Antisemitism and D.E.I. are smokescreens

Almost three months into the Trump administration’s war on universities, and a year and a half into the Republican Party’s organized campaign against the presidents of top colleges, it is clear that antisemitism and D.E.I. are mere pretexts for these attacks. Like much of what this administration does, the war on higher education is driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. Trump is building a mafia state, in which the don distributes both money and power. Universities are independent centers of intellectual and, to some extent, political power. He is trying to destroy that independence.

There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and it requires more than 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.

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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 already 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, and others, the administration has shown that it considers knowledge production worthless. In the rare areas where the president — or perhaps Elon Musk — may see value in research, the emergent mafia state is almost certain to distribute funds to its friends. One shudders to think what universities would have to do to fit themselves into that category.

… Bard … is a private college that acts like the best kind of public university.

I asked [Bard President Leon] Botstein how he balanced this kind of expansionism with his fiduciary responsibilities as president of the college. He said that he is a “naïve believer” in good ideas and so far the ideas have been good enough to attract philanthropists. He doesn’t think a university has to be rich, he told me — and Bard, with its $270 million endowment, decidedly is not. In his view, universities, “portals to tolerance and the expression of fundamental equality of all human beings,” are essential to democracy. A child of Holocaust survivors who came to this country as a stateless person in 1949, Botstein is particularly sensitive to the ways of an autocratic government. Three weeks into the Trump administration, he 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.

Alternatively, you can try to negotiate with a mafia boss who wants to see you grovel. When these negotiations fail, as they inevitably will, it will be too late to ask for the public’s support.

M. Gessen, This Is How Universities Can Escape Trump’s Trap, If They Dare (Shared link)

Bard College is now more prominent on my radar. There’s more to it than Steely Dan.

Oh, yeah: M. Gessen, f/k/a Masha, is rising in my estimation as well, though her bio makes her an unlikely ally. She has been resisting tyrrany much of her life.