Collective Action Is Essential for Universities in Current Political Climate

The incorporation of psychological science into public policy is key to supporting a stronger society, but the success of that societal impact is determined by how well the science is understood and how thoughtfully it is applied.

APS recently formed an Advocacy Task Force that is committed to bringing psychological science into the forefront of both public policy and public understanding. This new column will feature insights from psychological scientists who have become vocal advocates for science-driven policy.

Explore the new APS Advocacy & Policy hub, your gateway to up-to-date policy statements, expert analysis, action tools, and resources to help psychological scientists engage meaningfully with legislation, funding decisions, and public discourse.

In this first column, the Observer spoke with Richard “Dick” Aslin. Aslin is a professor at Yale University and a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories. His research focuses on a form of implicit learning called statistical learning, which has been used to describe how individuals understand speech, music, phonetic categories, visual shapes, and more.

In early 2025, Aslin created a Substack that dissects policies and actions put forward by the current U.S. administration. Since then, he has gained over 1,000 followers who read his commentaries, such as this post about the compact for universities proposed by President Trump and his administration in October 2025. In this Q&A, Aslin shares his thoughts on the compact, the real meaning of “academic freedom,” and why members of the higher education community have reason to be cautiously optimistic.

What led you to start your Substack, and why did you choose that platform for talking about issues in science policy and academic culture? 

I think it’s pretty clear that on January 20 those of us in academia were somewhat shocked by the speed with which President Trump started to initiate a whole series of executive orders. I was concerned about higher education and the implications of some of those executive orders for overturning what you would call a pretty good 80-year run on the support for higher education, particularly the support of research by the federal government.

So what led me to think about writing about these issues was a feeling of helplessness that we had no political power and that it would be useful to try and mobilize individuals in academia who might be in a position to push back on some of these executive orders.

I honestly didn’t really know much about Substack, but I knew a little bit about it and decided that if it was good enough for individuals who had won Pulitzer Prizes in journalism at the Washington Post, why not me?

I think my first post was on February 7, so just a couple of weeks after President Trump took office. There were two reasons why I wanted to do this. One was to see if I could convince some people who had power greater than me to start to push back on some of these executive orders, particularly executive orders that were just completely antithetical to the way higher education operates. 

But the other reason was kind of personal. I was just extremely frustrated. I mean, how much can you do as an individual person? I felt that it was therapeutic for me to put down in writing some of the things that I think all of us have been thinking about. Just the process of putting it down in words made me feel better. So it’s kind of a personal journey on how to deal with, I guess you would say, some traumatic experiences in our professional lives. 

You describe Trump’s proposed compact with universities as “the devil in the (missing) details.” What key omissions or ambiguities concern you most, and why do those gaps matter for higher education policy? 

There are many vague terms that could be just mistakes on the part of the individuals who wrote the compact, but I don’t think so. I think they were expressed in vague ways because that would give the Trump administration latitude in how they define them. One of the big terms had to do with supporting current opinions about what national security means and principles about defending United States values. What are those values? There obviously is considerable disagreement about what you mean by American values, and pointing to American values in historical contexts is a dangerous thing. Would we want those historical values to be a support for slavery or for the absence of women having the right to vote? So, it’s a very difficult thing to use a term like “national values of the American experience” and say exactly what that means. What does that allow you to do? What does that disallow you to do? So those vague terms were particularly problematic because it allows the administration to redefine them in any way they wish in the future.

Consider, for example, the controversy about individuals on college campuses in the past year who have expressed displeasure with how individuals in Gaza have been treated.

Is that American? Does the expression of those concerns about the individual lives and safety of Gazans, does that somehow fly in the face of American values? I think that’s a debatable point. 

Another example, beyond just the vagueness issue, is what I would characterize as the one-sided protectionism for so-called conservative values. What is your definition of a conservative value, and how do those definitions of conservative values change?

So, for example, I think it’s uncontested that 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan and his acolytes believed in free trade (i.e., no tariffs or minimal tariffs). And yet here we are today where that conservative value is put on its head, and now we’re in the uber tariff regime of conservative values. Values change and the terminology in referring to those values has obviously undergone a huge change since Donald Trump became president in 2017.

Your article outlines how the compact quietly redefines what counts as “merit” in research and teaching. How do you think this redefinition could reshape the research landscape? 

I found it a little, I’ll use the word hypocritical, to be bandying about the term “merit”—and this has been not just in the compact, but in other rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration. As if merit is a quantitative thing that is unambiguously measurable.

It seems as though the perspective that is being proposed about how to assess merit is fundamentally some sort of standardized test. I think it’s important to point out historically that standardized tests were designed in a way that benefited the individuals who made the test. If you go back in time to Alfred Binet and Lewis Terman, who created the Stanford–Binet IQ test, the way in which items were selected on an IQ test, back in the early 20th century, was to go to a bunch of successful, putatively smart individuals and ask them what would be the kind of question to ask another putatively smart person that they would answer in a particular way. 

Well, those individuals, of course, are coming from a particular cultural background, and they probably, if they were educated in the classics, knew something about Shakespeare. 
And so, to them, it was obvious that if you didn’t know Shakespeare, you just weren’t an educated person. But imagine going to, I don’t know, sub-Saharan Africa and asking them to answer a question about Shakespeare. It doesn’t make any sense, right? It’s pretty clear that these kinds of standardized tests have some value within a particular context, but they’re not definitive. 

I also gave the example of individuals who have tremendous potential but who don’t come from backgrounds that facilitated that potential. And this is the McNair Scholars Program. These are first-generation college students. None of their parents or grandparents went to college, and many of them are underrepresented minority students, though not all. With appropriate facilitation of the things that majority students tend to naturally bring to the college campus without any special training, but which these McNair students tend to be missing, they succeed because they’re really, really smart, and they go on to professional careers.

Let’s open up the opportunities as wide as we can because we need talented people. There’s quite a bit of research on the issue of whether it is beneficial to have diverse viewpoints in an organization, and I’m not referring to academia in particular. Diverse viewpoints allow a debate about what’s important and what’s not important, and without that debate, you could get into trouble. Because if everybody agrees on a particular perspective, they’ve ignored the alternative perspective that could come back to bite them.

If universities sign on to this compact (or similar ones), what might we expect in 5–10 years in terms of institutional change, research agendas, and the culture of higher education? 

It depends in part on how many institutions signed on to the compact. Let’s imagine that some did and that the compact was in its current form, which is pretty vague. What are the criteria that are going to be used to enforce the compact? That was completely unclear. If you’re going to write a law, you should at least write down whatever it is that is bad that’s going to get people put in jail, right? That just simply wasn’t done. If the compact had been written in such a way that those issues had been clear, then at least people would know what the consequences would be.

But in terms of looking at the future, my biggest concern is let’s imagine half the universities in the United States signed the compact and half didn’t. Well then are we going to end up with well-supported universities who believe that the federal government should largely determine what they do, and the other half of the universities who are in basically the current status where they have autonomy, and they get to do more or less what they want to do, obviously within reason?

You’re going to politicize the strongest aspect of our society in a way that is further dividing the country. You end up in a situation where half the universities are like they are now, hopefully without the drama. And the other half are just kowtowing to the government that is telling them what they can teach, who they can hire, what books they can read. It’s going to really polarize the country in a horrible way, and we’re already horribly polarized.

In your essay, you talk about how a focus on academic freedom can be confusing because people don’t understand the meaning of the term, and they conflate it with freedom of speech. Can you talk a bit about the difference between those two terms? 

Let’s talk about freedom of speech first. The fundamental premise of freedom of speech is that I can go out in the Boston Common and stand on a bench and say things that are negative about the government. And as long as I’m not promoting violence, I’m not going to get arrested and put in jail. This is a good thing. But we all know that freedom of speech does not seamlessly move from Boston Common to, for example, being an employee of an organization. In other words, if I work for Amazon and I send out negative email blasts about Jeff Bezos, I’m probably going to get fired. But I’m not going to get put in jail for doing that, right? So, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. 

Academic freedom is different from that. Academic freedom is when you are an employee of a university or college, and within certain limits you have the freedom, that is the option, of assigning materials and teaching content in your course within certain bounds. But it’s certainly the case that, for example, many universities who teach introductory psychology don’t always let the instructor choose any textbook they want. Sometimes they do, but they have a committee that says, “Look, we teach 17 sections of introductory psychology, and we kind of want to use the same textbook in all of them. Let’s see if we can agree on what that textbook is going to be.” Now, is that a violation of academic freedom? I don’t think so, right? That’s a collective decision on the part of the department about how they’re going to teach a particular course. So academic freedom has some limits to it. You can’t do things that would be counter to the standards of conduct within that organization.

What I like rather than the term “academic freedom,” which I think the layperson conflates with freedom of speech, is the notion of institutional autonomy. Institutional autonomy means that the government is not telling you what to do. And I hope we would all agree that’s a good thing. 

If you were advising university leaders right now, how would you suggest they respond to this compact? And what risks do they face? 

Let me begin with a larger issue that’s related to your question: When do you stand up for your values? We’re living in an extremely hazardous time since January 20 where what we should do and what people are doing seem to be somewhat disconnected. I’ve been disappointed in the leadership of many universities and some professional organizations who have chosen to basically keep their head down and hope that all of this is just going to pass over and that they’re not going to be harmed.

I have been arguing in other Substack posts and in work behind the scenes that this is a time for collective action. When Columbia University was first targeted by the president, what I think should have happened is that all the Ivy League presidents should have stood up and said this is not acceptable. President Trump and his acolytes in the administration are extremely good at doing one-on-one. But if you view this as bullying tactics, the best response to a bully is to have a crowd of people present to protect the person who’s being bullied.

I can reveal here that I and several colleagues privately urged the top 30 private research university presidents to band together and to take collective legal action. I cannot say that they failed to do so because they didn’t tell me what they did. But in public, as far as we know, they did not do that. The American Association of University Professors did it. And the Association of American Universities did it. Other professional organizations did it, and they were reasonably successful in the courts, although it remains to be seen whether that will be upheld by the Supreme Court. But when you go one-on-one with the current administration, not only are you bound to fail, but when you settle and you think you have settled, you haven’t settled, and there’s always something else that will come up. 

To get back to your question, what I’m concerned about is that these one-on-one conflicts with the current administration are simply playing into the hands of not really fighting back appropriately. And I wish that there had been collective action in a coordinated way beyond what has happened by these professional societies. 

You seem cautiously optimistic despite your critiques. What gives you hope about the future of science policy? 

As you might imagine, there have been lots of efforts in the background to contact congresspersons and senators who are on the appropriations committees for science, technology, and medical research. My initial concern was that politicians just don’t get it. They just don’t understand what we do. And I was immediately told by individuals who deal with them on a daily basis, “No, they understand exactly what’s going on.” They understand that we are far and away the most impressive scientific community in the world, and we got that way in large part because the federal government spends a lot of money on it. Those individuals in Congress know what science is, and they know what it takes to do it well. They know that it isn’t just short-term gain; that it’s a multi-year, multi-decade steady funding stream that allows it to be successful.

The problem is that they’re paralyzed by fear that they’re going to be singled out for retribution from the administration if they speak up. However, we do know that before the shutdown back in August the appropriations committees in both the House and the Senate—just the committees, not the full House and not the full Senate—but out of committee, they voted both for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to have very modest cuts from the previous fiscal year budget.

Now the previous fiscal year budget was rescinded by a vote in July that said that all the cuts that the Trump administration had already implemented, probably illegally, are okay. But nevertheless, when they met for fiscal year 2026, they voted the money back in. Then the shutdown happened, and it hasn’t gone to the full House and the full Senate. But the fact that those Republican-led appropriations committees for fiscal year 2026 said, “No, we’re not going to do a 55% cut of NSF, and we’re not going to do a 44% cut of NIH. 
We’re going to basically give them a 2% cut.” All of us would breathe a huge sigh of relief if that were true.

Is there anything else you’d like to share that I didn’t ask about? 

I think one of the biggest difficulties we face now is trust. The scientific community is not a short-term real-estate deal. It is a multi-year, multi-decade process, and what has made our research enterprise in the United States, in all of higher education, the envy of the world is its stability, and there’s so much uncertainty at the moment. 

That trust is not something that you can just flip a switch at the next election and go back to normal. It’s already created tremendous damage, and I think we’re going to have to work really, really, really hard—assuming the optimistic scenario where these appropriations bills are in fact funded for the next three years or whatever—to recover from that broken trust. 

So either way, it sounds like a long road ahead. 

I think that’s a fair statement. It’s really easy to break something, and it’s really hard to put it back together again. And that’s a lesson that I think we’re all faced with now.

Feedback on this article? Email [email protected] or login to comment.