As university leaders work to make deals with the Trump administration, many college presidents are at an ethical crossroads. On the one hand, they must do all they can to restore funding for vital research. On the other, they risk ceding to the demands of a president with views that don’t align with their missions.

As the fall semester begins, academic administrators could look to literature for guidance. Latin America’s rich archive of fiction over the past century features this dilemma in numerous stories about living under dictatorships.

Among many others, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, Colombian writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez and Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela have mined the region’s turbulent political history to explore how authoritarian rulers bend institutional leaders to their will by cultivating fear.

In these works, some threats are more overtly coercive than others.

Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat details how Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo reportedly fed insubordinate underlings to voracious crocodiles, an image that, for me, has echoes in Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz. In García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, an illiterate strongman takes over all institutions to such an extreme that “él solo era el gobierno” – he alone was the government.

Yet to me, the greatest danger that Latin American literature foretells for higher education is the insidious way capitulation to...

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