Trump’s Threat to Universities about “Illegal Protests”
Yesterday President Trump threatened via social media to stop “all federal funding” for “any College, School, or University that allows “illegal protests”.
I think the first question to ask in regard to things like this is, “what is this meant to divert our attention from?” After all, it’s a social media post, not an executive order he’s issuing or a piece of legislation he’s supporting.
About the content of the post, well, everything hinges on what makes a protest “illegal”. Reuters reported: “A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to questions about how the White House would define an illegal protest or how the government would imprison protesters.” Reuters also drily noted, “The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protects the freedom of speech and assembly.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued a statement in response to Trump’s threat. It says, in part:
Colleges can and should respond to unlawful conduct, but the president does not have unilateral authority to revoke federal funds, even for colleges that allow “illegal” protests.
If a college runs afoul of anti-discrimination laws like Title VI or Title IX, the government may ultimately deny the institution federal funding by taking it to federal court, or via notice to Congress and an administrative hearing. It is not simply a discretionary decision that the president can make.
President Trump also lacks the authority to expel individual students, who are entitled to due process on public college campuses and, almost universally, on private campuses as well.
Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.
As FIRE knows too well from our work defending student and faculty rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, threatening schools with the loss of federal funding will result in a crackdown on lawful speech. Schools will censor first and ask questions later…
Misconduct or criminality — like true threats, vandalism, or discriminatory harassment, properly defined — is not protected by the First Amendment. In fact, discouraging and punishing such behavior is often vital to ensuring that others are able to peacefully make their voices heard. However, students who engage in misconduct must still receive due process.
Meanwhile, as the New York Times reports, “The Trump administration is threatening to cut tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for Columbia University, making the school the first major target in its effort to root out what it considers antisemitic harassment on college campuses.” Columbia is one of ten universities explicitly named as targets of investigation by the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.
those of us under assault in red states have been trying to raise the alarm for years now, does raise some questions about how much academic studies translate to abilities to respond to actual happenings outside the seminar beyond say LSAT test-prep….
FWIW, Trump isn’t trying to distract. He’s expressing a sincere desire to jail political opponents. It’s been a consistent theme of his for years, which is what one would expect of an authoritarian strongman. Whether or to what extent he can make good on this threat, now or later, is another question. (He did have protesters in Portland illegally abducted by federal agents in 2020 and his Justice Department is currently going after two members of Congress.)
A good rule of thumb is that, when Trump openly says something that a minimally decent person would never say openly and mean sincerely, he does mean it sincerely. See “grab ’em by the pussy,” “slow the testing down, please,” “Proud Boys stand back and stand by,” etc.
I imagine many philosophers will be rightfully outraged at this. I also think it is quite unfortunate that many of my colleagues spent the last year and some debating twisting themselves into knots trying to justify why the Palestine protestors should have been shut down or banned.
Yes. Given the total moral bankruptcy displayed on this issue, both by university administrations and by many philosophers on these pages, it’s hard not to conclude that the American academy has coming whatever Trump is going to give it. (After all, collective punishment is morally fine, as Israel’s apologists have taught us).
Well done to FIRE for the principled line it has taken in opposing this. For the many in higher education who are cheering on FIRE’s intervention here but ignore or reject FIRE’s principled interventions in other cases when it conflicts with their leftwing political agenda, your double standard and blatent inconsistency is a big part of the reason why higher education in the US currently faces these threats. It has made attacking higher education one of the top priorities of hard right and made the American public largely apatheic to these attacks.
When you look at the various targets of hard-right attacks at the moment, do you think that they are all (or mostly, or many of them) guilty of similar inconsistencies and double standards? If not, perhaps we should look for a different cause of hard-right antagonism.
The left is dominant in US higher education and over the last decade has abused that position of power to do many unethical things. FIRE has opposed these actions using the same kinds of general principles that they cite above against Trump. Anyone who is not politically naive has worried that this overreach by the left would make higher education especially vulnerable if the right ascended to power. That moment is now upon us and the expected results are even worse than anticipated because this is a particularly nasty and unrestrained rightwing administration.
You ask about other cases. Many of them are different for obvious reasons. Trump is doing aweful things to undocumented immigrants. He and his enablers are to blame for this. But we should also blame other powerful people who could forsee the risk of this rightwing backlash, had the opportunity to take steps that would make it less likely, and didn’t take that opportunity due to incompetance, or concern for ideological purity, or whatever else. Who are these powerful people? Not the poor undocumented immigrants, who are powerless. Rather it is the Biden administration and the Democrats who were too liberal and tone deaf on immigration and so lost the majority of the US public on this issue. This significantly contributed to Trump winning the election and to a majority of US voters becoming apathetic towards immigrants and not caring about the cruel way in which Trump is going after them. I’m actually in favour of open borders (something far more radical than anything Biden did). But you have to be a realist in politics. In current conditions, if anyone sympathic to my views got power I wouldn’t want them to implement the immigration policies I favor because the predictable electoral backlash would ultimately make the things worse not better.
This is, respectfully, a bad take. Biden was, in many respects, a continuation of Trump in immigration. Despite the efforts to streamline immigration through CBP One, the Biden administration (and the Harris campaign) continued to cede right-wing assumptions about immigration. If anything, it was the underlying inconsistency that angered both the left and right. Biden and Harris never should have accepted the premise that there was a crisis at the border, because there wasn’t.
But that’s besides the point. The academy has always been a target for opportunistic right-wing politicians. Why the current (broader) popular support for these attacks? It’s not wokeness, but the combination of two facts: (1) college is increasingly one of the most expensive investments people will make, and (2) the economy is structured to make it extremely difficult for people to earn a comfortable living that encompasses their aspirations (e.g., home ownership, raising children, taking regular vacations) without having a college degree. So, people feel forced to expend a huge amount of money to earn a credential to be competitive in the workforce. Due to various pressures, colleges have tended toward more professionalization. Combine that with grade inflation, and people feel that college is essentially expensive job training disrupted by the occasional requirement to write a book report on a novel. That, rightly, pisses people off. That story has nothing to do with the ideology of the academy, but instead how the academy is situated within the broader work culture of the US to ensure that people are sufficiently in debt that they will accept wage slavery in the hopes of maybe one day owning a home in their late 40s or early 50s.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be suggesting that the dominance of the left in academia was necessary for the hard-right attacks on it, and that Biden’s policies were necessary for attacks on immigrants. Even if they were contributory or even sufficient (which I doubt, but am happy to set aside), what would that matter? Would academia not be under attack were it not so liberal? Would immigrants not be under attack were Biden’s policies different? Would LGBT people not be under attack if they had ____? Would scientists not be under attack if they had _____? If Ukrainians were not so ____? If Canadians, medicare recipients, etc. etc. etc. Or is it just that all of these people had the bad fortune of being defended by people to defended them to vociferously?
“to” = “who” in the last sentence (apologies)
The right attacks education because education is intrinsically a threat to the right. Such credulity towards their pretext for these attacks is just playing into their hands.
Yes, when Trump said in 2016, “I love the poorly educated,” he did not mean that he loves the people that find themselves in this group (which would suggest wanting to do better for them, including helping them get an education). He meant that he loves that there is such a (large and growing) group of people. Imagine a set of policies explicitly aimed at growing that group. How different would those look from Trump’s?
And Vance is worried about freedome of speech in Europe?
The Trump administration is making good on the part of the Tweet about deporting “agitators” from other countries. DHS has detained a leader of last year’s protests at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil, and says its revoking his green card:
https://zeteo.com/p/breaking-dhs-detains-palestinian?utm_campaign=post
Rubio has indicated that Khalil was targeted because of his alleged support for Hamas:
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5185620-rubio-ice-arrest-pro-palestinian-columbia-mahmoud-khalil-green-card-dhs-trump-immigration-crackdown/
I’m not an expert on immigration law, but an argument I’m seeing is that only the State Department has authority to revoke green cards in this way, and that they must follow specific procedures to do so–procedures which weren’t followed here:
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3ljyf2k7f7c23
There’s reason to think the White House ordered the detention:
https://bsky.app/profile/premthakker.bsky.social/post/3ljxnmfyzfk2v
In short, there’s good reason to think that a legal immigrant is being illegally detained for his political beliefs.
My own position (as well as disposition and opposition) is to make clear that Trump IS the enemy. Not just an opposing party. He and his crime family are the enemies of truth, reason, the rule of law, decency, and democracy. This, I think, is and has been patently obvious, and far past time to say it, mean it, and share it. For the longest time, the press and many others (including academics) simply want to say things like he stretches the truth or exaggerates; no, he outright lies and bullshits (and worse) in the sense that Harry Frankfurt made clear in his famous little essay. To treat him respectfully is almost like a form of appeasement sometimes.
Perhaps the only thing more depressing than the current state of affairs discussed in the piece are the comments.
We have, apparently, academics pining for the destruction of academia as deserved punishment. Or, wishing the academy did a better job at training resistance fighters – a move equivalent to the victim offering to reload the mugger’s gun.
“If only the academy had given more support to the protests” is the kind of thing that could only be said by those with little understanding of the electorate. This is not, for the most part, Trump – but Trump acting with the support of large swathes of the populace.
If anything, the reverse is true. Many in the academy failed to distinguish between supporting protesters of Israeli aggression with supporting those engaged in criminal activity – vandalism, trespassing (in ways that interfered with the functioning of the university), and in some cases, intimidation of students. The American public is at worst, indifferent to protesters. The latter they have little tolerance for, especially from those viewed as guests. And, now, we risk both groups being lumped together – non-citizens being the most vulnerable.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that can be done is to support and trust in the strength of our institutions, especially the courts – the “capture” of which by the right has been exaggerated. The vulnerable need good, if expensive, legal representation. There will be elections….
I’m sure everyone here can figure out ways to keep doing exactly the work they’ve been doing without bringing undue attention. Let’s keep to the work while the pendulum swings.