The president of Dartmouth, home of the brave space, has been notably absent from the list of college leaders speaking out against the Trump administration’s all-out assault on academic freedom and free speech.

As of this writing, the name of Sian Leah Beilock was nowhere to be found among those of 594 college leaders who signed an open letter from the American Association of Colleges and Universities protesting the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” The roster runs from A (Andres Acebo, interim president of New Jersey City University) to Z (Mark Zupan, president, Alfred University) and includes all of Dartmouth’s peer institutions in the Ivy League as well as community colleges, public flagship universities, Jesuit schools and historically Black colleges.

More than 325 Dartmouth alumni have urged Beilock to speak out, a plea that so far she has met with platitudes such as, “I am proud of Dartmouth and our sole focus on being an educational institution, not a political one.” To which we can only say, “President Beilock, when your neighbor’s house is on fire, it’s wise to lend your garden hose before the flames spread.”

There are a few possible explanations for Beilock’s absence from the roster of college presidents signing the statement. Moral cowardice is one, and unfortunately it is the best one. That is, she may legitimately fear the wrath of Trump and the possible effect of retaliatory federal funding cuts on the college (not to mention on her job security), and is happy to let other institutions fight the academic-freedom battle for her. Not exactly a profile in courage, but an all-too-common response to bully boys.

The other, and worse, possibility is that Beilock and the college trustees are in sympathy with part or all of Trump’s agenda to remake higher education in his own image: rich, white and hewing to a radically conservative line.

We omit the Trump administration’s purported objective of stamping out antisemitism on campus, which is a classic false flag operation. As Christopher Browning, a historian of Nazi Germany, recently pointed out, Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign included two ads that were “blatant renditions of the classic antisemitic smear of Jewish money and Jewish financiers as the sources of power behind an opponent.”

Add to this, Browning writes, Trump’s statement that there were fine people on both sides at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where demonstrators chanted “Blood and Soil” and “Jews Will Not Replace Us”; his labeling as “patriots” the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, one of whom was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Camp Auschwitz”; and dining in 2022 with a leading Holocaust denier at Mar-a-Lago and you get an accurate picture that antisemitism is being weaponized for other purposes.

In fact, five Jewish presidents of leading universities — not including Beilock, who is also Jewish — have taken exception to this excuse for the administration’s campaign to exert government control over higher education.

What appears to have galvanized college leaders across the country to finally speak “with one voice” in opposition to “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live and work on our campuses” was the refusal of Harvard to knuckle under to the government’s proposed hostile takeover of its operations, which was detailed in an April 11 proposed settlement agreement that would have amounted to placing the institution in government receivership. These demands included ceding control of admissions, hiring and curriculum to government oversight. Harvard responded that “the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Resistance may carry a heavy price. In response, Trump immediately froze $2.2 billion in grants and contracts for Harvard and asked the IRS to revoke the university’s nonprofit status. Neither of these actions is likely to withstand a court challenge, but they do suggest how high the stakes are, even for an institution with a $50 billion endowment.

But the price of submission is even higher. As the historian Richard Evans relates in “The Coming of the Third Reich,” the eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger, a thorough-going Nazi, was elected rector of Freiburg University in April 1933 and gave his inaugural address on May 27. He first announced that he had taken over “spiritual leadership” of the university and “declared that ‘academic freedom’ would no longer be the basis of life in the German university ... It was time, he said, for universities to find their anchor in the German nation and to play their part in the historic mission it was now fulfilling.” And so they did.

Such enormities do not occur overnight, of course, but where academic freedom and free speech are under assault, Dartmouth — and all institutions that live and breathe those values — need to rise to the occasion and defend them. Anything less is a shameful abdication of responsibility.