Trump’s Attacks on Universities, A Continuing Series (updates)

Trump administration officials yesterday revealed that the president has ordered that $1 billion of federal funding for Cornell University and $790 million of federal funding for Northwestern University be withheld.

According to the New York Times, “the funding pause involves mostly grants from and contracts with the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services.”

Other universities to recently have their federal funding frozen include: Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University.

The Trump administration claims that the attacks on the universities are a punishment for them failing to address allegations of anti-Semitism on their campuses and for their efforts to promote diversity. Yet even those who are sincerely concerned with campus anti-Semitism have been “alarmed” by the actions of the Trump administration. Amir Goldberg (Stanford) and Barbara J. Risman (Illinois at Chicago), writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Trump’s “racketeering tactics”, say:

We believe they are dangerous, hypocritical, and cynical. The plight of Jewish students and faculty members deserves better than to be exploited as a cudgel by an authoritarian presidency, hellbent on retribution and hostile to academic free speech. We fear that the administration’s actions will only fuel antisemitism by making Jews the scapegoats in Trump’s war on academe.

We have good reasons to be skeptical about Trump’s motivations. If he truly cared about the well-being of Jews, he would start by uprooting antisemitism among his own ranks. Instead, his vice president recently encouraged Germans to vote for the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a party seeking to erase the historical memory of the Holocaust, while Elon Musk, his senior adviser for government efficiency, ridiculed critics who were incensed by his apparent Nazi salute.

Trump is using the justified grievances of Jewish students as an excuse to achieve two goals. The first is to cripple academe… Trump’s second goal is to subdue his critics through fear and persecution.

In an editorial in The Times last week, Michael Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell, defended his university, and universities in general, as institutions that “serve to guard and promote the expertise, knowledge and democratic norms that advance societies.” Universities “cannot afford to cede the space of public discourse and the free exchange of ideas,” he said.

Towards the end of the piece, Kotlikoff wrote:

If we are to preserve our value and our meaning, we cannot let our caution overtake our purpose. Our colleges and universities are cradles of democracy and bulwarks against autocracy.

Will Cornell stand as such a bulwark? Will other universities?

In an essay at The Nation, law professors David Pozen (Columbia), Ryan Doerfler (Harvard), and Samuel Bagenstos (Michigan) observe that

Universities nationwide have given little indication that they intend to fight back in court against the defunding of their scientists or the deportation of their students. Hardly any university leaders said a word in defense of Columbia.

Instead of objecting to the funding cuts, universities are instead engaging in “anticipatory obedience”:

The result is a classic race to the bottom. University administrators are sacrificing more and more of their academic mission in the hope of avoiding additional funding cuts or, worse, escalating state violence against the most vulnerable members of their community. This is unfolding in plain sight, notwithstanding that leading scholars of fascism have made it crystal clear that only concerted collective action stands a chance against such authoritarian predations.

Though some organizations and associations are attempting to fight back legally, that’s not enough, since they “lack the material resources and media-generating capacity of rich universities.”

It would be better for the universities to join forces:

To protect both themselves and the entire educational system, then, university leaders should commit, collectively and immediately, to challenge unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance. Nothing in the antitrust laws prohibits this sort of coordination. To further reduce the risk of “being picked off one by one,” schools could also promise to support one another in litigation by submitting amicus briefs, joining suits that raise common issues, and (for sufficiently widespread issues) filing class actions. 

Filing lawsuits would do more than produce judicial decisions ordering the government to return specific funds. The litigation would afford schools a high-profile venue in which to detail the Trump administration’s lawlessness and aggression. By standing up to such threats, the lawsuits would also send the message that civil society institutions have a duty to defend basic democratic and rule-of-law norms, a message that must be communicated in word and deed to unsettle the culture of capitulation that has begun to take hold, not just in higher education but throughout the legal profession.

Perhaps most importantly, filing lawsuits would lay the legal groundwork for challenging any future funding cuts or other punitive measures taken on pretextual or retaliatory grounds—thereby alleviating the pyrrhic-victory concern—while buying time for universities to make their case in the court of public opinion.

Is such a joint commitment likely? Is there anything we can do to make it more likely?

This looks like a collective action problem, but it’s not clear that there’s any real advantage to defecting: the universities that have rolled over for Trump are not exempt from his punishment. Did Northwestern’s buy-in last week to Trump’s campus anti-Semitism scare—one of the pretexts for the funding freezes—help it much yesterday?

Trump has threatened 60 universities with investigations that could result in the cancellation of major funding. If there isn’t effective opposition to this, expect that list to grow. Faculty and administrators at nearly all universities have reasons to worry—and reasons to work together.

UPDATE: Readers may be interested in this page at The Chronicle of Higher Education that is tracking Trump’s agenda, actions, orders, and policies regarding universities and colleges.

UPDATE 2: Many Cornell faculty are signing onto a letter to the university’s Board of Trustees that states: