The Mendacious Mussolini is good at one thing: dividing his opponents so he can conquer them one by one. Take the case of colleges and universities: Trump started by going after Columbia; when they agreed to his demands — Under threat from Trump, Columbia University agrees to policy changes — he then demanded more: Trump May Seek Judicial Oversight of Columbia, Potentially for Years. Now he’s going after Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other colleges and universities. This raises two questions.
First is why? Well, that’s obvious: the function of an independent institution of higher education is to teach its students to think independently — to think for themselves and come up with their own understanding, regardless of whether it fits some agenda or ideology. (Yes, this is an ideal, but at least they try.) A second function is independent research for its own sake, following the evidence wherever it happens to lead. Both goals threaten Trump’s control (also threatens his supporters and backers), who do not want their fantasies questioned. It is aligned with the long-standing and growing anti-intellectual movement which prefers gut feelings (and the Bible) to hard reasoning and scientific evidence.
But the other question is why aren’t universities, should must know this, fighting back by banding together? “Divide and conquer” is something freshman history students learn about. Trump started by going after one university, Columbia, and when it caved, it set an example — a bad example — for Trump’s next targets.
M. Gessen, a columnist for the New York Times and a journalism professor, wrote about this in their column this morning: This Is How Universities Can Escape Trump’s Trap, If They Dare. First, why is Trump doing this:
[T]he war on higher education is driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. Trump is building a mafia state, in which the don distributes both money and power. Universities are independent centers of intellectual and, to some extent, political power. He is trying to destroy that independence.
And what higher education should — must — do about it:
There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and it requires more than forming a united front. They must abandon all the concerns — rankings, donors, campus amenities — that preoccupy and distract them, and focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Intellectuals have adopted this strategy to fight against autocrats in other countries. It works. [emphasis added]
Gersen quotes the president of Bard College:
A child of Holocaust survivors who came to this country as a stateless person in 1949, Botstein is particularly sensitive to the ways of an autocratic government. Three weeks into the Trump administration, he called on universities to band together in the face of an existential threat posed by the government. That was three weeks into the first Trump administration. [emphasis in original]
Here I have a slight disagreement with Gersen: They mention cooperation, but seem more interested in underground education such as Poland developed under that autocracy — and which ultimately succeeded in taking that autocracy down. I think more emphasis needs to be placed on cooperation, on Boorstein’s call for universities to “band together.”
That is because Trump is not your usual run of autocrat. He is both transactional and a bully, whose policies are dictated by his personal wants and whims and which he can change on a whim. Even more importantly, he backs down when challenged. That is exactly what happened with his tariffs (though he reversed his rulings in ways that make things worse).
Which brings me back to Gersen’s first recommendation above: universities must wean themselves off of federal largess, because Trump has made it clear they can no longer count on it — nor can anyone, from law firms to states to corporations to countries. Trump has already destroyed the world’s trust in the United States to keep its word, and it will take generations to get it back. If we ever do. In the meantime, universities, like everyone else, will have to fend for themselves. And most of them can; Harvard has a nine billion dollar endowment, for pity’s sake! And form a united front to stand up against the bully who squats in the Oval Office.
