American popular culture, ever promoting the myth that we live in the land of the free and the brave, wants us to believe that we stand up to bullying. Even if bravery is in short supply at times, like during McCarthyism, someone like attorney Joseph Welch ultimately comes to the rescue. Breaking the spell, the First Amendment hero stands strong: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
It’s hard to imagine who would dare to exhibit such defiance today.
These days, the assault on freedom comes not from an alcoholic senator but a teetotaling president. Donald Trump’s presidency isn’t even ten weeks old, yet his threats have already prompted wealthy and powerful institutions to surrender their fundamental values.
On March 8th, Trump canceled $400 million in federal research grants to Columbia University for what he called “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” during last spring’s encampment protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Though there’s still little to no evidence that pro-Palestinian demonstrators made anti-Semitic statements or committed anti-Semitic acts—every directly sourced claim of anti-Jewish speech turns out to be anti-Zionist instead—accusing Columbia of inaction is unfair.
In a notable set of setbacks for academic freedom even before Trump returned to the White House, Columbia forced out its president, banned two pro-Palestinian student groups (including one run by Jewish students), fired at least one professor, and suspended, expelled or revoked the degreesof dozens of students. To prevent demonstrations, Columbia even commandeered a public street running through campus by indefinitely locking its gates.
Trump demanded more. So, choosing stability over principle, Columbia appeased him further. Though there’s no credible allegation against it, the school’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department will be neutered and discredited as it’s placed into a watered-down form of federal receivership. Columbia will create an anti-protester security squad. Protesters will no longer be allowed to wear masks, so it will be easier for pro-Israel groups to doxx those remaining who haven’t yet been expelled, banned, and cowed into silence.
Stability is proving elusive. Several Columbia students have been arrested by Trump’s immigration officers for participating in pro-Gaza events. One, Mahmoud Khalil, a recently graduated master’s alumnus, was dragged from his university-owned apartment and is now in a notorious for-profit Louisiana ICE detention center. Wary of Trump, Columbia officials have expressed nary a syllable of concern.
Not to be out-wussed, the University of Maine system reversed its policy and banned transwomen from women’s sports after Trump threatened to pull $30 million a year in research funding.
Then Trump threatened to remove national security clearances from a major Democrat-aligned law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. So Paul, Weiss agreed to dilute its DEI policies and donate $40 million in pro bono work to causes to be specified by the White House. A D.C. lawyer—speaking anonymously, naturally—told NBC News called the firm’s decision to cut a deal “as craven and despicable a decision as you will find.”
Then there’s the media. ABC News will give $15 million the Trump’s future presidential library to settle a defamation case it would normally have fought and likely won. Meta will do the same, to the tune of $25 million. If it looks like a bribe…
It’s not so much whether or not they have abandoned laudable stances in favor of bad ones to curry favor with Trump. Anyone who reveres free speech should agree with the University of California’s abandonment of the woke requirement that faculty members sign “diversity statements”—another change prompted by a Trump threat to slash federal funding.
Whether Trump is right or not is not the point. The problem is that he’s getting his way by thuggery rather than persuasion.
He is the president. He has the bully pulpit. The fact that he’s not leveraging his position to try to convince citizens of what’s wrong and how it should be fixed signals that he does not believe buy-in is necessary. This is not the way things work in a representative democracy.
It is Trump’s authoritarian style, more than his politics, that ought to animate resistance.
But who will stand up to him?
If a law firm with $2 billion in annual revenue and a thousand lawyers, and an Ivy League university with a $15 billion endowment won’t tell the president to pound sand, who will? Though Trump’s threats to Paul, Weiss and Columbia would have been a hit to their bottom line, neither would have been existential. They would have survived. They might even have thrived as liberal clients and alumni wrote checks in support.
Perkins Boie, another firm in Trump’s crosshairs, is doing what it does best—it’s suing and has obtained a restraining order against the president.
If the story of Trump’s attempt to govern by individual fiat is to have the kind of happy ending we saw to McCarthyism in 1954, it will take longer and be harder to achieve after so many well-connected and deep-pocketed institutions that could have easily resisted caved in so quickly. If and when Trump’s wrath homes in on smaller targets with fewer resources, we will need people with more courage than we have seen in a long time.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)
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Great write-up.
A comment on the nature of the underlying rot in academia, since I know that intimately, and Ted’s column touches quite a lot on academic institutions in general and Columbia in particular.
It will not come as a shock to readers of the rall-blog that the very framework of research and teaching in university (labs and clinics) has been revamped from the ground up in recent decades (neo-liberalism, managerialism, constant grant-writing and so on). Relevant cartoon: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1436
[An anecdote: when I was a graduate student 10 years ago, there was some debate among fellow students about the remaining tenure protections of faculty. When I told them that the very function of tenure was to enable professors to voice political opinions without fear of retribution, a) they never heard that before and b) were trying hard to suppress giggles since (in their words) “but academics are the people in society least likely to hold let alone voice political opinions”. ]
On a structural level, Dan Davies has a recent deep dive (The Unaccountability Machine) into how managerialism, despite the name, isn’t a win for the professional managerial class – but its abdication of power: Effectively a subset of the managers get some crumbs and what remains of the prestige in exchange of following protocols designed to make (here:) academics and academic institutions transparent and governable to the actual ruling class (owners).
This has proceeded to the point of creating a new professional academic identity based on success in out-competing others to shape themselves and their projects to (pro-actively) match the direction set by administration (directed at prestige and photo-ops) and larger funding institutions.
[Anecdote: I remember the “CEO” of a newly created high-tech engineering institute boasting that he managed to acquire the very scientists who otherwise got the highest offers from competing institutions. He may as well have been managing Paris St.Germain soccer team and signed Messi and Neymar. This circular policy was the sole scientific direction of the institution. All hail the market, praise be.]
I think this explains a lot of the “wussiness” Ted has diagnosed here.
It was by design, by ensuring universities are managed just like businesses which answer to investors. This has inevitably created a vacuum on top – since unlike the Chinese Communist Party, Western ruling classes have little understanding of established science let alone future possibilities.
Note that it doesn’t matter at all whether resistance to the current government could be a sound business strategy. The whole world-view of administration at all levels is to follow orders from above, even to lie to themselves that they had come up with the desired policy independently ahead of time. Beyond that there is no strategy, no tactics, hardly independent long-term planning at all on the level of universities.
The very “managers” who were most aggressive in implementing the previous set of liberal policies – “we have been ranked in the top 5% of representation of women and minorities! Athena Silver Star!” will now fall over themselves to forget over-night that they authentically believed their own liberal window-dressing. Only what will Trump and Musk want by next Tuesday? A challenge worthy of the greatest minds in academia…
To be fair to academia, this void is partially filled with defined programs in engineering and biotech who have established partnerships with industry and the state (NIH and DoD); but it has also given rise to dysfunctional landscapes of research so narrowly specialized that is hard to even outline to fellow academicians what the point of it is, if any. According to the perspective sketched above a lot of merely as a consequence of rewarding transparency metrics and what is effectively a casino of grant funding precisely in the absence of long-term planning or strategy, rather than a function of science operating in uncharted territory that was always going to mostly fail.
A lot of words coming down to:
( 1) Alas, there is no organized resistance coming from “Western” academia (anyone above students and adjuncts) for at least a generation.
(2) Alas, there even is little professional loyalty when research programs are coming under attack (however stupid that attack), as many academics themselves are hard pressed to defend the existence of a lot of the research conducted in their areas under the new management*
*outside of legacy research in high-tech, some institutional echos from a more self-organized time, and some islands of true experimentation which are getting harder and harder to establish or maintain…