Described as pragmatism by supporters and capitulation by critics, these strategies are a response to the extraordinary pressure the Trump administration is applying to universities in the form of funding cuts, civil rights investigations, and arrests of international students and faculty.

Rather than soaring rhetoric about democracy and the First Amendment, university leaders are generally responding with tactical maneuvers and persuasion designed to soften the blows and nudge public opinion in their favor.

“Higher ed is under attack,” said Marlene Tromp, the incoming president of the University of Vermont. “We have to be very frank and practical about what could be ahead for us.”

Some critics warn that if universities do not defend themselves, the pressure from Trump will undermine core values, such as independence and academic freedom.

Moreover, concessions are not necessarily insulating schools from further scrutiny — or sparing the officials behind them. Last Friday, Columbia University replaced its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, a week after she and the board acquiesced to demands from the White House.

And late Thursday, the Trump administration made a similar list of demands to Harvard, including shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, implementing “merit-based” admissions, and proving “full cooperation” with the US Department of Homeland Security. The demands followed the administration’s announcement it was placing $9 billion of federal funding tied to Harvard under “review,” even though the school had already preemptively taken actions closely aligned with the government recommendations on how schools should handle antisemitism and campus protests.

In recent interviews, university administrators and presidents described their approach as “adapting” to a new political reality.

The University of Michigan, once heralded as a leader in diversity, equity, and inclusion, said last Thursday it was abolishing virtually all of its DEI offices. Dartmouth College hired a former top lawyer for the Republican National Committee as its general counsel. In January, the day after the presidential inauguration, Harvard adopted a definition of antisemitism favored by the Trump administration, despite protests from academics that it could chill free expression.

The concessions by Columbia University are the most notable yet. School leaders met nearly every demand the Trump administration made after it canceled $400 million in funding and raised the specter of cutting billions of dollars more.

The university said it would give dozens of new security officers the power to arrest students in a bid to control campus protests. It agreed to promote intellectual diversity among the faculty to counter any liberal slant. It placed a Middle East studies department, which had been criticized by the Trump administration, under new oversight.

Some Columbia professors reacted furiously to the concessions.

When interim president Armstrong gave faculty leaders private assurances on a Zoom call that the concessions were not as significant as they seemed, her remarks leaked to the media and the Trump administration, according to press reports and a Columbia professor familiar with the matter. Columbia’s board replaced Armstrong within days.

To critics, the fallout at Columbia underscores the risks of the conciliatory approach.

“Capitulating will only encourage” the Trump administration to demand more and “universities will be inclined to give more,” said Vincent Brown, a Harvard professor of history and African American Studies.

“Don’t hear me saying this is not a dangerous moment,” Brown said. “I understand where the caution comes from. It’s not in the interest of any one university president to confront the Trump administration, but the only way is to do it together.”

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, has sounded a similar note of alarm. He has compared the Trump administration’s policies to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Órban’s takeover of his country’s universities. “Appeasement right now is a disastrous policy,” he said. Vice President JD Vance has said Órban’s approach “has to be the model for us.”

But Roth is an outlier among his peers. When he has reached out to other presidents to organize a unified resistance, he said, he “get[s] some cold shoulders.”

Related: ‘His way has to be the model’: Team Trump turns to Hungarian strongman for inspiration on higher ed

Some liberal donors are also mad. After Dartmouth hired Matt Raymer, the former RNC lawyer, Meg Krilov, a New York doctor and graduate of Dartmouth Medical School, canceled a meeting with the college’s fund-raising office. Raymer, in an op-ed in January, had publicly backed Trump’s bid to eliminate birthright citizenship, the constitutional guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen.

In a moment of terror for many immigrants, when masked government agents are detaining students and laborers in the streets, “it is disgraceful of Dartmouth to side with the oppressors,” Krilov wrote in an email canceling her meeting.

Jana Barnello, a Dartmouth spokesperson, said Raymer’s op-ed “presented a scholarly legal argument contributing to the broader conversation on a widely discussed topic.”

Trump and his allies contend universities are dominated by leftist ideologues who have abandoned core academic principles and instead indoctrinate students into radical thought. Diversity initiatives went too far, they say, morphing into illegal discrimination against white and Asian students. University leaders have also failed to maintain order on campus and protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment, they contend.

One reason university leaders, including board members, have been open to engaging conservatives is because many agree with at least parts of Trump’s diagnosis, according to professors and current and former university leaders.

Presidents, board members, and some factions of school faculties have come to believe universities became overly politicized by taking public stands on contested issues, such as Black Lives Matter or abortion rights. Some also worried about a chilling effect on campus discourse as controversial topics, such as gender identity or affirmative action, began to feel off limits.

In a Harvard survey last year, more than half of professors and students said they were afraid to express their views on campus, citing fear of criticism on social media, damage to their reputations, or the risk of discrimination and harassment complaints.

“We have lost the ability to have reasoned debate,” said James Applegate, a professor of astronomy at Columbia University who cofounded a faculty group, the Academic Freedom Council, to promote “open inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse.” The problem used to spring from “left-wing illiberalism on campus,” Applegate said. Now universities also face “right-wing illiberalism” but with the added force of the federal government, he said.

Related: Professors say they know how to save Harvard. Top leaders are listening.

For some, the campus turmoil over the Israel-Hamas war — which led to campus occupations and the resignations of three Ivy League presidents — was a turning point. It revealed, to some, that campuses had become ungovernable and universities too political.

At the same time, public approval for higher education has cratered. “We’re wondering: How did we get in this mess, and what do we need to be doing so that we can earn back the trust of the general public?” said Amherst College president Michael Elliott.

In February, Elliott attended a “fireside chat” at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, where he acknowledged “the academy has not always done as good a job” as it should of resisting “groupthink,” according to a video of the event. But he also defended diversity programs, pushing back against a conservative critique that academic excellence and DEI are at odds.

We need to “speak directly to our critics,” he said in a recent interview.

Elliott is one of many leaders who have been traveling to Washington since Trump’s election to lobby for American universities.

The presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth, and other top institutions have met with Republican lawmakers and administration officials to make the case that elite universities, and especially their research operations, serve the national interest and should be preserved, according to people familiar with the meetings.

They have focused especially on their contributions to US national security, economic competitiveness, and medical advances.

But schools have also pushed back, using the courts more than the bully pulpit. MIT, with Harvard’s support, helped lead a lawsuit challenging the administration’s attempt to cut billions in research funding.

At the same time, they’ve made subtle defenses of liberal values when speaking directly to students, staff, and faculty. “Everyone benefits when all are welcomed,” Harvard president Alan Garber said at an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Forum in February. But, like many other presidents, he has avoided taking bold, public stands that could attract the administration’s ire.

Hundreds of Harvard professors in an open letter last week demanded a more confrontational approach. On Tuesday, about 200 students and professors protested on campus against what they saw as the university’s anemic response to Trump.

One of the professors who signed the letter, Andrew Manuel Crespo, said there is only one way to stop the Trump administration from causing irreparable damage to US universities and other institutions such as elite law firms that have been targeted by the Trump administration.

Related: Hundreds of Harvard professors call for resistance of ‘attacks on American universities’

“The only hope for these institutions is sectorwide solidarity,” Crespo said. University leaders “have to realize that we will each keep getting targeted individually and crumble unless we make a stand together.”

In a perfect world, one Massachusetts university president said, leaders would do just that. But collective resistance does not seem feasible, or likely to succeed, in the face of the Trump administration’s threats, this official said, requesting anonymity for fear of making his institution a target of the administration.

Caution, therefore, is the order of the day.

“I do believe that university presidents have an obligation to protect their students first, and that might mean protecting them from federal government cuts that could hurt their ability to get a college education,” the Massachusetts leader said.

“Universities are places where people need to have freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” he said. “But for university leaders, it’s important not to jeopardize the students they serve.”

Mike Damiano can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Hilary Burns can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her @Hilarysburns.