is professor emerita of English at Boston University. She lives in Northampton.