Campus Politics in the Age of Trump - New York Times
A sizable number of those students are registered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; if President Trump moves ahead with his threats to repeal the program and deport millions of undocumented people, it would leave a significant dent in our community.
Hence the calls for sanctuary campuses. “Most of the policies that are being talked about on college campuses are not really about getting in the way of federal enforcement,” said Michael Kagan, a professor of immigration law at U.N.L.V. “They are about making campuses as welcoming a place as possible regardless of people’s immigration status.” After all, contrary to popular belief, he said, “Being an undocumented person in the United States is not a crime.”
Claiming sanctuary status, however, has its own complications — which our president, Len Jessup, explained when he declined the petition’s request (along with the presidents of Harvard, Columbia and Penn State). Legally, the label has no definition, and what it means in practice is unclear.
“The term inspires some and generates anger for others,” Professor Kagan said. “Any institution that decides whether it wants to raise that flag must realize it is no more than a symbol.”
For the left, that symbol has come to represent an overt stance against President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. For the right, it is further proof of liberal bias in universities. Some have lumped the sanctuary campus movement in with larger conversations about “safe spaces” on campuses, and the ethical and moral challenges universities face in meeting the needs of their increasingly diverse student populations.
Many of the college administrations that have rejected the term cited their fears of giving undocumented students a false sense of safety while remaining legally unable to protect them from deportation. Others worry about their federal funding, which conservative congressmen have threatened to try to yank from those universities that take on the label.
Still, the sanctuary movement, whatever its legal or symbolic implications, raises important questions for campuses like mine that strive to be committed to minority and low-income students: How do we proceed in the shadow of a presidential administration that unapologetically promotes xenophobia? And is it even possible to do so without getting political?
Naturally, President Trump’s actions, in particular his executive order for agencies to find ways to deny federal funding to sanctuary cities, have unsettled undocumented students. But they should equally bother institutions that claim diversity as a central part of their mission. Not only are Mr. Trump’s executive actions a threat to those values, his entire first few weeks in office have been driven by ideologies, ideas and anti-intellectualism that conflict with academic principles. Remaining apolitical in the Trump era not only undercuts core principles of higher learning, it is no longer sustainable.
But universities that prioritize diversity of thought are not all the same, and they are by definition heterogeneous places. On my campus, conservative groups petitioned against the sanctuary label, and an instructor threatened to report students who revealed to him their undocumented status. There is strong opposition to the idea that college campuses should pick and choose the federal laws they follow.
Balancing all of this — competing interests on campus, concerns about claiming sanctuary status, threats from the White House — is now the most pressing task for university presidents. Their guiding principle must be to protect the students who make up the breadth of perspectives that our institutions value. If we as a university refuse to take symbolic, practical and political steps to express solidarity with these students, we are undermining our own principles.
Institutions like U.N.L.V. may reject the sanctuary label, but we must be prepared to eventually step into the political firing line. If the last few weeks are any indication, President Trump’s policies may soon force us to.
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