A new national coalition, the Alliance for Higher Education, announced its launch Tuesday, promising to defend higher education from government interference.

The nonprofit’s mission is to protect higher ed’s role in fostering democracy by ensuring that colleges and universities have academic freedom, autonomy and opportunity for all students to learn and succeed, said Mike Gavin, the organization’s inaugural president and CEO.

“Our goal—the joke I’ve been making—is to make things less bad,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed. “But in the long run, what we want to see is” higher ed making good on its “democratic promises.” He believes that involves ensuring college access and preserving a “healthy separation” between government and higher ed.

The plan is to tackle that goal through a multipronged attack. The alliance is providing “rapid-response” resources to counter and pre-empt the Trump administration’s political incursions into higher ed. For example, the organization’s site is already populated with reports and tool kits, including a template for how higher ed employees can respond to ICE actions as well as a guide for campus reflection and planning after the Trump administration dropped its appeal of the court order blocking its guidance to quash DEI efforts. The alliance has similarly been working on a resource to prepare higher ed institutions in case the Trump administration ever threatens to ax financial aid funding.

The organization is also thinking long-term with a project called Democracy’s Campus 2036, which aims to create a blueprint for how campuses can create “more access for more people so that the democracy thrives,” Gavin said. A think tank focused on the intersection of higher education and democracy is also in the works to disseminate research and best practices across different types of institutions.

In recent years, Gavin made waves as the outspoken president of Delta College, a Michigan community college, and as the leader of Education for All, a grassroots network of community college leaders fighting anti-DEI legislation. He said the Alliance for Higher Education was born out of that work as he saw state and federal legislators meddling with higher ed operations, teaching and learning.

His scholarship has also led him to believe that college access for diverse students and higher ed’s role in fostering democracy are “inextricably linked,” but the two missions aren’t necessarily widely seen as connected.

That’s why the alliance’s advisory board brings together leaders of democracy and higher ed–focused organizations, including some prominent names: Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors; Paulette Granberry Russell, outgoing president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education; Democracy Forward’s president and CEO, Skye Perryman; George Boggs, president and CEO emeritus of the American Association of Community Colleges; Young Invincibles president and CEO Kristin McGuire; and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of African American studies and public policy at Princeton University.

“Even if there were not necessarily attacks on the sector right now, we still would have a need for an organization like this,” Gavin said. But “these attacks have catalyzed people being able to see the need.”

Growing Support

So far, the alliance has partnered with more than 50 higher education associations and organizations, collectively representing “almost every single student, employee and institution” in the country, Gavin added.

The alliance isn’t readily sharing information about its partners or funders because of concerns they’d get blowback, he added.

The organization’s leadership decided “there’s no point in having people fearful of putting their name on something,” Gavin said, though he acknowledged that “it’s really sad in this time that we can put people at risk by doing that.” But “we have a lot of excitement about this effort,” including among “pretty major players.”

Within hours of the alliance’s birth on LinkedIn, it had over 200 followers. And some big names have come out in public support.

“American colleges and universities are the intellectual and economic engines of the world,” Arne Duncan, former secretary of education under President Barack Obama, said in a statement. “I firmly believe that we must join together and pursue every possible strategy to safeguard them, and I’m thrilled to see the Alliance coming in to fill this critical gap.”

Thomas Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey and a past president of Drew University, said in a statement that he hopes “the Alliance can help us move forward with bipartisan compromises and finally make the changes we need in higher education.”

Gavin said he wants the alliance to empower the sector moving forward.

The alliance aims to help higher ed leaders and staff “feel like they have agency and their imaginations haven’t atrophied” in terms of their hopes and goals for achieving their institutions’ highest ideals “because there’s a space that’s looking out for them,” he said. And he wants to raise a question: “In the national consciousness, who is it that’s going to college? And subsequently, how do we think about the long-term goal of democracy in conjunction with which institutions and which people we lift up?”