Originally published at Project-Syndicate | Mar 18th, 2025
When the basic institutions of a democracy come under attack, those leading major universities and firms have an outsize duty to act in their defense. If America’s academic and business leaders remain silent in the face of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian behavior, they will come to regret it.
CAMBRIDGE – America’s prodigious wealth and power are founded on two pillars: universities and businesses. The first produces the ideas, research, and training that have made the country a mecca for the world’s best minds. The second generates the investment and innovation that have powered America’s formidable economic engine. But now, President Donald Trump seems intent on wrecking both.
Trump’s behavior is no surprise. His economic-policy ideas have always been wacky, and his hatred for elite academic institutions – which he views as the home of “woke” culture – is well known. What is more shocking is that corporate and academic leaders have made barely a peep.
After Trump’s election victory last November, there was cautious optimism within business circles. He seemed to them like a welcome change after Joe Biden, who had talked tough against the private sector and supported organized labor and regulation. Trump, by contrast, promised low taxes and less regulation. His tariff talk was a problem, but most assumed that it was largely for show. The stock market blessed Trump’s election by soaring to new highs. Tech billionaires donated to his transition and bent the knee at his inauguration.
The intervening weeks have shown such optimism to have been deeply misguided. Trump has thrown one curveball after another at the economy, leading US stock markets to give up more than their gains since November. It’s hard to know which move has been worse: the steep tariffs imposed on America’s closest allies (Canada, Mexico, and Europe), or the constant bluster, threats, and whipsawing on trade policy, which have sent economic uncertainty indicators to levels higher than during the 2008 global financial crisis.
Making matters worse, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has wreaked havoc with the federal government, violating basic legal tenets and sacking more than 100,000 government workers. While there may be some cold-hearted logic to the cutoff of foreign aid, the administration also has inexplicably taken an axe to basic research in fields ranging from health and biological sciences to education.
It ought to be obvious to American business leaders that Trump is a clear and present danger to the system from which they generated their fortunes. As damaging as his erratic trade policies are, they pale in comparison to the threat he poses to the basic institutions that a thriving market economy needs: the rule of law, the separation of powers, government investment in science and innovation, public infrastructure, and stable and friendly relationships with likeminded foreign countries.
Musk owes much of his own success to these institutions. Without a critically timed government loan, Tesla would have gone bankrupt; and SpaceX has received tens of billions of dollars in government contracts. Yet Trump has jettisoned all these functions in favor of an agenda that advances no coherent strategy, let alone solutions to the country’s problems.
Trump’s threat to US academia is even clearer. He has sharply reduced government support for basic medical research; and under the guise of fighting antisemitism, he has arbitrarily starved some of the country’s leading universities of funds. Columbia and Johns Hopkins were early targets, but others (including my own institution, Harvard) are also on the chopping block.
When the basic institutions of a democracy come under attack, those leading major business and academic organizations have an outsize duty to say something. Yet neither business executives nor university presidents have stepped up to the plate. Instead, their approach seems to be what Harvard political scientists Ryan D. Enos and Steven Levitsky call “quiet appeasement.” They have calculated that by working behind the scenes and not drawing attention to themselves, they can avoid the worst.
But as Enos and Levitsky point out, this strategy does not work. Authoritarian populists such as the late Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India), and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey) always target universities and trample academic freedoms. Censorship, whether imposed by the government or self-imposed, is the price all academic institutions end up paying. Even when autocrats are initially market-friendly, they eventually undermine the institutional foundations of a competitive market economy.
Compared to these other authoritarian figures, Trump’s assault on America’s democratic institutions has been breathtaking in its speed, brazenness, and transparency. It simply is no longer possible to say, “This is just how he talks; he will never carry out these threats.” No civil-society organization or public leader can continue to doubt the seriousness of the situation.
Autocrats thrive when their opponents remain divided and fearful of speaking out. Such is the tragedy of collective action: we all lose when we refuse to stick our individual necks out. That is why the country’s leading universities and largest corporations – those with both the most credibility and the most to lose – now bear a disproportionate responsibility to do something.
Imagine that the chief executives of America’s top universities and richest corporations – along with labor unions, faith groups, and other civil-society organizations – issued a public statement that spoke clearly and loudly about the dangers of undermining the rule of law, academic freedom, and scientific research. Such a gesture would not move Trump and his allies, but it would give heart to other democratic forces, galvanizing them and helping them mobilize. Tens of millions of Americans are asking when someone will have the courage to speak out. At the very least, those who do will put themselves on the right side of history.
Dani Rodrik: Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, is Past President of the International Economic Association and the author of Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017).
