Brown University senior Caitlyn Carpenter was working on a class discussion post the night of Oct. 1, when news broke that set off a firestorm of debate in academia. The Trump administration had just released a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” and invited nine prominent universities, including Brown, to sign on. Schools that did so would receive preferential federal treatment.

The compact included provisions to restrict student protests, eliminate gender-neutral restrooms and identity-based affinity spaces, and limit international student enrollment, among other regressive measures.

“I knew immediately we had to do something,” said Carpenter, who is a member of Sunrise Brown and an outreach organizer for the national Campus Climate Network, or CCN.

That night, Carpenter joined a Zoom call with other Brown students who spent two hours discussing what to do. They decided to launch a new organization, Brown Rise Up, specifically to counter the spread of authoritarianism on campus.

CCN is one of many organizations in the nationwide Students Rise Up coalition, which formed this fall to resist Trump’s agenda on college campuses. Defeating the compact became a major coalition priority.

However, student leaders are already looking beyond this one document, to a wider campus-based movement against authoritarianism in all its forms.