University leader advises patience as Trump era dawns

In the age of Donald Trump, administrators need patience and calm, says Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California, or UC, system.

[This is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, America’s leading higher education publication. It is presented here under an agreement with University World News.]

Uncertainty on campuses is rampant, as faculty, staff and students don’t know what Donald J Trump’s presidency means for higher education. While Trump’s rhetoric has caused major anxiety at universities, Napolitano said during a visit to The Chronicle of Higher Education last Wednesday, it’s still unclear whether "the bark is worse than the bite".

President Trump "can tweet, but Congress needs to act, and those are very different things", she said. "Just reiterating that message over and over again is important."

Napolitano touched on a variety of topics, including what UC’s campuses are doing to help allay the fears of undocumented students threatened with potential deportation, campus-speech controversies, and what it’s like having one of your flagship campuses targeted in a Trump tweet.

Undocumented immigrants

Napolitano has emerged as a key defender of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, a policy she crafted as secretary of homeland security under former president Barack Obama. She estimates the University of California has roughly 3,700 undergraduates who benefit under the policy, which has granted two-year, renewable work or study permits to many immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

The university has created resource centres for undocumented students, and it announced after Trump’s election that its police departments would not be used as proxies for immigration officers.

Napolitano said she is hopeful that Trump will see the value of DACA.

"These are the last people you should want to deport," she said. "They’ve done everything we have asked of them. They’ve gotten into the University of California. They have clean criminal histories. We want their brains and their talent to be retained."

Betsy DeVos

Betsy DeVos, the new education secretary, remains a wildcard on higher education policy, Napolitano said. "She hasn’t really announced a higher education agenda and she hasn’t had any substantive experience in higher education."

Napolitano said she didn’t schedule a visit with DeVos during her trip to the capital because a conversation would be more productive after the new secretary settles into her role and starts setting a higher education agenda. "She’s on the beginning of a learning curve," she said, "and she has a lot to learn in the higher education space."

Campus speech

Napolitano said she expects more campus encounters with provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor of the Breitbart website [a pro-Trump outlet] whose talk at the university’s Berkeley campus was cancelled last month after violent protests.

She said the university did everything it could to allow Yiannopoulos to speak, including creating a safety plan for him in case of violence. It’s also considering what could have been done differently, like perhaps scheduling the talk during the day instead of at night.

Ultimately, the university can’t bend on the First Amendment, Napolitano said, and the militant protesters who disrupted the event trampled on Yiannopoulos’s rights. "I still hope they’re able to identify some of the perpetrators," she said.

Response to sexual assaults

Napolitano hopes the US Department of Education will clarify the 2011 ‘Dear Colleague’ letter that specified in detail how colleges must respond to reports of sexual assault.

"It has created a cottage industry for lawyers," Napolitano said of the letter and subsequent guidance from the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which has argued that the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX requires colleges to do everything within their reach to prevent assaults and punish the perpetrators.

Napolitano, however, said the Trump administration must be careful in making any changes to the guidance, especially if eliminating it. "If they were to rescind the guidance, they need to also at the same time send the message that Title IX is of paramount importance," she said, "and will continue to be enforced."

Targeted on Twitter

It’s hard not to pay attention, Napolitano said, when the president of the United States tweets about taking away money from your university to his 25 million Twitter followers, as Trump did last month following the violent protests at Berkeley. But she reminded people to put the message in context.

"That’s not how the appropriations process works," she said.

The incident also illustrated that Trump, who suggested that Berkeley was crushing free speech, didn’t have a grasp of the facts. "It wasn’t the campus that was suppressing speech," she said. "Far from it."

International students

The sprawling 10-campus California system produces roughly 7% of US doctorates, according to a recent estimate by Napolitano, and a significant chunk of those are international students. Enforcement of Trump’s travel ban has been suspended while litigation against it proceeds, but Napolitano said she worries about the long-term damage the president’s isolationist rhetoric has done to the desire of international students to study in the US.

"We haven’t seen that in our applications yet," she said, "but I’ll be watching for it."

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.