While Harvard decision-makers have rejected some of the Trump administration’s demands, they have also quietly instituted others. All the while they have steadily negotiated with President Trump toward an eventual deal. This has yielded weeks of breathless speculation across our campus and the world: Will Harvard lead, staying the principled course it set when it sued the federal government in April, or will it follow other universities and break under the onslaught?

This myopic focus on the university’s administration ignores a truth fundamental to the future of American higher education: Salvation does not and cannot lie in the hands of the Harvard Corporation — the university’s secretive, self-appointed governing board made up of financiers and power players. Universities are much more than the individuals who come to campus a few times a year to review high-level operations.

The role of faculty is fundamental. We are the teachers, researchers, and writers who have committed our professional lives to learning and free inquiry, working together with students to advance truth with rigor, independence, and integrity for the collective benefit of society. That commitment means that, unlike our distant governing boards, we will not give up so easily — no matter what kind of deals are signed in our name.

At Harvard, for instance, while the university’s leadership has earned well-deserved plaudits for its legal challenges to the most egregious of Trump’s punitive measures, it was not, in fact, the administrators who took that bold step first. It was the faculty.

When the Trump administration started threatening Harvard, the university leadership’s initial response worryingly pointed toward accommodation, seeking compromise at the bargaining table and implementing controversial internal changes that echoed the demands coming from the federal government. As Perry Bacon, a staff writer for The New Republic, recently pointed out, Ivy League boards are liable to agree with many of the demands Trump is making of them — at least insofar as they aim to restrain student protests, roll back diversity initiatives, deny collective bargaining rights, and silence criticism of the genocide unfolding in Gaza. The federal assault may even offer them cover to institute policy changes they could never get away with under normal conditions.

By contrast, faculty, students, and alumni quickly mobilized. More than 800 faculty signed a letter calling for the university to actively resist, urging Harvard to “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance.” Hundreds of alumni echoed that statement. In the face of inaction by the Harvard Corp., Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, alongside the AAUP National, filed litigation on April 11. We were joined soon after by the United Auto Workers, the union representing Harvard’s postdoctoral scholars, non-tenure-track faculty, and graduate and undergraduate employees. Part of the purpose of our lawsuit was to invite Harvard’s leadership to join us in fighting back. The university, when it filed its own suit on April 21, asked to have its case linked with ours.

This pattern — in which faculty, students, staff, and alumni lead and university leadership follows — has been repeated at the national level. Researchers in the University of California system filed a class action case that blocked the termination of hundreds of grants from the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Endowment for the Humanities. A coalition including UAW and several of our Harvard faculty colleagues convinced a federal judge to strike down the decision to cancel an array of National Institutes of Health research grants based on politically motivated criteria. This week, student journalists at Stanford University challenged rules censoring the viewpoints of foreign students on campuses. AAUP has spearheaded innovative lawsuits challenging the gutting of diversity initiatives, the weaponizing of antisemitism, and the abuse of federal civil rights enforcement authority.

Members of university boards can retreat to their day jobs, but for the broader university community, the Trump administration’s attacks are truly existential. It is our colleagues who have seen their clinical trials suspended, their years-long collaborative projects canceled, and — especially if they work on topics disfavored by the Trump administration, like climate change, racial and gender equity, or Middle East politics — their speech chilled or suppressed on issues central to their professional expertise. While the restoration of unlawfully canceled funding is critical, achieving that cannot come at the expense of academic freedom and intellectual independence.

One AAUP member, a computer scientist who has lost nearly all his research funding, penned a personal note to Harvard’s president last week, expressing alarm at the prospect of a deal with the government. He wrote movingly of how difficult it has been to watch the foundations of his identity — as a child of immigrants and a scholar dedicated to advancing knowledge — come under withering assault. “But I am willing to endure that pain,” he continued, “if by being here at Harvard, I am part of the fight to restore the values of the country. If Harvard settles, I do not know if that will be the case anymore.”

Those values are more important now than ever. If trustees are willing to engage in extortionate backroom dealings with political operatives, it must be the role of faculty, staff, students, and alumni to protect academic freedom, university independence, and free speech. In our own lawsuit on behalf of Harvard, we will not trade these principles away. We will fight against any substantive changes to faculty hiring and tenure reviews; any “exceptional” treatment of some academic units and centers; any policy favoring or disfavoring applicants for admission, hiring, or appointment on the basis of political viewpoint; any sharing of information about Harvard affiliates with the government beyond what is legally required for legitimate purposes; and any appointment of an external overseer.

Cash payouts to resolve allegations of illegality that have never been properly established or investigated, as at Columbia, are unacceptable; sacrificing non-gender-conforming community members to satisfy the Trump administration’s retrograde gender ideology, as at Brown and Penn, is unacceptable.

It will take more than lawsuits to preserve what remains of this country’s democracy. But the forms of student and faculty action mentioned here point the way. Corporate boards of trustees are not synonymous with the universities themselves, and they are not the ones most motivated to defend the core values of higher education. We are. And we won’t capitulate.