President Holley defends American higher education

Mount Holyoke College President Danielle R. Holley appeared on “MSNBC Prime” on Friday, April 18, 2025. She discussed how colleges and universities are resisting the Trump administration’s attack on higher education, following Harvard University’s refusal to comply with the government’s demands for an overhaul.

Host Symone Sanders-Townsend praised Holley for speaking out early against the attacks. “I saw very early on that the attacks against universities are really attacks against the fundamentals of our democracy,” Holley said. “Government attacking free inquiry, academic freedom [and] the ability of colleges and universities, especially private universities, to govern ourselves — those are all attempts to stifle freedom of ideas and to stifle opposition to government. I absolutely spoke out early because I believe that if we want to defend our democracy, we must defend our colleges and universities.”

Holley also told Sanders-Townsend about why Mount Holyoke would resist federal overreach. “We have a very small amount of federal research grants, and they’ve been canceled . . . they’ve been canceled for reasons like the government telling us that work on gender is nonscientific and has no benefits,” she said. “When you get letters from the government that say things that are fundamentally untrue, I think we all have a responsibility to stand up. We need to support the universities that have chosen to really say, ‘We have a space for ourselves to engage in this inquiry without you overseeing us beyond what we’re required to do in regulation.’ Anyone who supports democracy must support [the] colleges, universities, law firms [and] corporations that are standing up to this bullying by the federal government.

“An incredibly important point that Harvard made is that what the government is asking [it] to do is illegal,” President Holley continued. “There has not been a single finding that Harvard has done anything illegal [or] that it has violated Title VI. What’s missing [are] the required legal findings that these universities have actually engaged in wrongdoing. Why does the federal government want to come and commandeer universities for [its] own purposes? We cannot allow the federal government — without any legal findings — to come in and begin to govern our universities. That would be the beginning of the end for free inquiry and important academic research in the United States.”

President Holley also noted that there are reasons to be hopeful. “What gives me hope is our students!” she said. “I went to our Senior Symposium today and saw students presenting on things like how we can use the First Amendment to end misinformation.

“If you come to our universities and college campuses, you know that we are educating students from around the country and around the world who are from all different backgrounds; these are spaces that really help to grow [the] critical research and knowledge that we all need.”