Academic Freedom for Me, But Not for Thee

I did a recent podcast with David French for The UnPopulist, where we talk about the Trump administration’s assault on higher education. It’s a long, in-depth, wide-ranging conversation, and I highly recommend it. The end kind of turns into me trying to talk David off a ledge, in despair at the collapse of the American system—a common experience when talking to classical liberals these days.

Only Moral Leadership Can Stop America From Giving in to Authoritarianism: A Conversation with David French

I specifically wanted to talk with David about this issue, because as he observes, he has probably sued more universities over freedom of speech than anyone else, during his career as a litigator for FIRE. So he knows all the sins the universities have committed. Or as the folks at The Onion put it, some of us can’t believe we’re on Harvard’s side.

To keep this concrete, see a recent post at Discourse by Roger Pielke, Jr., on how he was slowly shoved out of his academic position at the University of Colorado Boulder, despite enjoying the supposed protection of tenure, because he is a minor heretic on global warming. (Pielke’s heresy consists of pointing out the actual state of science on the impact of climate change, which does not support the catastrophic projections activists need to frighten us into adopting their agenda.)

So yes, the universities have long had a problem with ideological conformism.

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The Establishing of a New Establishment

The problem is that the Trump administration is responding to political conformity imposed from the left by imposing political conformity from the right.

For this audience, the best rejoinder I can give is a quote from Ayn Rand, in “The Establishing of an Establishment,” which was her response to the mid-20th Century increase in federal funding to intellectuals and the arts. The context was a congressman’s discovery that the notorious behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner had received a substantial federal grant for his research.

Mr. Gallagher stated that he believes in Dr. Skinner’s right to advocate his ideas. “But what I question is whether he should be subsidized by the Federal Government—especially since, in my judgment, he is advancing ideas which threaten the future of our system of government by denigrating the American traditions of individualism, human dignity, and self-reliance.”

If Mr. Gallagher were a consistent supporter of the American traditions he describes in the second half of his sentence, he would have stopped after its first half. But, apparently, he was not aware of the contradiction, because his solution was a proposal to create “a Select Committee on Privacy, Human Values, and Democratic Institutions...designed to deal specifically with the type of threats to our Constitution, our Congress, and our constituents which are contained in the thoughts of B. F. Skinner.”

Nothing could be as dangerous a threat to our institutions as a proposal to establish a government committee to deal with “antidemocratic thoughts” or B. F. Skinner’s thoughts or anyone’s thoughts.

This is basically what the Trump administration is doing, and make no mistake that they are very much targeting people for their ideas.

One of this administration’s most destructive policies is the mass revocation of student visas for overtly ideological and partisan reasons. The most high-profile and egregious case is Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who has been in an ICE prison for six weeks (so far) simply for writing an op-ed. The Washington Post found information about the internal State Department memo prior to her kidnapping.

After receiving the recommendation from DHS, the State Department found that while Ozturk had protested Tufts’ relationship with Israel, neither DHS nor ICE nor Homeland Security investigations produced any evidence showing that Ozturk has engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization, according to US government employees briefed on the State Department’s memo.

Marco Rubio revoked her visa, anyway.

All of this is, ironically, an attack on one of America’s biggest exports: higher education. “In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.”

The attack on foreign students is just the most obvious form of ideological censorship today’s conservatives want to impose on universities. As a kind of bookend to the story about Roger Pielke, see a report on the harassment of an Indiana University professor under a state-level “intellectual diversity” law that seems to be aimed at decreasing the diversity of intellectual discourse on certain topics.

Conservatives have embraced the same pattern you see from just about every faction when it comes to freedom of speech: Free speech for me, but not for thee.

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Academic NATO

A lot of us have decried the lack of organized resistance from university administrators, who are generally cowards. They were cowards before the demands of the woke mob, and now they will be cowards before the demands of the authoritarian right.

Slowly, some of that is beginning to change. Universities are beginning to sign on to an idea some are calling “Academic NATO”—a mutual defense compact against the federal government.

The Bloomington Faculty Council passed a resolution April 8 to form a mutual academic defense compact for the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

The Rutgers University Senate passed the same resolution April 6 to establish an alliance with the Big Ten’s 18 universities to defend “academic freedom, institutional integrity, and the research enterprise.” Rutgers called on the leadership of other Big Ten universities and their governing boards to implement the compact. For the coalition to be created, Big Ten leaders would have to convene a summit and initiate its implementation.

If a compact was established, its funds would be distributed to provide “immediate and strategic support to any member institution under direct political or legal infringement,” including legal counsel and representations, expert testimony, legislative advocacy and countersuit actions.

Once again, the big institutions are being cautious and slow and are led by the kind of glad-handers who tend to rise to the top in peacetime. Under pressure, they will have to find the fighters who are willing to stand up against overbearing authorities and protect their institutional independence.