Abraham Flaxman is a professor at the University of Washington who studies diseases and how they affect global health. He’s a bit uneasy, he says, with military talk.
But such are the times that when I ask him the meaning of the movement he’s brought to the UW, he answers with this:
“An attack on one is an attack on all,” he says, quoting the core premise of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance that formed in the aftermath of World War II. “That’s what this is — a NATO for higher education.”
Flaxman is the sponsor of a resolution that passed the UW’s Faculty Senate last week, calling for the UW to join a “mutual defense compact” of Big Ten universities. It passed 52 to 5.
Except unlike NATO, which was formed to guard against the threat of a hostile foreign power (the Soviet Union), this one has formed to guard against the threat of our own government.
President Donald Trump has been going after major universities, for their diversity programs as well as last year’s protests against the war in Gaza. The administration has tried to pull federal funding from seven schools while threatening dozens more. It has also upended the visas of nearly 2,000 international students.
The resolution calls on the schools to band together. If any one gets its funding or academic independence threatened, then all will rally a “vigorous defense” that could include legal counsel, lobbying, experts and other resources.
The resolution reads: “The federal government has signaled a willingness to target individual institutions with legal, financial, and political incursion designed to undermine their public mission, silence dissenting voices, and/or exert improper control over academic inquiry.”
Said Flaxman: “We are on some of the target lists put out by the Trump administration. So it’s coming. That was our premise — that it’s coming for us, and it’s also coming for dozens of other colleges.”
The idea of a defense pact was initiated by Rutgers, and UW now is one of a half dozen or so of the Big Ten’s 18 schools to pass the resolution. It doesn’t have any force of law, Flaxman said — it’s more of a rally cry for a coherent resistance.
What strained times. That a little “NATO” is deemed necessary inside our own country, to protect one part of it from another, is only one of the local news items this week that hinted that our grand national experiment could be headed for a crackup.
In Olympia, Democrats put forward a bill that bars other states from sending their National Guard units here without permission. It’s born of fears that some red states, emboldened by Trump’s vow to use the military to round up migrants, will send in their own National Guard units.
Former Gov. Jay Inslee put it most directly: “It’s not the Guard personnel we are concerned about, it’s other governors in the Trump cult.”
Republicans correctly countered that the bill, like UW’s NATO pact, is mostly symbolic. Trump can likely get around it by declaring an emergency and federalizing the Guard. He’s been making noises he might try exactly that.
That we’re even talking about states effectively invading other states is … well, it was enough to get one state senator to invoke the last time such a thing happened.
“A state sending their National Guard into another state … this has never happened before,” said state Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, before catching himself. “Only once — in the Civil War.”
He was talking about times a state’s National Guard had been sent into another state with a hostile posture (the units go frequently when asked). There have also been times like the 1950s, when President Dwight Eisenhower commandeered the Arkansas National Guard to force it to help a group of Black students integrate a Little Rock school.
But these examples refer to periods of extraordinary national duress. Are we there?
“With today’s tensions in the United States, and each state, this bill should be put down, if for nothing else to ease the tensions,” Wilson said during the legislative debate earlier this month. “No civil war — please put this bill down.”
Democrats did not put it down — they passed it, and on Monday, current Gov. Bob Ferguson signed it.
“We just cannot allow as a state to have armed forces come into our home and enforce policies that are against our core values,” Ferguson said at Monday’s bill signing.
The talk of civil war, and of NATO-style defense pacts — it all may seem hyperbolic. But it reflects a very real instability in the land right now. There’s an uneasiness that the center — the separation of powers, due process, the Constitution — this time may not hold.
Back at UW, Flaxman says his hope is that the mutual defense pact resolution will lead to more of a focus on solidarity, not the sense of fraying that led to it.
“I see the limits of the military analogies, but at the same time, I feel the NATO comparison is justified,” he said. “There’s an urgency about this. We feel the very existence of some universities is now at stake.”
The saying goes that “it can’t happen here.” But every day there are more signs that it might.
Correction: The vote total in the UW Faculty Senate on this resolution was changed after publication, due to an incorrect tally provided originally by the Senate.
The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.