University of Michigan President Santa Ono announced he was leaving his post to the University of Florida, whose name was quietly removed from office Wednesday, a letter signed by more than 600 university presidents denounced the Trump administration's "unprecedented governmental over-gonement and political interference" related to academic institutions.

With Ono going to be the country’s highest-paid public university president, the state is often at the forefront of the right-wing battle against higher education, the reversal first reported by Talking Point Memo, highlighting the challenge of opposing the government’s full-scale attack on education in a solid red country.

Many private universities have begun to oppose Donald Trump’s federal funding cuts, banning diversity initiatives and targeting foreign students, while among more than 30 universities, most of them, have passed resolutions that have passed “reciprocity compact” – largely a symbolic commitment to support each other, to support each other in the face of repetitive measures of government. But local attacks on higher education were prevalent in conservative countries, where teachers trying to fight back found themselves fighting on multiple fronts: against state lawmakers and against Trump.

Some have persisted, although the boycott is limited to statements and resolutions at the moment, calling on universities themselves to propose a more muscular response. The Senate of Indiana University in Bloomington voted for the Defense Compact last month, days after Republican lawmakers passed a comprehensive overhaul of state schools. In Georgia, Kennesaw State University became the first school in the South and thus far, joining the Solidarity Convention call, partly due to protests that the state seized decades of initiatives to increase black college enrolment, part of the Trump-led diversity initiative. This week, staff at the University of Miami, Ohio and the University of Arizona (the majority legislature of the Republic) also passed a resolution supporting the alliance between universities.

The resolution is unconditional because faculty senators play a consulting role in most universities and have so far not responded to the phone call. But the idea behind the person is to send a message.

"All universities in all states are under threat," said Jim Sherman, a retired psychology professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, who proposed a resolution passed by teachers. “If we don’t stand together and talk about what each of us is going through, how we deal with it and what the choice is, then we stand alone and it’s much harder.”

Paul Boxer, a psychology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, first proposed a plan to organize faculty at the Big Ten conference, a group of 18 large, mainly public universities to fight the Trump administration’s unified front. But schools outside the conference showed interest, and solidarity efforts quickly surpassed the consortium, including other major public universities and universities across the country. The boxers also praised other collective initiatives that have emerged since then, including a group of "elite" universities quietly tackling against Trump administration policies, but called on more universities to openly unite.

"It's obvious that Harvard did what they did, but I'm glad they're sitting on a $50 billion donation basis, they can do what we can't do in public universities," the boxer said. "A lot of the attention has attracted the attention of Harvard, the Ivy League, and the universities whose name Trump is decreasing, and I'm glad they're sitting on a $5 billion donation basis, they can do what we can't do in a public university."

Boxers noted that large state universities, especially those in blue states with sympathy for lawmakers, have other advantages, including close ties to alumni in local government and the wider community.

This is a harder case in Republican-controlled countries, some of which, such as Florida, Texas, Iowa and Utah, have basically put forward a blueprint for attacking diversity initiatives and academic freedom in the years before Trump’s election. In Indiana, the recently passed measures (legislators attached the budget bill at the last minute) will build a “productivity” quota for tenured teachers and end the alumni’s ability to vote on the university board, which will have full control over the state’s Governor Mike Braun.

“There is a lot of anxiety,” Sherman said. “If Indiana shows any signs, the red state may even be threatened by the state legislature rather than a threat to the federal government.”

Teachers say it is not easy to take a public stance in an increasingly severe repressive environment. In Florida, Florida, the state's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, an early champion against the diversity initiative, said this week that he hopes the incoming president to comply with the state's mission of "refusing to refuse Walker indoctrination."

In Georgia, during this week’s statewide teacher leadership meeting, scholars from universities in the state debated how to defend programs for supporting black students, help international students facing visa revocation, and prepare to fight proposed state legislation to further limit further restrictions on diversity programs and to criminalize certain libraries’ allocations.

"Teachers want to do something, they want to respond, but they also see the inevitability of the university system and lawmakers, and training in Georgia has not stopped," said Matthew Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia.

“There are state-level attacks, there are federal attacks,” he said. “We took it from all directions.”