Three months into the Trump administration’s war on universities, and a year-and-a-half into the Republican Party’s organised campaign against the presidents of top colleges, it is clear that like much of what this administration does, the war on higher education is driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. US President Donald Trump is building a mafia state in which the don distributes both money and power.
There is, however, a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and 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.
Because Trump views everything as transactional, he has approached universities the same way he approached law firms and, arguably, countries: by deploying devastating financial threats against each one individually, to compel compliance and prevent coalitions.
His first target, Columbia University, acceded to his demands within two weeks of losing $400 million in grants. When Columbia’s first sacrifice didn’t bring back the money, the university made another: its interim president, Katrina Armstrong. That didn’t satisfy Trump, who now reportedly wants Columbia to agree to direct government oversight. He is also brandishing financial threats, separately, at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern. There is no sign of organised resistance on the part of universities.
It shouldn’t be this easy to cleave universities from one another but, so far, it seems to be even easier than making law firms compete for the don’s business and favour.
Prominent American universities, most of the time, measure their success not so much by the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the world as by the size of their endowment, the number of students seeking admission and their rankings by U.S. News & World Report and others, which assess the value of a university education in part by looking at graduates’ starting salaries.
Trump has threatened to use many different tools against universities: pulling federal financial aid, revoking accreditation, rescinding nonprofit status, imposing an endowment tax and blocking the flow of international students. Nor — as the case of Columbia has demonstrated — will submission end the attack. Slashing and burning its way through the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wilson Center, the United States Institute of Peace, the Smithsonian, the administration has shown that it considers knowledge production worthless.
In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Polish dissidents operated what they called a “flying university” in apartments across the country. Run by the country’s leading intellectuals, this university wasn’t selective and didn’t charge tuition; its only goal was to spread knowledge to as many people as possible.
Adopting such a radical approach would be costly. The universities most actively targeted by Trump have the resources necessary to weather such a radical reorientation. But as Leon Botstein, the president of the private Bard College, told me, “Too many of our wealthiest universities have made endowments their primary object of protection.”
In the last quarter-century, Bard’s expansion has focussed on people who would ordinarily not have access to a university education. I asked Botstein how he balanced this kind of expansionism with his fiduciary responsibilities as president of the college. He said that he is a “naive believer” in good ideas and so far the ideas have been good enough to attract philanthropists. In his view, universities — “portals to tolerance and the expression of fundamental equality of all human beings” — are essential to democracy. Three weeks into the Trump administration, Botstein 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.
So this is my radical proposal for universities: act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and expand your reach not by buying real estate but by bringing education to communities. Create a base. Become a movement.
NYTNS
