As the Trump administration implements policies affecting higher education, from research funding cuts to civil rights investigations, some colleges and universities have banded together to make a case for the distinctive value of U.S. institutions of higher education and the importance of protecting that value against governmental overreach.

On April 22, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) published an open letter titled “A Call for Constructive Engagement." The letter argues that a peculiar strength of American institutions of higher education rests in their freedom “to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom” in an environment where “faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.”

This open letter has been signed by leaders of several types of institutions — not just colleges and universities, but also scholarly professional societies and other kinds of affinity groups. What can we learn from considering who has joined this effort?

After removing the latter kinds of groups from the signatories list, as of May 3, 2025, we find there were 514 total university and college signatories to the open letter, which represents about 9% of the institutions of higher education in the U.S. Together, these institutions employ nearly a quarter-million full-time equivalent faculty and enroll just over 4 million students — roughly 22% of the total number of students enrolled in a U.S. institution of higher education.

What are some other characteristics of the signatory institutions to the open letter? What kinds of institutions have signed on? And what kind of political environments do they inhabit? To investigate these additional questions, the HxA research team created a dataset that combined information about the open letter’s signatories (as of May 3, 2025) with publicly available data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and other sources.

Results show that roughly 10% of signatory institutions have been named in recent Education Department press releases announcing investigations into colleges and universities for antisemitism or racial discrimination. Not every institution so named has signed the open letter, though a majority have.

Most signatory institutions (60%) are private, though public institutions are still well represented. Leaders at private institutions might be able to more easily sign open letters like “A Call to Constructive Engagement” than leaders at public institutions, as the former tend to have much more power over exercising institutional voice.

A wide variety of institutions of higher education — from flagship research universities to masters-degree-granting institutions and from liberal arts colleges to community colleges — have endorsed the letter. Using the 2021 Carnegie Classification scheme, we find that colleges who exclusively grant bachelors degrees (labeled in the graph below as Baccalaureate Colleges) constitute a plurality of signatories. Research-intensive universities that award doctorates (classified as R1, R2) and universities with large masters degree programs (classified as M1) are also substantially represented among the signatories.

There are also noteworthy regional patterns in the institutions that have signed the open letter. Applying the regional categorizations IPEDS uses to classify institutions, we see that institutions in the mid-Atlantic region (IPEDS uses the label “Mid East” for the states DE, DC, MD, NJ, NY, and PA) constitute roughly a third of signatories, followed by institutions from the “Far West” (AK, CA, HI, NV, OR, WA). Interestingly, very few institutions from the Southwest or Southeast regions — think the Sunbelt and the Deep South — have signed the open letter.

Zooming in from regions to state-by-state trends in signatories is even more suggestive of interesting trends. Institutions of higher education in New York and California lead the way. In contrast, institutions of higher education in Texas and Florida are hardly represented among the open letter’s signatories relative to the size of their student enrollments.

New York and California are archetypal “blue states,” while Texas and Florida are archetypal “red states.” This suggests that the state-level political environment of institutions of higher education may play some role in explaining the patterns we see in whether university leaders are putting their institution’s names on the open letter.

A preliminary way to interrogate this question is to look at the statistical relationship between the percentage of a state’s institutions of higher education that have signed the open letter and the percentage of that state’s popular vote that went to Donald Trump in 2024. We might ask, does the percentage of Trump’s vote in a given state predict the percentage of that state’s institutions of higher education that have signed the open letter?

Using our dataset along with data from the American Presidency Project, we find that there is a moderately strong negative association (ρ = -0.70, ρ2 = 0.49) between these variables: the greater proportion of voters who went for Trump in a state predicts a decrease in the percentage of that state’s institutions of higher education who have signed the open letter.

The pattern of institutional signatories suggests that the political environment may influence universities' decisions to publicly oppose federal actions. Institutions in Democratic-leaning states are likely to face less political risk from state governments for doing so, while potentially experiencing greater pressure from students, faculty, or alumni to take public stands. Institutions in Democratic-leaning states might also feel the need to organize themselves against adverse actions by a Republican-leaning federal government. In contrast, institutions in Republican-leaning states might face stronger disincentives from state officials and governing boards to publicly oppose a Republican-leaning federal government. Although our data reveals a correlation between state-level 2024 presidential election voting patterns and institutional signatories, a fuller explanation would of course require investigating the specific decision-making processes at individual institutions.

Moving forward, it will be worthwhile to track whether additional institutions sign onto the open letter, particularly from U.S. regions hitherto underrepresented. The current geographic distribution of signatories may shift as the political situation evolves. Moreover, examining whether and how signatory institutions implement the principles of the open letter will provide insight into whether their public commitment translates into meaningful institutional practice.

Whatever the explanation of trends we see in who is — and isn’t — signing “A Call to Constructive Engagement,” the principles set forth therein stand on their own. While opinions may differ on the letter’s political purposes, the educational ideals expressed in it ought to appeal to everyone who values higher education, regardless of partisan politics. The open letter's emphasis on open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive dialogue mirrors the core mission of Heterodox Academy and, indeed, basic academic values that should resonate across institutional types and political contexts.

With thanks to HxA Research Assistant Erin Shaw for help with data collection and analysis.