PHILADELPHIA—The final speech at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ annual conference this week dissected the Trump administration’s “financial assault” on universities and urged the Supreme Court to be a check on a president whom Congress hasn’t reined in.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a constitutional scholar, also told the attendees of the APLU meeting that their institutions should be united against the administration’s attacks on higher ed.

“The one thing we all learned on the playground is if you give in to a bully, it only makes it worse in the long term,” Chemerinsky said Tuesday, adding—to applause—that “it’s so important that institutions of higher education stand together at this moment and stand together for our shared missions.”

The speech comes after multiple prominent universities, including a few public ones, refused to sign Trump’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which asked them to give up significant autonomy in exchange for an unspecified edge in competitions for federal funds.

It also follows legal victories against the administration’s grant cancellations. Litigation by UC researchers against Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency and other federal agencies and officials has restored more than $500 million in federal research grants, which the administration cut at UCLA after the Justice Department accused it of tolerating antisemitism during a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Chemerinsky, who is Jewish, is representing the researchers in that litigation.

Asked for comment, a White House official told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “UC Berkely clearly needs to make some changes – violence broke out on UC Berkeley’s campus just last night and they have failed to police antisemitism by tolerating an ‘unrelenting’ steam of antisemitic harassment toward Jewish students and faculty.”

Even before the latest cuts, Chemerinsky estimated the Trump administration had already slashed close to $1 billion in funding for faculty and researchers across the UC system, a figure that he said was much higher than DOGE’s tally. The UC system didn’t confirm or deny this estimate or provide a more recent estimate Tuesday, saying the system was closed for Veterans Day.

“I think the termination of grants that we’ve seen, whether it’s to researchers and faculty or to universities, is clearly illegal,” Chemerinsky said. But when it comes to “nonrenewal of grants in the future and funding in the future,” he added, the “government has far more discretion, and there it’s going to be much harder to bring legal challenges.”

Chemerinsky also said federal funding cuts are just one of four financial vulnerabilities the administration has identified in universities: “they’re very dependent” on federal money, tuition, philanthropy and foreign students. Using his own institution as an example, he said Berkeley Law has an L.L.M., or master of laws, degree program that’s exclusively for foreign students and represents $20 million in its annual budget.

He then expressed concern about how the Supreme Court has ruled on the administration’s actions, even beyond higher ed.

“By my count, 39 matters have come to the Supreme Court since [Inauguration Day] Jan. 20, challenging actions of the Trump administration,” he said. “All are instances where the lower courts ruled against the Trump administration, and in 36 of 39, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Trump administration.”

Noting eight of the nine justices graduated from the law schools at either Harvard or Yale Universities (Amy Coney Barrett graduated from the University of Notre Dame), he said, “My optimistic self believes that the United States Supreme Court will stand up for higher education.” Chemerinsky added that since Congress hasn’t served as a check on the president, it’s up to the federal judiciary to uphold the laws and the Constitution.

Fittingly, his speech took place at a Philadelphia hotel about a 15-minute walk from where the founders adopted the Constitution. APLU said more than 1,300 people attended this week’s three-day conference.

“Ultimately, I believe the guardrail of our democracy has to be the courts and the Supreme Court,” Chemerinsky said. “If there is going to be a check on a president who has authoritarian impulses, it’s going to have to be from the restraints of the Constitution—and the only way we can enforce those is the courts.”

Chemerinsky noted that “one characteristic of every authoritarian—or would-be authoritarian—rule is the way they go after universities. What we’ve seen in the last nine and a half months is unprecedented in American history.”

He compared Trump’s actions to McCarthyism, the 1950s-era political persecution of faculty, government employees and others. But Chemerinsky pointed out that back then, “it wasn’t the president of the United States leading the attack on higher education,” and “there wasn’t the financial assault on universities.”

“But the one thing that the McCarthy era should say to all of us is that history will judge us,” he said. “Twenty, 30, 50, 75 years from now, people will look back on us the way we look at university officials in the McCarthy era, and they will judge us as to whether we capitulated or whether we had courage.”