On first appraisal, the nine universities that the Trump administration singled out appeared to have no real choice but to concede to the administration’s demands. As set forth in the so-called Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, these include an oath to abide by the White House’s biological theories of gender and to show respect for “conservative” (but not liberal or centrist) values. Framed as a question of who is first in line for federal funding, the compact warns that nonconforming universities will have to go their own way fiscally. Such threats have bite because about half of universities’ $102 billion in annual research spending today flows from the federal budget. Federal Student Aid provides about $120.8 billion in grants, work-study programs, and loans to students. Federal regulation also shapes, mostly favorably until now, universities’ financial environments and helps sustain their educational mission—via the tax code, the antidiscrimination regime of Title VI, and (as Harvard found out the painful way) the federal government’s control over international students’ presence.

But seven of the nine universities have outright rejected the pact, with only the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt remaining noncommittal for now. This show of strength may indicate that universities are coming to accept a painful fact: The attack on higher ed will continue, and the era of lavish government support is coming to a close. Universities can weather this change by looking to the past.

At the end of the 19th century, without the benefit of federal support, a group of entrepreneurial leaders built universities—institutions that combined the best of Oxford’s and Cambridge’s system of college-based learning for undergraduates, and Bismarckian Germany’s research universities.