Mount Holyoke defends academic freedom amid federal pressure
Mount Holyoke College President Danielle R. Holley spoke to CNN about being one of the few higher-education leaders pushing back against federal government overreach.
Since January 2025, the federal government has worked to pull funding from colleges and universities that don’t follow its new policies about ending diversity programs, banning transgender athletes and shifting research priorities. Even as some universities, such as Brown, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, are acceding to government pressure, Mount Holyoke College is one of the few institutions pushing back.
According to an article on CNN’s website, Mount Holyoke President Danielle R. Holley is one of the few leaders in higher education who continues to speak out against the government’s efforts to control higher education. She told CNN that supporting diversity, equity and inclusion is a bedrock principle of the College.
“At Mount Holyoke, we are a women’s college, and because of that, we are built on diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Holley.
She decried Columbia University’s agreement to have what it calls an “independent monitor” installed to resolve disputes with the Trump administration over admissions and hiring.
“The idea that an American university would have a government monitor, not related to what they have been found to be in violation of, but related to their academic departments and the way [in which] they hire people,” Holley told CNN. “I think everyone in the United States should be deeply concerned with the idea that our federal government is attempting to run private universities and attempting to tell those universities who to hire [and] what they should be teaching in their classrooms.”
Holley linked Mount Holyoke’s loss of research funding to a wide-ranging attack by the Trump administration against research that focuses on women.
“If you are a researcher in this country doing work on women’s health, doing work on women in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] [or] doing work on women in leadership, any research that has to do with women is being caught up in those government searches and is being canceled,” she said. “When one of our research grants was cut, the wording from the federal government was that this kind of work related to gender is not beneficial and not scientific.”
