On Anticipatory Complicity

In 2025, in higher education, we have used and heard the phrase anticipatory compliance, about universities rapidly reworking everything from legal admissions policies to the racial and gender composition of faculty and staff, to the very fields of research deemed valuable, in fear of the loss of billions in federal funding for science, technology, and military research.¹ And no doubt, higher education has been held hostage as the second administration of President Donald Trump has shattered the foundations of scholarly research across the natural sciences, public health, medicine, social sciences, humanities, museums, and libraries, forcing universities into a defensive stance through the brutish annihilation of free inquiry and the total destruction of post-Civil Rights visions of a just society.²

To anticipate is to take steps before, to prepare for the future. Compliance is abiding by laws, standards, guidelines. But we are not in a system after 2025 that is creating rules lawfully, with fair standards or lawful guidelines. Rather, I would submit that the hushed feeling that captures the institutional mood of our moment is, more accurately, complicity, defined in Oxford Languages as “the state of being involved with others in an illegal activity or wrongdoing.” In our moment now, higher education in the United States has found itself in its era of willful wrongdoing, of anticipatory complicity. And perhaps nowhere is this clearer than the standing of women, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS) in the university right now. The university never really treated WGSS as a field of knowledge production, which helps to explain the current rush to complicity. The call against “gender ideology” is coming from inside the house.

We all feel the university’s complicity around us, which has especially impacted our students. With the election and start of the second Trump administration, I have heard from dozens of colleagues across universities and colleges across the United States about the sudden dramatic decline in enrollments and majors in WGSS and allied fields. Strikingly, these fields had, for a decade, been active and often growing in enrollments despite the overall decline in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.³ In a time when transformative ideas of gender defiance and the diversity of queer, non-binary, and trans lifeworlds are more available than ever, the state has made the normative enforcement of gender binarism its top priority. In the face of gender policing, there is no question that students are running scared, afraid to openly study critiques of patriarchy and gender binarism in the time of Project 2025. They are shaped by the feeling of dread in the time of pandemic economic uncertainty, perpetuated by college and university administrators who collude and submit to the demands of Trump and the many influencers who condemn universities for “woke ideology” and “DEI.”

In this moment, students have little access to clearly communicated ideas that undo authoritarian claims about gender ideology, ideas of bodily autonomy, or the politics of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Even as scholars and students of gender and sexuality feel an intense sense of uncertainty and the sudden retrenchment of universities, there has been little collective action in defense of research on women, gender, and sexuality. We are met with deafening silence and the total absence of oppositional statements and strategic planning by leading national academic professional organizations across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that claim to support and sustain research on women, gender, and sexuality.

And young people now witness their own professors, administrators, and academic advisors assume a defensive crouch, unwilling to acknowledge the world around them. Students have few resources in the university to navigate mass misinformation about gender as a concept, the end of constitutional protections for reproductive rights, and the dangerous scapegoating of sexual minorities. They are left to reckon with this dissonance by themselves. Unsurprisingly, they are scared to engage these ideas.

That we are in a crouch is not a surprise. While claiming anti-institutional roots and a posture of critique and refusal, WGSS as an institutional project has been tentative and submissive for years, from the feelings of fragility and exhaustion expressed by scholars in the field for decades to this moment now, an era of desperate, hushed preservation. This crouch is especially clear at many elite private universities where one might imagine funding and resources for fields that are more vulnerable to public pressure in state institutions. Indeed, the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies has most successfully institutionalized at state-funded public universities, yet these institutions have and continue to face widespread budget cuts for WGSS as the far right demonizes the work of free inquiry and DEI at the university.⁴ Today, more than fifty percent of students go to US public colleges and universities in states with laws that censor higher education.⁵ Unlike public institutions now under attack, Ivy League plus and other affluent private universities with independent resources and deep endowments never departmentalized WGSS nor expanded programs with the intent to invest in research. These elite private institutions entrenched underfunded curricular programs, institutes, or “committees for the study,” while perpetually deferring departmentalization or a real commitment to investment in scholarly inquiry. And over time and multiple waves of false claims to austerity, private universities have perpetually starved and quietly defunded these units, leaving only the shell of WGSS programs intact.

Perhaps we too have been complicit with the hushed starvation of our own fields. Many WGSS faculty, me included, have unwittingly participated in the undermining of our own curricular and intellectual goals, disregarding the insights of our field’s critiques of the vexed histories of institutional power, the neoliberal destruction of free inquiry, and labor exploitation at the American university. We have done the endless labor of the field even as our programs experienced systemic deprivation and disregard over many years, long before 2025. Faculty do the work of the university and the profession while they care for hundreds of abandoned students above and beyond the formal requirements of the job.⁶ They do so for many reasons: because they are committed to intellectual life; because they believe in their students; but mostly because the material reality is that contingent faculty do the most labor of teaching gender, and they work like hell to keep their jobs. These faculty and instructors face an enduring culture of perpetual job insecurity and desperately low pay, and now, sudden firings without due process.

WGSS programs and institutes have provided unpaid labor, overachievement in teaching, and expert service to the university for little cost. And we have done so with an implicit understanding of the benefit of silence and tacit acceptance of poor working conditions. Over almost a decade, I regularly heard such sentiments from senior colleagues from across the university as: “We don’t want to ruffle feathers. We cannot take a public stand on our university culture of sexual harassment. You as junior faculty should not say anything about the political climate. You can express your ideas when you are tenured. We will only make some change if we are seen as willing and active contributors to the university.” And every year, we justify our existence in annual planning documents, a pedagogy of anticipatory complicity that existed long before 2025. In these institutional reports, we narrate our ability to mount a curriculum in WGSS with little-to-no funding in order to maintain the façade of the diverse university. Over many years — doing the endless labor of university administration, demonstrating our ideal citizenship, teaching and mentoring with care — we have quietly consented to conditions of perpetual deprivation. We lost sight of the epistemological imperative of asserting the place of WGSS as a distinct field of research that reimagined intellectual life in and out of the university. Instead, we have settled on less than the bare minimum for grossly underfunded curricular programs while affirming we are the best citizens of the corporate university of all.

I am a participant in this culture of quiet consent, and I am also a casualty of 2025’s anticipatory complicity. In 2017, I was the first fully lined faculty to be hired into the program of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, a program founded more than forty years ago, the first person ever to join the faculty for primary expertise in the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies in Harvard’s now 390-year history. A historic hire, too historic, one that would be made impermanent in a time of reactionary backlash with the denial of my bid for tenure. At its most “diverse” some years ago, women constituted just 26 percent of the tenured faculty at Harvard, a percentage that is quickly declining. In 2025 administrators declared that gender demographics for faculty in arts and sciences would no longer be publicly reported, but the already low percentage of women has fallen precipitously in the last year with the dramatic reductions in hires and departures at all levels of the faculty.

In my time at Harvard, multiple faculty were found to have committed grave acts of sexual harassment and violence, and almost every day I was asked to support students facing harassment, sexism, and anti-queer and anti-trans statements and harassment by senior faculty and administrators. I learned of countless investigations and definitive findings of sexual harassment by university leaders, well-known senior faculty, and heads of centers and institutes, in whispers, unsaid in public and still secret. Sexual violence and rape were endemic issues among students in their clubs and secret societies. Turns out, it was most pervasive among faculty and university leadership, as we continue to learn, among the many, many people at the university who were close associates of Jeffrey Epstein before and after his 2008 conviction. These numerous Harvard associates of Epstein are implicated not only in his unethical financial dealings, but also the violent transnational network of power sustained through the rape, coercion, and trafficking of women and girls and the coordinated promotion of anti-trans ideology through Epstein-sanctioned eugenicist science. Yet there has been and will be no sustained institutional reflection, let alone reckoning, with the longstanding, grotesque university culture of pervasive sex discrimination and endemic gendered violence. In this environment, it is no surprise that administrators and faculty say nothing about gender discrimination and harassment yet regularly characterized the field and scholars of WGSS — research-based expertise in the perversions of patriarchal power, institutional failures against sexual and gendered violence, and the perseverance and abundance of women’s, queer, and trans lives and thought — as lacking in scholarly merit and rigor.

The disregard for women and queer scholars was clear as we experienced psychic terror in the forms of harassment, doxxing, and death threats. I watched as an extraordinary faculty member in my program experienced terrifying forms of harassment and anti-Black racism with no institutional support. I witnessed again, again, and again the violent backlash against Black women, including Harvard’s first Black woman president, as well as numerous women of color faculty who for years had been institutionally fetishized, to use the language of Amber Jamilla Musser.⁷ Long objectified by the university, today they have been publicly reviled and threatened with rape and racist violence without consequence. While there was always a deeply pervasive culture of “anti–Black women racism and misogyny” in the academy, as Tiffany Lethabo King argues, today, there is no guise of propriety shrouding virulent racism, which is now totally speakable.⁸ My students, primarily women of color, international, and queer and trans students, faced unprecedented doxxing, the cruel taunting of trucks circling campuses with their faces and personal information, leading to paralyzing threats to their home and families, with absolutely no institutional protection. And when I was doxxed, harassed, and threatened for months for teaching courses on the history of gender and sexuality, I experienced firsthand the total abandonment of faculty by an administration that had, just a few moments before, championed my work with awards and placed me in front of donors.

Today, administrators continue to eagerly pursue a twenty-first century Harvard remade in the nostalgic supremacist visions of the university of yore. The Harvard administration has been willing and swift in its alliance with the goals of the Trump administration, all under the guise of standing up to Trump (but only pushing back for federal money). They have fired diverse faculty, staff, and leaders of academic centers, policed curricula and events, suspended student groups for speech, and gutted minoritized student life by eliminating the women’s center, the LGBTQ student life office, the multicultural center, and equity educational programs for first-generation students. During my time on the faculty, almost no classes at Harvard College featured substantial content on women or sexual minorities or addressed urgent issues such as reproductive and trans politics. Now, under claims of financial austerity, they are gutting whatever threadbare budget and curriculum is left in WGSS.

How fragile our small carved-out spaces in the academy are, how swiftly infrastructures for minoritized intellectual work in the post-Civil Rights era university can be annihilated.

Ten years ago, in a collective engagement with “Institutional Feelings” led by editors Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens, feminist scholars reflected on unseen networks of relationality and argued for self-preservation, divestment, and embodied refusal in the face of the inhumane demands of the corporate university.⁹ But what does this vision of refusal and the divestment of our labor look like in the scenario now, after 2025, when the federal government welcomes our exit? What is refusal when both affluent private and scrutinized public universities alike are actively complicit, leaving their faculty out to dry, as women, sexual minorities, and people of color are ruthlessly attacked online by everyone from students recording on phones, billionaire donors, and reactionary members of Congress? What is our work in WGSS now, as universities wait in anticipation ready to enforce new modes of state violence, like those who so willingly agree to the imposition of gender binarism through blatantly discriminatory government-university “compacts”?

One cannot refuse the institution and its labor if you are not employed. Many in public universities and colleges face the worst working conditions with little to no way to sustain a politics of divestment from the university. As of December 2025, colleagues in Texas and a graduate instructor in Oklahoma permanently lost their teaching jobs because they taught essential ideas from gender and sexuality studies.¹⁰ In January 2026, Texas A&M University eliminated their women’s and gender studies program and censored gender and race content in all courses, and multiple programs and departments across the United States have been shut down since. With new state laws that mandate administrative enforcement of “intellectual diversity” and require the public display of syllabi, faculty at public institutions have little security to do the basic work of teaching despite the efforts of faculty senates and faculty accountability efforts to reveal the injustice of faculty firings.¹¹ These precarious scholars face the psychic cruelty of endless doxxing, threats, and uncertain employment prospects. As faculty unsuccessfully invoke empty institutional mechanisms to advocate for the right to faculty governance and academic freedom, contingent scholars of gender and sexuality have zero protections from either job loss or the hounding of virulent mobs.

We are surrounded by a petrified silence for self-preservation, the predominant institutional feeling in our present. Perhaps the framework of anticipatory complicity for our universities helps us better confront the profound existential crisis our fields face with internal attacks on gender ideology that have exposed scholars of women, gender, and sexuality to ruthless scrutiny. We need to reckon with not only the shockingly rapid dismantling of our field of gender and sexuality studies in 2025 and the lack of substantial opposition and a defense of academic freedom in the university today, but decades of starvation of WGSS by colleges and universities. Then we might find new ways to contest the university’s complicity with the only actual gender ideology at play today: state-enforced gender binarism.

There is no individual refusal within the university in a time when an authoritarian state works illegally and ideologically to annihilate a whole field of scholarly inquiry. In the present crisis, earlier frameworks critical of neoliberal multiculturalism in the university may no longer serve us. Instead, we must create new collective visions of refusal, rejecting the formal and informal compacts of the state, university, and doxxing mobs who actively ally to exile scholars and ideas of minoritized fields of knowledge from the university. How might we rethink the politics of feminist divestment now to create a renewed vision of the institutional project of WGSS, insisting on our right to create knowledge within the university? It begins with shattering the fiction that self-preservation for the field of WGSS can be achieved through silence. It requires that we demand currently weak professional organizations advocate for WGSS against the creep of an authoritarian politics against “gender ideology.” It requires that we build new advocacy networks for our research and divest from existing scholarly organizations when they fail to advocate for us. And it begins with systematically mapping current material foundations of WGSS and collectively pursuing new avenues to endow research. Even as I myself have lost my job in the field, I believe more than ever in the importance and urgency of scholars and students of feminist, queer, and trans studies to defiantly claim the university as our own.