Less than two months in office, the Trump administration has conclusively demonstrated two things: if it declares you an enemy, it will come after you; and when it comes after you, it will test the limits of legality.
JD Vance already professed years ago that professors are the enemy in his view. And the president himself is encouraging his underlings to adopt the strategy familiar from his decades in business: do something illegal and see if anyone sues. It is crucial that university leaders see the measures taken against Columbia not as an isolated incident, but as a test for how far the education system can be subjugated. In other words, it is not an isolated problem for one place but a collective challenge that requires a collective response.
As citizens in Hungary, India, Turkey and plenty of other countries have learned the hard way in recent years, aspiring autocrats do not subscribe to the cliche of the “ivory tower”. They consider universities highly relevant. After all, universities, like courts and free media organizations, are sources of authority that might rival the leader’s. They also recognize that students can be effective in mobilizing – just think about what has been happening in Serbia recently. Thus, authoritarians seek not merely to destroy the independence of institutions of higher learning; they also try to turn the rest of society against students.
The Trump administration claims to be concerned about antisemitism; its supporters claim that universities are condoning “pro-genocidal campus quad glampers” (of course, the administration could prove its credentials for defending Jews much more easily if it sanctioned the president’s special adviser and supposed Doger-in-chief for his tweets and gestures, which are widely considered antisemitic).
The fact that Columbia was punished mere days after a supposedly “comprehensive review” started, shows that the method is unlikely to be fair and thorough. The Department of Education under Linda McMahon seems to be going after speech the government dislikes, with a view to intimidating all institutions. A blueprint for “reining in American universities” lays out the logic: according to a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “to scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.”
How we respond? To begin with, universities should not be intimidated by the claim that public opinion is turning against them. Surveys that show a growing polarisation in public attitudes towards universities only demonstrate the effectiveness of decades of rightwing agitation. It is not a given that conservatives are inherently against universities. In other democracies, even voters of far-right parties are generally not anti-universities, even if they can be mobilized against bogeymen like “gender ideology”.
Universities must defend their truth-seeking and educational missions. They can point to obvious benefits, including economic ones. As the social scientist Adam Przeworski recently pointed out, “every dollar spent in publicly funded research yields $8.30 after eight years”. But universities must also insist that one cannot pick and chose research, as in: say medical research OK, but climate research not. They must not allow governments to dictate which departments are legitimate and which should be placed in “receivership”, a demand by the Trump administration on Columbia (Orbán – a “model”, according to Vance – showed the way by simply prohibiting gender studies).
Universities must avoid the trap of “we’ll sacrifice humanities if you leave us the hard sciences”. Humanities (and social sciences) are, after all, disciplines: its practitioners are disciplined by professional standards in what the former NYU president John Sexton calls “transparent, testable processes”. This is also why universities are governed by norms of academic freedom, not free speech; the latter is not subject to such processes.
Critics assert that “professional standards” is a euphemism for leftist group-think. No academic would deny that there can be blind spots; but the case is not proved by saying that certain subjects have few professors who identify as Republicans. For the explanation might primarily be the trajectory of the Republican party, which has positioned itself as the anti-science and anti-critical-thinking party (not to mention that it is the party that tolerates prominent members with theories about “Jewish space lasers”).
Practices in academia are not identical to those in courts, law firms, and hospitals – but there are overlaps in what it means to be a professional. Since aspiring autocrats will attack any source of independent judgment, professions should stand up for each other.
To be sure, many universities have recently committed to “institutional neutrality”, which is to say: institutions of higher learning should not comment of all kinds of issues of the day. A university should be, according to a seminal statement of the principle, a home for critics, not itself be the critic.
There is value to this idea, under two conditions: critics remain free to speak their minds (something that cannot be taken for granted, given the Trump administration’s intimidation tactics), and universities remain free to defend their core mission. After all, they can hardly be neutral about their own existence.
