Yves here. To be clear, I added to Rajiv Sethi’s headline to make the core issue explicit. JD Vance at least once described long form how universities needed to be taken over and remade to promote conservative values (does that include discouraging the education of women?) From Politico this week in Republicans have hated universities for years. Anti-war protests gave them a reason to punish them:
In 2021, JD Vance proclaimed “the universities are the enemy.” This week, the White House declared war against them.
President Donald Trump and his administration are escalating their attacks on higher education, intensifying a yearslong effort to hobble the campuses they say breed progressive ideology by casting them not as spaces of innovation, but as hotbeds of hate.
Republicans have long blamed college campuses for being ground-zero for a number of “woke” culture war issues to which they’re now taking an ax, including diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and academic frameworks like critical race theory. The protests that roiled college campuses last spring in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war gave Republicans fuel to go after the schools over concerns about antisemitism, and since taking office, Trump has swiftly taken actions designed to punish higher education.
The Trump administration’s effort pulls levers of power across the federal government. The Department of Education on Monday warned 60 universities under investigation for antisemitism that they could face penalties, reminding them that taxpayer support “is a privilege.”
Sethi describes what is happening at Columbia, at the forefront of the Administration’s ideological purge.
By Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics at Barnard College. Originally published at his website
When the federal government announced the cancellation of 400 million dollars in grants and contracts to Columbia earlier this month, the rationale given was “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Further cancellations were promised, with five billion dollars in existing commitments at risk.
President Armstrong’s response appeared to take this rationale at face value.1 In a message to the community, she stated that combating antisemitism was her “number one priority” and that under her leadership, the university had transformed its “approach to managing demonstrations, built and put into action disciplinary processes that previously existed only on paper, created collaboratives across our campuses to provide relevant education and training, implemented new anti-discrimination policies and trained our entire community on those policies, changed our protocols for campus access, and redesigned our leadership structures to more swiftly respond to incidents of antisemitism and discrimination on campus.”
If the eradication of antisemitism really were the goal of the federal authorities in squeezing Columbia financially, one might have expected the pressure to ease. Instead, as a precondition for any conversation on the restoration of funds, a further set of demands was announced. These include the abolition of the university judicial board, the adoption of a definition of antisemitism that has raised serious concerns among individuals and groups across the ideological spectrum, the granting of law enforcement powers to public safety officers, the placement of an academic department under receivership, and comprehensive admissions reform.
Over the past year and a half, many Barnard and Columbia faculty have strenuouslyobjected to the erosion of shared governance on their respective campuses.2 The letter from the federal authorities reveals that there is now little governance to share.
The Columbia administration faces a very difficult choice between complete capitulation and costly conflict with a much stronger adversary.3 If the university were to accept all demands made in the letter, there would be more demands made, and more again once those are met. My guess is that these would grow to include changes in hiring practices and the shuttering of departments perceived to be ideologically captured. Only when the entire organization itself is in receivership, with an administration loyalist installed at the helm, would any restoration of funding be contemplated.
The only other option on the table is to seek intervention by the courts. This carries a different set of costs and risks. Open conflict with the federal government is likely to lead to a further tightening of the screws, quickly reaching the full five billion dollars of grant commitments. Litigation will be protracted, devastating in the interim, and may end in failure. That said, this is the only path that allows for the preservation of institutional autonomy.
Back in 2021, JD Vance described American universities as the enemy, and arguedquite explicitly that they had to be either taken over or destroyed. This was long before the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, and thus long before the encampments, building occupations, classroom disruptions, and sit-ins to which the federal government claims to be responding.
Does this mean that charges of antisemitism are an opportunistic excuse to force long-desired changes in American higher education? What if there had been no unauthorized protests at all, and no trace of antisemitic rhetotic or imagery? Would similar demands have still been made and similar financial pressures applied?
I think that the answer to this question is yes, but Columbia would not have been first in line to face the fire. It would probably have been Harvard, with an endowment four times the size and a global reputation even more formidable. The protest activity placed a target on our backs, and the trigger has now been pulled.
Nils Gilman observed several months ago that Germany’s “hegemonic position atop the global academic research hierarchy before 1933 was arguably as dominant as that of the U.S. since 1945.” The Nazi regime destroyed it in short order, by persecuting Jewish and left-wing academics. Thousands of scholars—including Albert Einstein, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Hannah Arendt, John von Neumann, Hans Krebs, and Albert Hirschman—fled to more welcoming shores.4
This exodus has been described as Hitler’s gift to the allies, and the US took full advantage. Large scale federal funding of academic research “led to groundbreaking advancements: radar, jet engines, early computers, mass-produced penicillin, and, in the basement of Pupin Hall, a little something known as the Manhattan Project.” American higher education became a magnet for global talent, and waves of aspiring scholars came knocking at our doors. It also became a major export engine, providing a service for which there was seemingly insatiable global demand, and generating revenues that brought a bit more balance to our international transactions.
I don’t think that this system is at risk of imminent collapse, although such things happen with such ferocious suddenness that they are hard to predict. I do think it’s our responsibility as participants in the system to fortify it, and this must begin with an understanding of why we have lost the public trust.
Gilman has argued that we have strayed from our three core competencies, the things that we are uniquely good at producing. These are “educating a broad population to a high level of technical competency… creating the conditions for the discovery of new facts about and conceptions of the world… [and] maintaining the knowledge already created.” He argues that “a ruthless focus on eliminating anything and everything that stands in the way of these three things” is our only hope for survival. I think this diagnosis is correct, and there is little time to lose.
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1 I say “appeared to take” because it might have been a strategic decision made from a weak position, based on the belief that it was the only path to a prompt restoration of funding.
2 I had serious reservations about these initiatives for reasons explained here.
3 I use the term adversary here in recognition of the fact that this is how American higher education is viewed by the Vice President and many others in the administration.
4 Before he fled, Hirschman fought with the French resistance (under an assumed name) and helped many others escape. He then joined the US Army and returned to Europe as part of the war effort. He was among the most original economists of his era, and I was honored to speak at his memorial service.
I am not sure he is resisting so much as rationalizing not doing so.
“Over the past year and a half, many Barnard and Columbia faculty have strenuouslyobjected to the erosion of shared governance on their respective campuses.2 The letter from the federal authorities reveals that there is now little governance to share.
The Columbia administration faces a very difficult choice between complete capitulation and costly conflict with a much stronger adversary.3 If the university were to accept all demands made in the letter, there would be more demands made, and more again once those are met. My guess is that these would grow to include changes in hiring practices and the shuttering of departments perceived to be ideologically captured. Only when the entire organization itself is in receivership, with an administration loyalist installed at the helm, would any restoration of funding be contemplated.”
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I thought this was a great summary of the current situation at Columbia (the likely first example and test case).
The rest of the article did not really face the question raised: how to respond to the administration?
Figure out how to make up 5 billion?
Figure out how to work with all of academia to resist the termination of freedom in education?
To inject a somewhat counter intuitive thought here, I wonder just what percentage of the funds at play are really necessary to the core functioning of the modern University. Much of what passes today for “education” is really technical training. To a great extent, this function would be better provided by Community Colleges and outright Technical Colleges.
Taking to heart the idea of the “core functions” of a University, separating out the technical training part of the endeavour would leave us with what any scholar from earlier times would recognize as a University. To that extent, Universities can and probably should be “downsized,” with an accompanying increase in freedom and autonomy.
Secondly, once upon a time, businesses trained their new hires under one form or another of deferred compensation. My Dad learned drafting and later engineering that way just after the end of World War 2. His apprenticeship papers from Europe were accepted as the equivalent of a college degree by most American companies that he applied for employment with. This can be done again.
One major initiator of the stealth anti-intellectualism on display in the present Administration is actually an inter in-group power struggle. Lots of “rice bowls” are in danger of being broken and the “rice” redistributed.
We have entered the Silicon Valley phase of the Reaction. The motto now is “Move fast and break things.”
F Scot Fitzgerald was absolutely right in his opening to the novel “The Great Gatsby.”
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…”.
Stay safe.