The back foot of American higher education. As part of the Trump administration’s wider regime merger program, universities are facing new, shockingly direct threats to their independence and academic freedom. Over the past few months, we have seen reality begin to sink. Sometimes, there is no more compromise, and in principle the only way is to say no straightforwardly. In the process, academia can recycle the basic value that eroded before the current crisis.
This campaign, which advocates government control, is bad for academies, but is even worse for liberal democracy. Although given the political challenges facing these challenges, it is crucial that scholars, academic leaders and students all have to take back what seems to be forgotten – modern universities are a lively legacy of liberalism in the Enlightenment era, a tradition of political freedom, constitutional constraints on the constitution, freedom of thought, freedom of thought and evidence-based rationality.
Academic leaders of the founding era understand from a concrete perspective that universities are the cornerstone institutions of the fledgling American experiment. They see it as education not a royal theme, but a politically free, autonomous citizen who is able to manage the complex affairs of private, commercial and public life. They believe that freedom is inseparable from intellectual institutions.
As Benjamin Rush’s Declaration of Independence, the outstanding signator of the founder of Dickinson College observed: “Liberty can only exist in the society of knowledge. Without learning, people cannot understand their rights, and where learning restricts a few people, freedom is neither equal.” In other words, the spirit of American universities was integrated with the ideal of American liberal democracy from the very beginning.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that only liberal perspectives can be taught in higher education institutions. Stay away from it. Among the most unique advantages of liberalism, it creates space for its critics. But while individual scholars can explore and promote alternatives to the constitutional constrained liberal democracy, the institution itself must confidently defend the game’s liberal rules, which makes these criticisms possible in the first place.
In other words, if universities are to be the future of the cornerstone institutions of a free society, they must serve as caretakers for the liberal democracy project. My point is not that colleges want to play this role, that would be great. As my co-author Bradley Jackson and I put it: “The future of higher education and the future of liberal order are inseparable.
As I take a look at the past decade, a moment stays in my mind, a symbol of the current state of higher education now discovering itself. The first was in 2015 when the University of Missouri mass media professor called for “some muscles” to prevent student photojournalists from exercising his First Amendment rights to cover public demonstrations on campus quadrilaterals. At least one Mizzou staff member assisted in the efforts to intimidate journalists.
An episode held at Middlebury College in 2017, when organized students yelled and invited spokesman Charles Murray. Like many others, I was shocked and angry because outsiders thought it was an opportunity to engage in political violence. But the fact that my heart breaks my heart is that students are carefully prepared for the event, not by making the best arguments to fight back Murray, but by producing an ode to the provisions aimed at closing open-minded exchange of ideas. As a professor and provost, I considered what these events said to an industry that I was so passionate and dedicated. And, is the attack on intellectual freedom always one way or another, ultimately damaging those who are marginalized and fighting for social justice? Somehow, we lost the plot.
Perhaps the most intense plot ahead of this year’s event was in December 2023, when presidents of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania convened an anti-Semitism charge in front of a congressional committee to face allegations of opposing protests against Israel’s response to Israel’s protests against Israel. I not only deceived the law firms provided by witnesses in an inquisitive trial. I cringe because, in their attempt to see First Amendment freedom as their justification, the presidents of our three most prestigious institutions had zero credibility. Their loyalty to First Amendment principles is like a convincing fox hole conversion.
My point is not to keep these events. Instead, it is to propose a model and provide context on why universities are so vulnerable to influence by the Trump administration and the state legislature. When academic leaders, professors and students ignore the college’s Freedom Foundation, when the unfree power completely removes all this, we no longer have a position. The weaponization of federal funds, the deportation of students and scholars who have been protected from political rhetoric, the ban on the concept of “schisphericism” and the threat of consenting orders – the legal reconciliation that puts universities under long-term federal control – effectively deprives university autonomy that governs autonomy and sets dangerous precedents for political interference in academic institutions.
Now facing a real existential crisis, many institutions are starting to fight back. Faced with an previously unimaginable threat, Harvard dug on his heel and turned to the court to protect its rights, not only blacklisting its blacklist from federal research grants, but also in an indestructible attack on its tax-free status, and the same illegal attempt to revoke its certification to recruit international students. In response to the government through its lawyers, Harvard made it clear that it refused to end without hesitation: “Colleges will not waive their independence or waive their constitutional rights. Harvard and any other private university cannot allow the federal government to take over themselves.”
Harvard is not the only institution that has discovered its courage. Georgetown University was threatened by interim federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., whose freedom of speech and religion (as a Jesuit University) correctly illustrates its right to identify its own faculty and courses. This is not a matter of abstract principles. A member of Georgetown’s own faculty was awarded kidnapping and priceless deportation. Princeton University is also actively pushing backwards.
Resistance is not limited to elite universities. Smaller private universities and state institutions have been raising alarms as students go missing to dissatisfaction with the administration, and as Trump’s public censorship requires. In the process, they not only defend their own self-interests, but also gather in civil society to resist early authoritarianism. Charles Murray’s work provides a compelling example of how the Liberal escalating Tit-Tat cycle unfolds. At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, the office of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the removal of the so-called “dei” work. although Bell-shaped curve Surviving the purge, there is no criticism of Murray’s most controversial book.
Ironically it is hard to ignore. After entering the Naval Academy, the crew of the Chinese crew took a swearing oath to defend the Constitution “to target all foreign and domestic enemies.” Shouldn’t we believe that future U.S. military leaders exercise our freedom to demand that they defend their lives? (The majority of the initially deleted books have since been sent back to the Naval Academy shelves.)
Fortunately for civilian institutions, the courts are proving the task of retreating. Tufts University student Lumesa Öztürk was released weeks after immigration and customs law enforcement guardians, with his goal to collectively constitute a criticism of the Gaza war. Such things will happen in the United States, which is an unimaginable attack on freedom of speech. Öztürk was incarcerated and threatened with deportation, not for protest, which could turn into physical conflict and a violation of rule, but for merely to give an opinion, the government decided not to like it.
No liberal education – no liberal society – is unbearable in the shadow of this sinister national revenge and repression. We should not ignore our long-term vision and need to recommend ourselves to the first principle. We must strengthen the principle of academic freedom, because it is the constitutional order that ruled a functioning university. Furthermore, when we welcome freshmen and colleagues to the college, we cannot regard them as liberal values, openness of privilege, curiosity, originality and intellectual humility will continue. We must do our best to cultivate these values.
But at the moment when our impulse is to defend the Academy at all costs, an important piece of advice is the one that is not easy to follow. In short, we have to have our own mistakes. If we are to rethink the Freedom Foundation for Higher Education in America, we must proactively enumerate the failures that lead to the allowable structure, which is now suitable for non-liberal and authoritarian reactionary forces. In some cases, this will mean replacing leaders who can better satisfy the credibility of those who are.
It should be clear that when we have our mistakes, we will not favor political elites on either side of the aisle. We will talk to the public and rebuild trust, who support higher education institutions through taxes and tuition. We will talk to our own campus communities that seek principled leadership.
Taking full responsibility for the correction of the course will be beneficial to the college as it will reset the path of colleges and universities to become intellectually open, challenging and discovery sites. But this will also be beneficial to the future of our country. It will provide an example of how the cornerstone institutions of the American experiment can once again find their orientation, rebuild their independence, and affirmatively strengthen our constitutional system of restricting liberal democracy at the most urgent moment.
