SCHWARZ | U.S. Universities in Crisis: The Implicit and Explicit Threat of Nationalization
Using the threat of withholding research funds and taxing endowments, Trump and his acolytes are trying to nationalize universities. Under the guise of fighting antisemitism, they want to put universities under the auspices of various kinds of monitors, perhaps in some cases judges, who will control what universities do.
Disregarding democracy, autocrats are bullies who stifle dissent and debate to impose their worldview. The Trump administration lives by intimidation, whether it be directed at the press, the legal establishment, cultural resources or the media.
Defending the right to express fact-based opinions and different interpretations of the same facts, universities must resist intimidation by an authoritarian regime that seeks compliant silence in the face of outrageous demands. Universities’ leadership must not follow the example of some leaders of the U.S. media, medical, educational, legal and corporate worlds who have been cowed into silence and succumbed to threats.
Despite Columbia University agreeing to his conditions, it still has not had its $400 million released because Trump’s end game is to continue making new demands on universities until they capitulate to his conditions on admission as well as his stipulations for muzzling free speech, hiring conservatives, testing the politics of foreign students and dismantling programs that encourage diversity and inclusion.
The failure of the GOP majority in Congress to resist or challenge Trump enables him to rule by executive order, which means ruling by decree. As Frank Bruni and others have remarked, we have entered a world of unpredictable darkness.
A personal note: When I was a guest at Peking University four years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protest demonstrations, which ended with the army massacring 200 protestors, the university was run by the army. Professors were humiliated when they came to work, having to show their credentials every day. I was told my lecture would be heard by party factotums whose reports could jeopardize my hosts. That is what happens when universities fall under government control.
U.S. universities must be independent of government control. Those who understand the role of universities in a democracy applaud Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, who refused to capitulate: “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” Nor, I would argue, can the great public universities submit to government interference even though they are vulnerable to state interference.
Because I was a guest columnist for The Sun in 2023-2024 and because I have taught at Cornell for 57 years, I am often asked what I think of the evolving political situation and how Cornell and other major research universities should be responding.
Cornell must work with other major universities, especially the Ivies and others under attack, to develop a resistance strategy and seek legal recourse whenever possible. I believe that there is no alternative but to take legal action in the form of universities suing as a group. We can hope that the courts will rule that Trump has overreached and that he will adhere to the rule of law.
Even while knowing the Trump administration will do everything possible to subvert and ignore court rulings, universities have no other recourse than to depend on the legal system. They are joining together to sue the government with the hopes that the courts will not permit this attack on universities, which is an attack upon knowledge, truth and facts.
Even if universities lose federal funding, they must do as much as possible to carry on research, not only in STEM but also in the social sciences and humanities, knowing that research greatly benefits the quality of life in the world.
I am aware that the leading universities, including Cornell, are planning for the worst if Trump withholds federal research funds. The universities will do everything they can to minimize job losses and sustain crucial research, especially in the medical fields, where the consequences of suspending grants will lead to needless deaths.
University leadership must defend what universities do in terms of encouraging opportunity and possibility for all students and of fostering objective research. At the same time, universities need to seek public support by communicating better what we do and why in terms of research and teaching.
In a recent New York Times Podcast — and before that in an article in The Atlantic — the President of Princeton, Christopher L. Eisgrub, has stressed that he will fight for the integrity of his university: “[A]s we look at efforts to influence what universities are doing, how they teach about Israel and Gaza, how they teach about climate, how they teach about American history, how they teach about diversity, we are seeing threats of significant intrusion into the freedom of scholars to raise the kinds of ideas that enable change to take place in our society and enable people to pursue truth.”
Whether it be about possible links between childhood inoculation and autism or supposed election fraud or rewriting the history of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrections and claiming those convicted were “political prisoners,” both University research as well and intellectual and political discussions must be based on factual evidence rather than unproven hypothesis or worse yet, outright falsehoods.
As Cornell President Kotlikoff has insisted, universities must welcome diverse points of view as long as they are expressed in dialogic form — “this is true, isn’t it?” — and not by violent actions that interfere with the rights of others. Political interferences and threats that open the door to nationalization must be excluded.
I have written about past antisemitism on Ivy campuses and how Jews were not welcome until after WWII. I have no problem with this administration monitoring how Jews or any minority are treated on campuses. But that is different from using the claim of campus antisemitism to threaten withholding research funds as a way of dictating curriculum and stipulating what books should be in the library of the Naval Academy or demanding that Columbia University and Harvard University change their admission policies.
As a scholar specializing in narrative, I am concerned with the increasing acceptance of false narratives without a scintilla of evidence. While we can hold Trump, Fox News, Truth Social and other right-wing sites responsible for these untruths, we also need to inquire about why so many people believe falsehoods about our universities, including the lie that their focus is on indoctrinating students. The nationalization that Trump implicitly and explicitly proposes would deprive US universities of the spirit of inquiry — including the search for truth about diseases and climate change — that has made them the envy of much of the world.
Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University where he has been a faculty member for 57 years.
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