On April 10, the New York Times reported on the latest development in the Trump administration’s war on higher education. As the Times explained, it “ may seek to have a federal judge enforce any deal it reaches with Columbia University in an arrangement that could ensure that the White House has a hand in the school’s dealings for years to come.”
One day earlier, the administration announced it was freezing one billion dollars in federal funds previously awarded or committed to Cornell University. “Affected grants could include research into new materials for jet engines, propulsion systems, large-scale information networks, robotics, superconductors, space and satellite communications and cancer research.”
That brings the total funds being withheld from some of America’s most prestigious higher education institutions to roughly $3.3 billion.
Some of them are standing up to the administration’s threats. Others have sought to reach an accommodation. And the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and its local affiliates have been active in filing lawsuits to stop the assault on higher education.
Whatever the outcome of these actions, it is clear that higher education in this country is in an unprecedented and precarious position. Fear is the order of the day among college students, administrators, and in countless classrooms across the country.
That fear has already turned the promise of academic freedom into an increasingly empty one. There is no freedom if people are afraid to say what they think, write what they think, and teach what their expertise enables them to teach.
Colleges and universities must act in new and unprecedented ways to protect academic freedom and take affirmative steps to shield their academic communities from threats coming from Washington, DC.
On April 12, the AAUP Chapter at Harvard University offered one model for doing so when it filed suit against the Trump administration. “This action,” their complaint said, “challenges the… administration’s unlawful and unprecedented misuse of federal funding and civil rights enforcement authority to undermine academic freedom and free speech on a university campus.”
“Harvard,” it went on, “like all American universities, depends on federal funding to conduct its academic research. Threats like these are an existential “gun to the head” for a university…. Defendants claim they are enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act…but…[t]hese tactics amount to exploiting Title VI to coerce universities into undermining free speech and academic inquiry in service of the government’s political or policy preferences.”
Bravo!
Earlier this month, Middlebury College’s Jay Parini gave expression to what the Harvard AAUP’s allegations mean in the daily lives of students and faculty everywhere:
Now, in my last semester of teaching, there is a pall over the same campus…. There is real terror on campus. Students who wish to protest the war in Gaza are worried about being detained or even deported if they’re not American citizens. This may be a small subset of students who really need to worry; but the overall effect ripples through the college community, stifling thought. If even one person on campus is seriously threatened by arrest or deportation, there is a generalized fear that everyone feels.
The Trump administration wants to control and police our thoughts. It’s difficult to teach poetry without mentioning such things as war, gender, social injustice and tyranny. Last week, for instance, I focused on one of the great lines by Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Written in 1919, these words seemed amazingly current today, I said, and my students nodded somewhat anxiously….
I feel the weight of Trump as I teach my final classes…. We’re in an era of surveillance, with the threat of consequences for those who don’t go along with MAGA groupthink…. We can’t tolerate this kind of attack on free speech and free thought, even and especially when we strongly disagree with what is being said.
“These,” he concluded, “will be my parting words to my students this spring, and I hope they will listen. It’s their life now, and their college. I hope they step forward boldly and say whatever is on their minds – without fear.”
Bravo!
But that is easier said than done. Telling people not to be afraid is like telling them not to feel what they feel.
Far more powerful are demonstrations of fearlessness of the kind shown by Professor Parini and the Havard AAUP Chapter.
But more needs to be done.
First, faculty need to educate themselves about what academic freedom is and how it differs from free speech. As Professor David Cole rightly notes, “[W]e afford it ‘special’ protection…because of the contribution professors and universities make to public discourse, the pursuit of knowledge, and the teaching of critical thinking…. [I]ts protection should apply when professors are speaking within their academic expertise…. On matters outside their expertise, the professor’s rights are no different than an ordinary citizen’s.”
Second, college leaders should revise campus policies on academic freedom which are only designed to protect speakers from reprisal from their home institutions. They should pledge that “Because [name of university] values academic and expressive freedom, it will take measures to support and protect individual students, staff and faculty who are targeted, threatened, harassed, or punished by the government or outside groups for exercising such freedom in their teaching, scholarship, artistic work, or public activities.”
Third, individual faculty members or the faculty as a whole can take measures to protect open inquiry in their classrooms. Examples include adopting the so-called Chatham House Rule. “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”
Fourth, colleges should explore and describe if any parts of what they teach are a form of intellectual property such that its dissemination can be controlled.
Finally, let’s build alliances with our conservative colleagues and off-campus free speech advocacy groups, which were quick to criticize campuses when speakers were shut down by progressive students. Some have already made their voices heard, echoing the arguments made in the Harvard AAUP’s lawsuit.
For example, FIRE, one of those advocacy groups, has said “[S]ome of the administration’s attempts to yank funding from groups based on their speech run headlong into the First Amendment…. The government cannot constitutionally use funding as a cudgel to control speech outside the funded activity…. Efforts to deny federal funding to groups and institutions whose views the current administration dislikes seriously threaten Americans’ First Amendment rights.”
The funding, FIRE explains, “is supposed to support a specific program or purchase, not give the state control over everything an institution does. The government can, however, decide whether to pay a group or person to speak on its behalf.”
In the end, none of these steps can dispel the fear that the Harvard lawsuit and Professor Parini document. But they offer colleges and universities ways to do more than duck and cover as lawsuits work their way through the courts and threats from the Trump administration proliferate.
