On Wednesday, according to The New York Times, the Trump Administration sent letters to nine universities offering them financial benefits and relief from investigations if they agree (among other things) to “freeze tuition for five years,” provide “free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other ‘hard sciences’ if endowments exceed $2 million per undergraduate,” “cap the enrollment of international students,” “commit to strict definitions of gender,” and “change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would ‘punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.'”

I have not seen the letter itself, but it refers to a “compact” document that the universities are asked to sign, and that is here. It includes, among other things, a provision that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.” (Does that mean I may not publish an article about Ukraine and identify myself as a Tufts professor?) Erwin Chemerinsky says, “It would be hard to come up with a more explicit attempt to restrict freedom of speech.”

Failure to sign evidently means risking federal support, or at least facing investigations and litigation. “This Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education represents the priorities of the U.S. government in its engagements with universities …. Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

Trump won the election, and elections have consequences. The Administration may write regulations governing higher education. So why doesn’t the Department of Education publish this “compact” as a regulation applying to all universities? One rule would then apply to all, and it would be transparent and predictable.

A rule would also be subject to judicial review, and colleges and higher ed. associations would have incentives to sue, arguing that the regulations exceed the statutory authorization of the Department of Education, violate the First Amendment, or both. Some or all of the regulations might survive judicial review. In any case, everyone would know the results and would have to comply with the courts’ rulings. Because the rules would apply to the entire sector of higher education in all 50 states, there might be considerable backlash from voters.

All of this–publicity, consistency, predictability, judicial review, and review by voters–constitutes the rule of law. These letters violate it.

Some institutions may willingly take the deal, and others may decide to settle even if they believe that it undermines their rights because it is cheaper to negotiate than to fight back. Already, the chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents has said that UT is “honored” to have been “named as one of only nine institutions in the U.S. selected by the Trump administration for potential funding advantages.”

The result will be a de facto policy, applied one institution at a time, with no judicial review. Colleges may accept deals that trade away their Constitutional rights. Possibly, students and faculty will have standing to sue their own institutions (as Jimmy Kimmel could have sued ABC), but it will be hard for third parties to challenge these “voluntary” agreements. And institutions that the Administration decides not to target will be left alone, thus reducing any backlash.

It is very important that students, faculty, and alumni of these communities advocate for their institutions not to sign the compact: University of Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, USC, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and UVa.

See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; AAUP v Rubio; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

On March 25, Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted by masked ICE agents because she had co-authored a clearly legal op-ed in our campus newspaper, not directly about Israel but about how the university had responded to our student government. According to Andre Watson, the Assistant Director of the National Security Division of ICE, this op-ed could “undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.”

After an unconscionably long period of detainment in inhumane circumstances, Rümeysa was ordered released. Subsequently, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle Eastern Studies Association sued Donald Trump and members of his administration, seeking an injunction against the policy that had ensnared Rümeysa and other defendants.

Yesterday, federal District Court judge William G. Young, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, issued a 161-page decision in favor of the plaintiffs that is a blistering denunciation of the Administration. It makes quite a read.

It starts with the image that I reproduce above. (I have never seen a judicial decision with a front-page illustration.)

The judge’s main finding comes early:

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations (pp. 4-5).

Judge Young does not mince words in the many pages that follow. For example, “the facts prove that the President himself approves truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech on the part of two of his senior cabinet secretaries” (p. 96).

After considering the arguments in favor of masking ICE agents, the court “rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable” (p. 98).

The judge explains:

It was never the Secretaries’ immediate intention to deport all pro- Palestinian non-citizens[.] for that obvious First Amendment violation … could have raised a major outcry. Rather, the intent of the Secretaries was more invidious — to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

The Secretaries have succeeded, apparently well beyond their immediate intentions” (p. 95).

I have been saying that we in academia should enhance ideological pluralism because it’s the right thing to do. It makes our thinking and teaching more rigorous. However, the Trump’s Administration’s attacks on higher education have nothing to do with that goal, except that intellectual diversity is occasionally and inconsistently used as a pretext. The Administration is trying to crush pluralism by applying a set of tools popular among modern authoritarians of the left, center, and right. The Administration’s policies make it considerably more difficult to promote reasonable dialogue across ideological differences on campuses. But more importantly, the government is “terrorizing” vulnerable people into silence.

Near the end of the decision, Judge Young quotes the president who appointed him, Ronald Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.” The judge concludes:

As I’ve read and re-read the record in this case, listened widely, and reflected extensively, I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message –- yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message. I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.

Is he correct?

See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; academic freedom for individuals and for groups; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

Two points are valid, in my opinion, and we should address both:

First, the Trump Administration is using almost every available tool, including unconstitutional methods, to harm universities and to interfere in their internal affairs. At my university, they literally abducted a beloved graduate student because she had written a completely appropriate op-ed in our student newspaper, thus suppressing speech on our campus.

The Administration receives support from people who think that higher education has been intolerantly leftist (or biased against Israel). Trump and his close associates may believe those complaints. However, their campaign against higher education is top-down and self-interested and closely resembles that of other “personalist” authoritarian regimes around the world today, which range across the ideological spectrum:

• “Under the [right-wing] authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the government has started a culture war to dismantle the independence of academic institutions.”
• “As Modi’s [Hindu nationalist] BJP tightens its grip, India’s universities become political battlegrounds where academic independence is sacrificed to ideological loyalty.”
• In Venezuela, “The main public universities, in particular, have paid a heavy price as a consequence of their defense of democratic values and academic freedom, as they have been defunded by the government” (which is left-wing).
• “Much of the structure of Turkish higher education” is being dismantled “through purges, restrictions, and assertions of central control, a process begun earlier this year and accelerating now with alarming speed.”

Both here and in other countries, attacks on universities are coordinated with attacks on broadcast media, foundations, law firms, civil servants, judges, and, often, the legislative branch.

In its battles with US higher education, the Administration has some grassroots support. In July, Gallup found that 41% of people had little or no confidence in higher education, and of those, 32% said it was “’too liberal,’ trying to ‘indoctrinate’ or ‘brainwash’ students, or not allowing students to think for themselves as reasons for their opinions.” That group represents 13% of the whole sample: enough to generate a flood of social media, but a minority of the population. The Administration’s agenda is mostly self-interested rather than populist.

Thus I disagree with people like Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), who believe that American universities courted trouble by being intolerant of conservatives. He says, “If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening.”

I welcome FIRE’s current work against the Trump Administration, but I believe that Trump would have gone after higher education in exactly the same way if universities had attracted more prominent conservative faculty and speakers or had avoided issuing statements about current events. Right-wing media would still have found plenty of anecdotes about liberal bias, and 13% of Americans would still have denounced higher education from the right. The administration needed a pretext–not a fair assessment–to squash higher education as an autonomous sector.

Second, I believe that one of our most important tasks–as humans, and specifically as people who study or work in universities–is to inquire into what is right. This process (call it “normative analysis”) is comparative or dialectical; it’s about juxtaposing alternative values and competing arguments and reasoning about which is better. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill was correct; you can’t just read and discuss alternative arguments to feel their force. You must talk to peers who sincerely hold them.

I think that swaths of US higher education are too ideologically homogeneous to support this kind of reasoning well. In the liberal arts and some of the professions, the dominant ideology is left (although not Marxist, because real Marxism is marginal). In business schools, economics departments, and business-oriented engineering programs, I think the bias is center-right and biased toward technology.

I do not object to the characterization that the whole of higher education is too homogeneously center-left. For instance, at my university, less than one percent of faculty political donations went to Republican candidates or organizations in 2018. At the same time, the name “Marx” is mentioned in just four Tufts course descriptions this semester, half of which are in Art History; none in the social sciences. In short, the ideological range is constrained on both sides, not to mention that academic culture tends to be secular, meritocratic, cosmopolitan, civilian, Anglophone. and technocratic.

Excessive homogeneity can lead to clichés, “motivated reasoning” (selecting evidence to favor a preferred conclusion) and weak argumentation. It can fail to prepare people to engage the broader society.

Meanwhile, few faculty are trained and empowered to address questions of value in academically rigorous ways.

Normative analysis is the focus of a subfield in political science, political theory, which had about 75 job openings in the USA in 2022-3 (5.75% of all political science jobs). That year, there were also about 450 job openings in the USA for philosophers involved with value-theory (broadly defined). Put together, those searches constituted about one open job dedicated to teaching normative inquiry for every ten institutions of higher education in the United States.

Normative analysis is (and should be) conducted in other disciplines as well. Yet it is generally countercultural across higher education and in contemporary society.

Some right-wingers denounce discussions of “divisive concepts.” I have personally observed left-wingers who are genuinely intolerant of conservative (or classical liberal, or religious) arguments. And many administrators, professors and students are positivists. They believe that facts and values are strictly distinct; that values are matters of opinion; and that scholarship should be about facts. It is particularly difficult to have a serious discussion about values in a community where people share key political values and yet deny that values are relevant, claiming that research and teaching are only about facts.

In sum: we should expand philosophical or ideological heterogeneity on college campuses, which means extending our ideological range to the right but also in other directions. We should do so because it is good for us, not because the Trump Administration claims to want this outcome. Trump’s people simply want to squelch autonomous civil society. A powerful civil society is confidently pluralistic and willing to debate normative questions from many angles. Getting there requires internal work, even as we battle our national government for freedom.

See also: Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?; primer on free speech and academic freedom; how to engage our universities in this crisis; trying to keep myself honest.