Has any university other than Harvard actually opposed Trump’s attack on their institutions in any meaningful way?

Not a rhetorical question.

This morning I wrote that Harvard was one of the “few” institutions to do so, and friend of the blog Michael Hiltzik asked me if I could name any others. He wrote a column touching on this a few days ago:

The National Science Foundation acknowledged that it relied in part on a three-page list of disfavored keywords and phrases provided by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), such as “advocacy,” “climate action,” “racism” and “gender preference.” The National Endowment for the Humanities searched for terms such as “transgenderism,” “green new deal social engineering policies” and “environmental justice.”

The most notable and explicit confession, though perhaps the least surprising, came from the Department of Energy. 

Referring to a list of grant terminations announced in October 2025, the agency admitted that it terminated or canceled 283 grants “solely” based on whether their recipients were in states that had cast its electoral college votes for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and had two Democratic senators. Meanwhile, 340 other grants from states that voted for Trump were left in place. 

The agency said it didn’t rely on “programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factors.” In other words, grants from blue states were cut simply because they originated in blue states.

The confession is unsurprising because the Department of Energy had made almost identical confessions in two previous federal lawsuits. In a case brought last year by the city of St. Paul, Minn., Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged that seven grants were terminated based primarily on “whether the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State.’” Similar grants for red states were unaffected, he said. In January, federal Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District of Columbia ordered the grants reinstated.

The agency repeated the stipulation in a lawsuit brought this year by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers over 11 canceled grants. In June, Mehta ordered those grants reinstated. . . .

Hiltzik has been corresponding with Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley’s law school, and someone who has been in the thick of the litigation against the government for illegally pulling grants for purely political considerations . . . something that as Chemerinsky points out the Trump administration is openly admitting it’s doing in court filings (it’s a lot harder to lie in court filings than on Truth Social or Twitter):

 UC as an institution played no direct part in that case or any of the others brought to challenge Trump’s assault on the university. 

“The University regularly evaluates its legal strategy, including in light of last week’s disclosures, and takes action when it is in the best interests of UC, our community, and our state,” the office of UC President James B. Milliken told me by email.

It’s true that the university has signed on as a co-plaintiff in several lawsuits brought jointly by the Assn. of American Universities and two other associations representing big universities. In each case, however, it was nestled within a cloud of about a dozen other big institutions. The cases are really being run by the associations. 

Among educational institutions, Chemerinsky points out, only Harvard has stood up for itself in court — and it has been successful, thus far. Meanwhile Columbia, Penn, Brown and others have made settlement deals.

“It’s very disappointing that universities have settled with the Trump administration rather than going to court — and I think they would have won,” he told me.

The sheer spinelessness of top university administrators in the face of an existential threat to the institutions they’re supposed to be protecting is about as surprising as the New York Jets having another bad season, but it’s still disappointing.