Which do major American universities value more, freedom of inquiry and free speech, or their endowments?

Charlie Eaton, $15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President, NYTimes, March 25, 2025.

President Trump has declared that this country’s leading universities are sites of “anti-American insanity.” He has tried to cut their funding for scientific research. His administration has announced investigations into diversity programs and floated new taxes on university endowments. Brown and Columbia have had faculty members or former students detained and threatened with deportation. On Thursday the administration suspended $175 million of funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies on transgender athletes.

Fearing sanction or retribution, universities have begun to placate the administration, banning diversity statements in faculty hiring or weighing whether to strip trigger words like “diverse” from their hospital systems’ websites. In doing so, they risk abandoning their roles as centers of free speech and critical debate in the name of appeasement.

Top universities must instead exercise the financial independence afforded by their endowments, which are commonly valued in the tens of billions. Their leaders should collectively declare they will not suppress lawful free speech, diversity programs or campus research to appease any president.

Later:

In short, were the university [Columbia] to choose to defend itself, some simple arithmetic suggests that — at least financially — it could. Easily.

It’s not too bold to predict that every university president will face a similar choice in the coming months. So far, some universities have found initial success with lawsuits to block federal research funding cuts. But nearly a dozen wealthy universities have already announced plans to trim their spending. Harvard, with a $53 billion endowment, has announced a hiring freeze. Stanford, with a $38 billion endowment, has done the same.

The Big Five private universities with the largest endowments — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and M.I.T. — should have the most room to maneuver. Their endowments, each valued at over $20 billion, have grown around tenfold (after inflation) over the past 40 years while enrollment has increased only by a fraction. Even universities with endowments valued over just $5 billion, on average, spend less than 5 percent of that each year. If they won’t spend their wealth to defend their academic missions, what are they hoarding it for?

Universities sometimes call on the idea of intergenerational equity — that endowments should be preserved to provide comparable benefits for future generations — to limit spending their endowments. In this climate, intergenerational equity is little more than a fallacy. If those universities fail to defend free speech and scientific research now, future generations could lose their treasures to creeping authoritarianism.

Frankly, while some faculty may care about freedom of inquiry and free speech, I have my doubts about university administrators. I fear they're more invested in the prestige they gain from their jobs than in the intellectual activities on which that prestige rests.