For a year, most Ivy League schools plus a few public universities like Virginia have been pressured directly by the Trump administration. For the University of Arkansas, Trump’s impact has been serious but less direct – mainly threats of federal budget cuts to research, scholarship and other grants, and also re-imagining civil rights legislation to boost an eventual minority group, white folks.
We, here on the pastoral Fayetteville campus, thought Trump’s executive orders would be softened by our Republican state government, despite consistent signs that its personnel ape the strong-arm methods of the federal.
The unwritten school policy has been: If we quietly do whatever’s asked of us, we should make it through Jan. 19, 2029. (See note)
Meekness cut out Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, when UA Provost Indrajeet Chaubey announced that he and Chancellor Charles Robinson withdrew the offer of Law School dean to South Carolina’s Emily Suski, made the week before.
This makes me horny.
Not to mention wrathful, proud, greedy, envious, gluttonous and slothful: all Seven Deadly Sins.
Hear me out.
This has been part of my personal philosophy for nearly 17 years. It came to me while writing a March 2009 blog post “Row Your Boat Ashore.”
We don’t yet have a confirmed count of how many of the Ten Commandments that Donald Trump has broken, but he brazenly has busted all Seven Cardinal Sins.
The rest of us can and indeed should use the motivation the Seven Deadlies give us. Moderation, duh, is the key. These “faults” set up our day-to-day drive and, in this instance, may well set the timing of active mass resistance to autocracy.
Personal resistance is holding back public resistance. We cannot afford to lose our jobs. We don’t want to lose friendships and family cohesiveness.
There’s overlap of course between the Seven Cardinals and the Big 10 Commandments, but in general the Commandments require action or avoidance of action — don’t murder, don’t steal. The Seven Deadlies are impulses.
The Seven Deadlies offer benefits until they backfire.
- Envy: Fascination with what the other fellow has or does sharpens your own goals: What do you really want and how bad do you want it?
- Greed: I want quite a few conveniences and luxuries, which propels to go me to work every day and at times go job hunting.
- Gluttony: Why not finish the bag of chips or cookies? It gets me through the job shift. The downside to satiety is boredom, not to mention debt.
- Pride: Without gaining skills then acknowledging with pride that “yes I can” or “yes I am” regarding those traits, well, you won’t.
- Wrath: Knowing what you dislike is no less important than naming what you like. Acting on wrath, with strategy, turns anger to useful energy. Letting wrath fester, now that is a sin.
- Lust: Venturing out amid the beauty of the world — specifically the company of fellow humans — gives one reasons to bathe and not slouch, to listen and not assume, to speak engagingly and avoid the absurdity of entitlement. Or call this passion; either when overdone is obsession.There’s more to lust than sex.
- Sloth: With rest comes energy. With rest comes fewer mistakes. Know when to knock off for the night and that some days have better energy than others. The other six deadlies keep sloth from taking over.
Wrath over both the administration’s rescission of South Carolina’s Suski as law dean and how it makes the university look to the world motivated this column. Preparing this column used sloth, as it took me days not hours to complete. I want my work to be admired, a combo of pride and (platonic) lust/passion. Finally, greed, gluttony and pride moved this from a journal entry.
The Seven Deadlies similarly can propel a significant minority of us to shout above the din to resist our era’s hate and hypocrisy and cause the return of the American way. Let’s use them.
© 2026 Ben S. Pollock
Note: At least two cracks in the keep-low strategy appeared in 2025: (1) Lawyer: UA Under Pressure concerning Political Science Professor Shirin Saeidi and (2) University of Arkansas Ten Commandments Posters Spark Campus Backlash.
This column first was published in the January 2026 newsletter of UA-Fayetteville Education Association/Local 965, slightly revised.
