Presidents of wealthy, elite universities are in a pickle. On one hand, they have to balance faculty members demanding their institutions make no deals with what most professors likely see as the devil in the White House.

On the other, they know the federal government has access to so many levers of epic institutional disruption that due care of their institutions virtually demands making a deal with the ideologues in the Donald Trump administration.

Take the high road and the labs dependent on federal funding shutter. Not only are jobs lost but institutional missions are compromised. Plus lawyers love multimillion-dollar settlements, as we’ve learned away from the campus, too.

So what we’ve seen so far are public protestations of defiance and the importance of academic freedom from university presidents — of varying intensity — accompanied by quieter, behind-the-scenes dealmaking.

Ergo, Harvard’s reported openness to dropping a stunning $500 million to make its fight with the Trump administration go away, following on from Columbia University’s agreement to cough up $200 million with the same aim. Reportedly, though, the Harvard leaders have now bristled because Brown University, which everyone knows is among the most progressive of the Ivy League institutions, apparently has gotten away with paying only $50 million (and paid to more palatable “state work force development organizations,” rather than the feds), one tenth of what Harvard apparently was willing to shell out to the federal government.

Sure, Harvard has a much larger endowment and a bigger political profile, but its sins against the Trump crew are no greater. So how, people in Cambridge are asking, can that be fair?

Harvard, it seems to us, has now taken to negotiating in the media, coaxing out sympathetic stories that express misgivings over whether Trump can be trusted, presumably hoping to save itself some money.

If you read between the lines of what The New York Times reported Monday as Harvard’s position, you can see the university’s lawyers arguing that whereas most settlements put an end to disputes, which is why people agree to them, this one offers no guarantees that the Trump administration won’t come back six months from now making additional, perchance slightly revised, demands and, again, leaving Harvard little choice but to comply and write a big check. To put all of that in terms of realpolitik, Harvard is arguing for a discount in the light of ongoing future risk and hoping the other side reads the story and sees its point.

This is why the federal government should not be engaged in crude dealmaking with some of the best universities in America.

All of the above paragraphs, of course, would have been unimaginable even in the first Trump administration, prior to the current administration’s decision to target schools with which it feels it has the biggest beefs, a list that also includes Northwestern University. The Evanston university currently is trying to unfreeze $790 million in federal funding, the loss of which has caused it to shed more than 200 jobs in order, it says, to self-fund that research.

Like his peers, Northwestern President Michael Schill clearly is motivated to make a deal. (He also had to deal with being summoned back to Washington Tuesday by the House Committee on Education and Workforce to answer questions on campus antisemitism.)

On the other hand, he also has to appease faculty members like the Northwestern Concerned Faculty Group, which wrote to the Daily Northwestern last week to observe that “acquiescence to the administration’s tactics would make Northwestern complicit in an assault on higher education, which is an essential bulwark of civil society. The administration is skirting legal processes and demanding what amounts to ransom from universities; such actions continue its well-documented and dangerous abuse of executive power.”

Not an easy week for Schill. We sympathize.

Of course, the real enemy of the Northwestern Concerned Faculty Group is not their own administration but the federal government; that’s just a target with a firmer belly, and infinitely more leverage, than professors turned administrators who likely agree in their hearts with those criticizing them, even as their lawyers negotiate terms.

What to do about a crisis that comes atop a separate issue for higher education involving the enrollment challenges arising from the falling birth rate?

As with so much, we’d like to see some of those in the administration with cooler heads realize that the federal government shaking down leading universities for millions of dollars, so-called “dealmaking,” is as cancerous as it is un-American.

The federal government has a legitimate interest in ensuring a safe and equal-opportunity campus environment for all students and in ensuring compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws; universities should follow those laws and everyone in higher education knows they have sometimes been skirted for ideological reasons when it came to hiring the best qualified person for a given job.

And, of course, Congress could decide to tax huge endowments differently, if that is the will of the people. But the feds do not have a role in policing what speech happens at a private university, nor should the government be trying to influence who is hired as president (or anything else) beyond the above.

The liberal bias on campuses is self-evident, but universities have to deal with that themselves. And if students don’t want to be taught in such a way, they should enroll elsewhere. That’s how the marketplace of ideas works. At private schools, at least. When it comes to where the federal government spends its research money, those decision-making public servants should be looking hard at the quality of the research, not extraneous political factors.

To put all of that simply, we’d like to see a deal that does not involve some massive transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars away from universities and toward God knows what.

We’d like to see campuses pledge their willingness to keep all students safe, to treat all job and student applicants fairly, to advance students’ intelligent critical thinking so they can express themselves without fear or favor and find their way in this changing world. In return, the Trump administration should let them use their money for what it was intended: research and teaching.

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