RAW DATA: Responses to the Hopkins Administration Survey

Selected quotations from faculty responses we received

*Responses below do not include responses that used the Hopkins AAUP guide

*Learn more and read a synthesis of the responses here

“Many of the requests [in the DoE “Call to Action”] were unconstitutional.”

“As a faculty member in healthcare education, I encourage Hopkins not to participate.”

“Faculty governance is also essential to maintaining the quality of the health professions workforce. Faculty with disciplinary and clinical expertise are best positioned to evaluate whether candidates have the scientific knowledge, methodological expertise, teaching ability, and clinical competence required for their roles.”

“Keeping our curriculum grounded in the best evidence available is the surest way to build public trust.”

“I believe the University can affirm academic excellence, affordability, free inquiry, research integrity, and service to society without submitting to a federally defined framework for demonstrating those commitments. Declining to participate would protect not only institutional autonomy, but the shared governance, scientific independence, and professional standards upon which high-quality health education and research depend.”

“I don’t believe in intellectual pluralism as a foundational value. I believe in intellectual objectivity, curiosity, and careful research. This may or may not produce a ‘pluralist’ range of answers to questions.”

“What will the Department of Education do to partner with colleges and universities in making affordable degrees a reality? So far, you [the DoE] have only made higher education more expensive.”

“JHU must act in solidarity with even the smallest institutions, to avoid undermining academic freedom and loss of educational resources for all. Do not lose sight of the PEOPLE—the faculty, researchers, students, staff, patients, and the general public—who benefit, enormously and sometimes unconsciously, from the pedagogy and scholarship of our universities. They stand to lose so much in the context of the DoE's position.”

“We owe it not just to JHU, but to all American institutions of higher education, to resist the urge to ‘comply in advance’ with the DoE's list of ‘questions’ posed to American universities.”

“Universities should coordinate their response and actions regarding this non-questionnaire. They should not voluntarily concede their responsibilities.”

“I boycotted the national ‘Call to Action’ survey. I found the questions tendentious, leading and insulting. To answer them … would be playing into the Trump administration's hands if we accepted the way that these questions frame the issues at stake.”

“The DoE letter was addressed to university presidents and trustees in order to evade democratic deliberation and shared governance. In answering, I urge you not to accept the DoE's dangerous misunderstanding (or deliberate misrepresentation) of how universities function. Rather, be clear about areas where faculty governance, academic freedom, and the spirit of democracy are, in fact, our controlling principles.”

“When answering, please also speak clearly about the university's mission, especially when that mission conflicts with the premise of the DoE’s questions.”

“Instead of complying with a coercive pressure campaign, we need to name what is happening and forge a coalition with others to resist illegal demands.”

The ‘Call to Action” is “a document replete with nationalist and protofascist language. Responding in good faith risks dignifying and even embracing such ideology when it should be firmly resisted. The document is also full of rank hypocrisy (e.g., in its calls for truth, free speech and—most laughably—to refuse gifts from foreign actors).”

“Reducing the ends of research to the advancement of U.S. interests will impoverish American universities inestimably, reducing their ability to act as a major source of soft power and influence in the world.”

“Deeply disappointed in President Daniels' involvement in the drafting of this ‘Call to Action.’ The university should be ashamed of Ron's complicity in the Trump administration's efforts to degrade higher education and his eagerness to abandon our most fundamental principles. JHU should defer to the clear consensus among its faculty, staff, & students and join other universities in having a backbone to stand up to this blatant attack on academic freedom.”

“I register my concern about JHU collecting feedback on critical policy matters via an unrestricted web form. This method of data collection suggests that responses will not be given serious consideration … An anonymous survey restricted by JHU login would have addressed these concerns.”

“An inappropriate request that violates the independence of the higher education sector.”

“For American universities to become an arm of the Republican Party, advancing a party-dictated ideology, is an existential threat to the educational and knowledge-producing capacity of the sector. The DoE letter is propagandistic in nature and calls on universities to incorporate nationalist propaganda into their operating structures.”

“The university could cherry-pick aspects of the ‘Call to Action’ that are less objectionable… I disagree with this strategy because it normalizes a heretofore unprecedented violation of academic freedom. It amounts to paying the ransom, in the currency of ideological compliance, to temporarily forestall punishment in the form of denial of federal grants. The rewards for compliance are always temporary; there will be another demand, another threat, and another capitulation unless universities adopt a strong stance of collective resistance.”

“I am afraid for our country . . . Assaulting higher ed is a long-standing tactic in the playbook of authoritarian regimes and I am horrified to see that it is being applied in the U.S.”

“A collective decision made by concerned universities not to respond to the Secretary’s letter would have been the most honorable. JHU’s President pre-empted consideration of that response by agreeing to help draft the letter’s questions. That decision was obnoxious to the independence of universities and to the principles of shared governance that JHU ought to affirm.”

“I do not think Johns Hopkins should respond to this letter. . . . responding to this letter in good faith risks legitimizing the administration's attacks as reasonable reactions”

“Authoritarian movements are hostile to the higher education sector, as the latter is an independent source of power and knowledge in an open society. This administration's attacks on higher education are ideologically motivated by its authoritarian leaning.”

“This administration does not have the improvement of higher education as a sector in mind with this letter, and we should not engage with them as if they do.”

“Johns Hopkins University should not respond … No university should.”

“It is the Department of Education that seems uninterested in making college affordable for everyone.”

“Responding to this ‘Call to Action’ is akin to negotiating with terrorists. . . . President Daniels should never have collaborated on the draft, nor committed to responding without consulting faculty.”

“A commitment to truth requires that we call out bad-faith actors who would seize the levers of government to discredit higher education en masse, the better to funnel federal resources toward private industry or towards those select institutions of higher ed that would profess fealty to a Presidential ‘agenda.’ Is it indifferent that the Vice-President of the United States, the Hon. J.D. Vance, has designated the modern university as ‘the enemy’?”

“We know, as faculty of Johns Hopkins, which pioneered the COVID-19 tracker, that the interconnectedness of our research enterprise with that of other nations or world regions is intractable; security can and must also be obtained through cooperation.”

“The Provost’s Office has done a disservice to the University community by deleting the premises of each, that is, the statements and claims that immediately precede each bolded portion. This amounts to sanewashing a document that presents as givens, various claims that would not stand up to scrutiny or that would invite, at the very least, rigorous debate. Because our institutional leaders at Johns Hopkins have chosen to sanitize a document produced by a corrupt U.S. administration that would prefer to ignore the law and simple administrative procedures, I refuse to comment on the seven individual items above. I believe that any alignment, even tacit, with the present U.S. administration in Washington, D.C. will do lasting harm to the integrity of our institution’s mission and ethos.”

“I decided to boycott this survey to protest the lack of consultation with faculty before Daniels' active collaboration with Trump.”

“The ‘Call to Action’ is not a court order or a request within the agency’s formal powers, it is an email from one agency within what is currently a disorganized, internally divided, and broadly unpopular administration.”

“The previous attempt at a Compact, targeting a smaller number of universities, was of course publicly rejected by most of them. Johns Hopkins had an opportunity to be a leader and demonstrate both good principles and common sense by refusing to participate in this process and making space for universities with less to fall back on to say no.”

“I choose to boycott this survey. I do so because I condemn our university leadership's cooperation with the current Presidential administration in devising the ‘Compact 2.0.’ It collaborates with this Presidential administration's attempt to reverse decades of progress in reducing racial and gender discrimination in colleges and universities; to define what are and are not legitimate areas of academic inquiry; and to closely regulate what constitutes legitimate political speech on campus. JHU's active role in drafting the Compact is a Faustian bargain. It trades academic freedom for the [elusive] promise of secure funding from an authoritarian and fickle President and his Department of Education.”

“It should affirm that research in the school where I am affiliated, the Bloomberg School, is designed to improve the lives of Americans and people through the globe by finding ways of understanding, preventing and curing disease and that funding not be subjected to ideological tests.”

“I am deeply troubled that President Daniels contributed to the drafting of this statement. Universities are vital institutions of civil society that have a responsibility to resist government overreach, not enable or pander to it. I resent the process of responding as well because it asks faculty and staff to expend precious energy on a project that runs counter to university principles.”

“Compact 2.0 is not an isolated document. It was issued by an administration that is violating the American constitution and sweeping away the federal government while terrorizing citizens and legal residents. Any response other than silence validates a document that has no purpose but to continue empowering a violent, authoritarian regime.”

“The university should stand up against this obvious attack on its operations. This questionnaire is extortion. Agreeing to it will be an embarrassment.”

“Daniels was involved in CEU’s accreditation review and was in Budapest in 2019, able to see CEU’s struggle firsthand. Writing a couple of years later with the benefit of hindsight Daniels made the following observation: ‘Nothing CEU or its director at the time, the former Canadian politician and academic Michael Ignatieff, could do would ever be enough to satisfy the Hungarian government.’ My suggestion is that the university administration take Ron Daniels' own research to heart. And that they either contest compact 2.0 or ignore it.”

“I'm embarrassed that anyone would take any of this seriously. I'm particularly ashamed of President Daniels's role here. A proper response would articulate a robust defense of the values of higher education in the face of such an assault, and would not participate in a ‘dialogue’ based on dishonest premises.”

“This is not a ‘questionnaire.’ It is a political instrument, and we should name it as such. There are real legal and political risks in engaging with and responding substantively to this document. The appropriate institutional response is coordinated refusal across universities, not individual engagement. The only effective counter, as we have seen in the past, is for universities to coordinate and collectively decline to treat this as a legitimate policy process.”