Failing grades

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump is setting us back with his war on education

Over the last 14 years, folks in China have welcomed me to teach fairly often. Whether they were graduate students at Tsinghua University or undergraduates at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, the students I was privileged to teach were smart and hardworking. Some even asked for extra homework, a request I never got at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, even from some outstanding students there.

That’s why a new report from Bloomberg News is alarming. Headlined “Why US Men Think College Isn’t Worth It Anymore,” the piece bemoans the erosion of working-class men’s status and prospects in the U.S. In that decline, a turn away from schooling is key.

“As U.S. men forgo higher education, the demographic group as a whole has lost ground in other areas too,” the piece reports. “Working-class men today are less likely to be employed than they were four decades ago, their inflation-adjusted wages have barely budged in more than 50 years, they’re less prone to get married or have children, and an increasing number report having no close friends. Men are also four times more likely than women to die by suicide. Data show that men age 18-30 spent an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours alone each day in 2023, 18 percent more than they did in 2019 and over an hour more than women did, according to a report by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.”

The suggestion, of course, is that a college education can boost earning power, aid in social mobility and status, and lead to better health and wellbeing. All those things are backed up by data. A wealth of it shows that more schooling drives such benefits.

Perhaps not surprisingly, higher education also increases one’s ability to think critically and, in theory, spawns smarter political decision-making. The disproportionate support Donald J. Trump has enjoyed among the less schooled, the so-called diploma divide, suggests as much. Dumb voters vote dumbly, it seems.

But perpetuating ignorance may be why so many on the right decry higher education and why President Trump is leading a war on it. He just launched his newest volley in an executive order attempting to reshape the college accrediting process.

The order asks the secretary of education to “hold higher education accreditors accountable including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination for poor performance or violations to the federal Civil Rights Act,” a White House official told CNN.

As the news outlet reported, the order also “directs the attorney general and the secretary of education to investigate and terminate unlawful discrimination by American higher education institutions, including law schools and medical schools,” the official said.

Trump’s order would shake up the arcane but pivotal world of college accreditation, a move Trump has called his “secret weapon” in his bid to remake higher education, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The order aims to use the accrediting system to combat what Trump views as discriminatory practices and “ideological overreach” on college campuses, the Journal reported. It would put a greater focus on intellectual diversity among faculty — presumably putting more conservative ideologues in the teacher’s lounge — and on student success. It also would make it easier for schools to switch accreditors and for new accreditors to gain federal approval.

As the newspaper reported, accreditors set standards that must be met to access federal financial aid. The federal government gave $120.8 billion in loans, grants and work-study funds to more than 9.9 million students in the year ended last September. To earn an accreditor’s seal of approval, higher-education institutions must prove they meet standards covering everything from their mission and admissions policies to the quality of their faculty and programming.

“Revoking accreditation is an existential threat for these universities,” Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, told the paper. “If you lose Pell grants and lose student loans, for most colleges that means you’re done.”

The effort mirrors Trump’s slash and burn approach to education. As the Journal reported, proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health funding, currently being fought over in court, have driven universities to freeze hiring, rescind graduate student offers and pause research. The White House has targeted several Ivy League schools, including Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Brown, with federal grant cuts or freezes, citing antisemitism concerns.

Trump, of course, has particularly attacked efforts to promote diversity on campus, echoing the themes of far-right extremists. Such rightists amplify a national undercurrent of dissatisfaction with schooling.

“Similar messaging has come from activists such as Charlie Kirk, who traveled to more than two dozen colleges before the 2024 election on what he called the ‘You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,’ to try to get more members of Generation Z to cast a vote for Trump,” the Bloomberg piece notes. “Almost one-third of U.S. adults said they have little or no confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in June 2024—before Trump’s latest tirades against academia. In 2020, 41 percent of young men aged 18-29 voted for Trump; that number jumped to 56 percent in the 2024 election.”

Should this worry us all? Unquestionably.

Trump’s demagogic promises of restoring a 1950s culture in which a high school degree and a well-paying assembly line job guarantee the American Dream seem as fictional as his vows to cut grocery prices and scale back inflation. The sepia-toned nostalgia he trades in is nonsense in the 21st century.

That brings me back to China. In the current great power competition, the country has some key edges over the United States. Start with the population disparity: 1.4 billion compared with 342 million. Then move onto governmental systems, where one prizes stability and competence and the other lately has been erratic and unpredictable. But most of all, consider education, where China graduates nearly 4 million college students year, nearly double the U.S. tally.

For educators, of course, the last category is the most unsettling, especially since so many Chinese are drawn to science and technology. As MSNBC reported, China graduates almost twice as many STEM-oriented Ph.D.s than the U.S., an estimated 77,000 versus 40,000, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Exclude international students from that count and China outpaces the U.S. 3 to 1.

The Chinese students I taught were representative. They worked like demons and were respectful of knowledge and education, realizing that school was their ticket upward in society. And, simply put, if these edges continue, the Chinese are going to beat the pants off us.

Meanwhile, our president would take us on sorry steps backwards. Yes, globalization driven by trade liberalization from the Reagan years onward has hollowed out American manufacturing, driving lower-skilled work overseas. And, yes, this has eroded the American Dream for many, at least for those who thought assembly-line jobs were the smartest route upward.

But is the answer really a return to such low-skilled work, the sort that Chinese meme-makers are satirizing? Is the answer a remaking of education to suit the political whims of some fantasists who momentarily are in power? Is the answer not, instead, a ramping up in university education, a stepping up that would better equip the U.S. to compete globally?

The multiple tragedies now unfolding in Washington and spreading, cancer-like, across the nation’s campuses are quite a partisan matter — one in which the Democrats have ceded far too much ground. Ever since at least the Clinton Administration, Democrats have lost the working class, particularly men.

Just recall how President Bill Clinton championed higher education as a sensible response to economic change. Consider his message in his 1998 State of the Union address:

“I have something to say to every family listening to us tonight: Your children can go on to college,” Clinton said. “If you know a child from a poor family, tell her not to give up-she can go on to college. If you know a young couple struggling with bills, worried they won’t be able to send their children to college, tell them not to give up-their children can go on to college. If you know somebody who’s caught in a dead-end job and afraid he can’t afford the classes necessary to get better jobs for the rest of his life, tell him not to give up-he can go on to college. Because of the things that have been done, we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today. And, my friends, that will change the face and future of America.”

Of course, since then, college has grown out of reach for many — or just something they feel they can’t or don’t want to achieve. Recall that less than less than 38 percent of American adults have bachelor’s degree to higher.

And that proportion may shrink, as college costs soar and state support shrinks in many places. As the Bloomberg piece notes, sticker prices in the Ivy League are near $100,000 a year, while public in-state schools cost about $25,000 annually, according to the College Board. “These costs also disadvantage lower-income women and girls, but it’s boys and men who are more often taught (consciously or not) the value of starting to collect a paycheck as soon as possible,” the report says.

Indeed, given such costs, it may be reasonable for many to forgo pricey schooling to instead seek a trade-school salary. And many may be more suited to that than to computer science or, heaven help us, the humanities.

But where does that short-sighted approach leave American society overall? Will there really be enough jobs for the underschooled? Is it really smart for our society generally to underfund higher education?

And, longer term, what road does that approach put our politics on? Does it blaze a path to enduring demagoguery, a country in which people unequipped to think critically can repeatedly be suckered by slick salesmen who make unfulfillable promises?

Some highly competitive and smart folks China would love just such a result. For the rest of us, however, the answers will earn us a dismally failing grade.

Guilt and regret?

Posted on April 21, 2025 by Joe Weber

Perhaps not for J.D. Vance

Though he’s an outspoken atheist, British author Ian McEwan is something of an expert on guilt and regret. His 2001 novel, “Atonement,” gives us both in spades through a young girl who wrongly accuses a housekeeper’s son of assaulting her sister. The girl spends her life trying to make amends, something she can’t quite ever do.

McEwan may have something to teach Vice President J.D. Vance. Recall that Vance, a seemingly devoted convert to Roman Catholicism, has long been carrying water for his conscience-free White House master. At his boss’s command, he has battled the pope and U.S. leaders of the Church, particularly over immigration.

In the wake of Pope Francis’s death on Easter Monday – barely a day after the Church’s top leader briefly met with the vice president – it’s easy to think of the McEwan character, Briony Tallis, whose awful error prompted a lifetime of regret. One must wonder: will the pope’s sudden passing spawn such sentiments in the vice president, for whom Francis was in theory an infallible confessor? Will Vance have second thoughts now about his actions and arguments?

On Easter Sunday, Vance visited the pontiff in Rome. Ever gracious, the pope gave him chocolate eggs for his children.

But the day before that, on Saturday, Church officials gave the vice president reason to ponder whether the horrific policies he and his president have carried out on migrants are misguided – as Francis long contended. Vance met with a pair of the pope’s deputies, Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, who seem to have given him an earful.

“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” a Vatican statement said. “Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged.”

So, did this lead to a Damascus moment for Vance? Did he show any signs of reconsidering his anti-migrant efforts? Did he show any regret or guilt over the wrongful deportation and imprisonment in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others like him?

It appears not. Indeed, Vance’s often-demonstrated arrogance and slavishness to Donald J. Trump seemed on display in the description of his meeting there by his office.

The vice president and Parolin “discussed their shared religious faith, Catholicism in the United States, the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world, and President Trump’s commitment to restoring world peace,” Vance’s spokespeople said.

As the Associated Press reported, the Holy See has expressed alarm over the administration’s crackdown on migrants and cuts in international aid while insisting on peaceful resolutions to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The reference to “serene collaboration,” moreover, appeared to refer to Vance’s claim that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to get federal funding, an assertion Catholic leaders deny.

In a Feb. 10 letter the pope suggested he had been following the “major crisis” in the U.S. concerning the mass deportations program.

“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote, as Axios reported.

Earlier, Vance had defended the administration’s actions by invoking on X the medieval Catholic theological concept of “ordo amoris.” The Yale-educated lawyer argued, legalistically, that this “order of love” idea meant responsibility to one’s family supersedes an obligation to a “stranger who lives thousands of miles away.”

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance posted, according to AP.

But the pope set him straight. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis responded. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating … on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

That led another White House bully into the fray. Trump “border czar” Tom Homan, also a Catholic, weighed in against the pope, essentially telling his infallible church leader to butt out. Homan told reporters that Francis “ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us,” The Hill reported.

The contretemps between the leaders of the Church and the lackeys in the White House almost certainly will have no impact on U.S. policy. After all, that is guided by a cruel monomaniac who seems to believe himself far more infallible than any mere pope. And, for his part, Vance is a reliable toady.

But one must wonder whether many American Catholics, especially in light of their leader’s death, will now question the White House approach. Certainly, Trump has given them ample reason — again — to question his mental stability and vindictiveness. Consider what the president had to say on Easter:

“Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country,” Trump wrote on social media. “Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten!”

Unhinged? Vile? Why do otherwise bright people like Vance not see that?

The key to Vance’s apparent blindness may lie in his autobiography. The vice president, who detailed the string of men his drug-addicted mother brought into his life in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir, has long sought father figures. Trump, it appears, is the ultimate one.

Certainly, Francis — a kind, compassionate and thoughtful man — would have made for a better mentor, a father figure with a heart. But it may be that Vance’s Catholicism doesn’t run all that deep and his thoughtfulness is surprisingly shallow.

Long into her old age, the fictional Briony Tallis made up stories in which she atoned for her errors, though she failed in reality to do so. Perhaps Vance someday will develop enough self-reflection to succeed where Tallis didn’t. For now, however, he seems as oblivious as his master.

When down is up

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Joe Weber

As Trump terrorizes international students, he endangers us all

Comic book fans of a certain age will remember The Bizarro World. Courtesy of DC Comics, this planet featured just about everything that was its opposite on Earth. Superman was a villain. Batman was an inept detective. Aquaman couldn’t swim, etc.

Lately, it feels as if Washington has fallen into that world and is dragging the rest of the country with it.

Consider the approach of Donald J. Trump to foreign students in our colleges and universities. Almost as long as there has been a United States, our schools have drawn foreigners here. International students attended Yale, for instance, starting in the 1800s, if not even earlier. And World War II marked a huge uptick, with the numbers of non-Americans coming to study rising to top 25,000 in 1948-49 and climbing to over 1.1 million in 2023-24, an all-time high.

Education has long been one of our biggest services “exports” — one helpfully “consumed” at home — that pours more than $50 billion annually into our economy. It’s also a big draw for the best and brightest to stay and enrich America economically and culturally. Some 41 percent of graduates at all levels – especially at the master’s and doctoral level – stay to settle in the U.S., according to the Economic Innovation Group.

Source: Institute of International Education

So why is the Trump Administration – which claims to want well-schooled and talented immigrants and aims to boost exports – making life miserable to international students? Only on the Bizarro World would this make sense.

How else can we understand why the administration has revoked the visas of more than 1,000 international students, and counting, so far? With only days to go for graduations for some of these students, it has cancelled their abilities to stay and study in more than 240 colleges and universities nationwide, according to Inside Higher Ed.

This count of students tops the 300 that Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially estimated. He claimed that such students came to the U.S. “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.”

Rubio made the comment after masked plainclothes officers on March 25 snatched a Fulbright Scholar in a doctoral program in child development off the street in Massachusetts. The student, 30-year-old Rumeysa Ozturk, coauthored an opinion piece in the Tufts University student paper criticizing Israel over the Gaza War.

Ozturk’s apprehension in Somerville, Mass., source: AP

Even though the Turkish woman has not been charged in any crime, she is being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana pending a decision in her revocation case. An immigration judge recently denied Ozturk bail.

In some cases, the students are being driven out of the country for taking part in demonstrations against the bloodshed in Gaza. In others – perhaps most – however, their revocations appear to have been triggered by traffic tickets or old minor violations that linger in their student records.

Based on such problems, the numbers of revocations are likely to grow. More than 4,700 students may have already had their records terminated in ICE’s Student and Exchange Visitors Information Systems database (SEVIS), according to Bloomberg Law. This move, which targets them for visa revocation and removal from the United States, is the opposite of the usual process in which a visa revocation triggers termination in the SEVIS system.

Another case of a Bizarro World approach, it seems.

The backwards, database-based approach also smacks of involvement by Elon Musk’s numbers crunchers at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. A claim on that point has been made in at least one lawsuit, that of 10 students who have sued over their SEVIS record terminations in Michigan.

At least 16 lawsuits have been filed over the government actions, IHE reported. Among the students who have sued is a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who is supposed to graduate on May 5, with a job offer to join the faculty. His attorney told the Associated Press that the student was likely targeted because of an unpaid traffic fine from when the student lent his car to a friend. Ultimately, the violation was dismissed.

As with the Georgia doctoral student, the U.S. stands to lose some of the best and brightest in this Trumpian effort. Science, for instance, reported the case of a biochemist caught up in the SEVIS terminations who had just been selected for a H-1B visa, but who had a misdemeanor charge dismissed more than 10 years ago. “A mistake made in high school came haunting me all over again,” the researcher told the outlet.

Trump and his toadies are going even broader. In the administration’s battle against Harvard University, it now is threatening to block the enrollment of foreign students. “It is a privilege to have foreign students attend Harvard University, not a guarantee,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a letter to the school obtained by The New York Times. “The United States government understands that Harvard University relies heavily on foreign student funding from over 10,000 foreign students to build and maintain their substantial endowment.”

Harvard relies on such students, who often pay full tuition, to support it financially. Noem demanded detailed records on such students and she said that failure to comply would be treated as a “voluntary withdrawal” of the certification system that allows international students to enroll. “The withdrawal will not be subject to appeal,” Noem wrote.

Wrongheaded as this assault on international students is, it also contradicts what Trump, the candidate, said last June when he promised a green card to any international student bright enough to graduate from a U.S. school, as Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell recently wrote. “He also promised to help his country better compete on the global stage,” Rampell added. “Today, he’s destroying one of our most powerful economic engines — and ensuring international students don’t come here (let alone graduate) at all.”

That 1.1 million tally for foreign students here in the last academic year may well turn out to be a high-water mark, a count that could easily decline in coming years. In China — one of the biggest sources of foreign students in the U.S. — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman heard repeatedly a few weeks ago that maybe studying in the U.S. isn’t such a great idea. “The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to Salvadoran prisons,” Friedman wrote.

Somdeep Sen, an associate professor at Denmark’s Roskilde University, echoed that theme in a piece in Aljazeera headlined “United States is no longer a safe destination for international students.” In it, Sen contended: “One cannot underestimate the precarity that orders the lives of international students in the United States.”

Reagan’s Farewell Address, source: Politico

Former President Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address to the nation in 1989, referred to the famous vision of Pilgrim John Winthrop of America as a “shining city upon a hill,” a theme Reagan had often invoked. The former president said the country was “still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

As Trump appears today to be doing his best to douse that light, one can only wonder how inverted his world is. For many international students, and for the U.S. generally, his comic-book version of reality is tragic. The harm it will do could prove irreparable and likely to long outlast him.

Friedman invoked Steve Jobs’s Syrian birth father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, who came to the U.S. in the 1950s to get a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. The legacy he left us, through Jobs, has proved immeasurable. How many Jandalis will now opt for graduate study in Canada, Europe or the U.K., or anywhere but Trump’s Bizarro America?

When taking aim at the king …

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump has a fight on his hands, at lasT

Omar Little, portrayed by the late Michael K. Williams, source: Fandom

The wonderful character Omar Little, appearing in the eighth episode of “The Wire,” offers a memorable line: “Ayo, lesson here, Bey. You come at the king, you best not miss.”

That line, now 23 years old, resonates anew as Harvard has decided to fight back against the would-be monarch now soiling the White House. It applies, too, to a group of other schools – including Brown University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois — that have brought suit against Trump’s Department of Energy.

All are attacking the vindictive federal overreach Trump is using to withhold funds in his effort to reshape higher education policies. Together, the moves could embolden more institutions, such as law firms and Columbia University, perhaps including some that the president has already bullied into acquiescence of various sorts.

“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives, told The New York Times. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”

But they also had better win. Their opponent is a wily master of the judicial system who has shown that 34 felony convictions, among other legal humiliations, are not enough to defeat him. Just look at how – so far, at least – Trump has spit on an order by nothing less than a unanimous Supreme Court to return wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison.

Along with showing an astonishingly callous indifference to a jailed man’s plight, Trump seems to believe that all and sundry should bow to his will, no matter how wrongheaded it is. The president is similarly indifferent to the damaging effects his battle with universities are having on medical and scientific research.

Already, Trump is upping the ante in his battle with Harvard. In the wake of Harvard President Alan Garber’s defiance, federal officials froze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and canceled a $60 million contract, along with the president threatening to remove the university’s tax-exempt status. The administration had put nearly $9 billion in funding at risk when Garber refused to bow to its demands for extensive policy changes and oversight.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community. He added: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

As The Harvard Gazette reported, Garber’s message was a response to a letter sent late Friday by the Trump administration outlining demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands included “audits” of academic programs and departments, along with the viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, and changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices.

Garber’s defiance stood in stark contrast to Columbia’s genuflection to Trump. So far, Columbia’s obeisance has not led to a restoration of the $400 million Trump cut. That, together with Harvard’s stance, may have prompted Columbia’s new acting president, Claire Shipman, to push back in a new message to the university community after her predecessor, Dr. Katrina Armstrong, had bowed to Trump’s demand and then quit.

Claire Shipman, source: Columbia Spectator

“To be clear, our institution may decide at any point, on its own, to make difficult decisions that are in Columbia’s best interests,” journalist and writer Shipman wrote. “Where the government – or any stakeholder – has legitimate interest in critical issues for our healthy functioning, we will listen and respond. But we would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms that serve the best interests of our students and community. We would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire. And yes, to put minds at ease, though we seek to continue constructive dialogue with the government, we would reject any agreement that would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.”

Separately, the handful of top schools that brought suit against Trump’s Department of Energy are fighting a policy change that would reduce the amount of indirect support that federal grants provide. As Reuters reported, the DOE announced that it would cut more than $400 million in annual spending by setting an across-the-board 15 percent reimbursement rate for indirect costs of research.

Many of the universities involved in the lawsuit have negotiated far higher “indirect” rates than the 15 percent proposed by DOE policy. The National Institutes of Health announced a similar cut and was also sued. A federal judge has issued an order blocking the Trump administration from proceeding with those cuts, while the lawsuit against NIH proceeds.

In the case of the indirect research support, the administration offers the specious argument that the cut would bring “greater transparency and efficiency” to federal government spending. In the case of the broader university reforms Trump is seeking, he and his minions have veiled their moves behind the claim of fighting antisemitism on the campuses.

The president’s broad list of demands to Harvard, however, gives the lie to the latter claim. He has demanded an end to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, for instance, along with eliminating any hiring preferences based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, along with gutting any such preferences in student admissions. He has demanded audits to assure “viewpoint diversity” at the school without defining that.

Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, told The New York Times that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory for the government to force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

In going up against Trump, the universities, no doubt, will be equipped with the best and brightest. Happily, they will fight a Trump Justice Department and other agencies that have lost their top talents in the president’s government-wide gutting efforts. Just consider that Harvard’s legal team includes William A. Burck and Robert K. Hur.

As the Times reported, Burck is also an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization and represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in the deal it recently reached with Trump. And Hur, who worked in the Justice Department in Trump’s first term, was the special counsel who memorably called President Biden “an elderly man with a poor memory.”

They are insiders who understand the man and the system they now are battling.

For his part, Trump is someone whose two years at The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were undistinguished at best. “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!,” one former prof of his said.

Still, he can work a lot of governmental levers, has a bottomless well of vindictiveness and can’t stand losing. The universities are in a fight for their lives and all of us have much riding on the outcome. They’d best not miss.

Social engineering

Posted on April 11, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s efforts to remake higher education bring us all to grief

During the Easter Parade in New York in 1929, PR wizard Edward Bernays pulled off quite the stunt, one that influenced generations. He hired appealing women to light cigarettes and march, scandalously smoking in public. Their “torches of freedom,” as Bernays called them, garnered headlines nationwide as symbols of equality and emancipation.

Women, who earlier accounted for only about 5 percent of cigarette sales, soon bought about 12 percent of smokes and, in time, grew to consume about a third of cigarettes sold. It was a PR coup and a health disaster.

For Bernays, a Viennese-born nephew of Sigmund Freud who was then working for the American Tobacco Co., this was proof that “social engineering” could work. It showed how “people in power . . . shape the attitudes of the general population,” and that those who mastered communication could become an “invisible government . . . the true ruling power of our country.”

Such social engineering – once anathema to people on the right who long bristled at government efforts to shape public and institutional behavior – comes naturally to another huckster, Donald J. Trump. But, tragically, his efforts are more than just headline-grabbing stunts. His extortions of federal funds are biting deeply at universities including Princeton ($210 million), Columbia ($400 million), Northwestern ($790 million), Johns Hopkins ($800 million) and Cornell ($1 billion).

And health, along with public welfare, is at stake in his cuts. The grants he and his anonymous minions are withholding go for things such as medical research (in topics including pediatric long-COVID, environmental science, cancer) at Columbia, global health initiatives at Hopkins, pacemaker and Alzheimer’s investigations at Northwestern, defense and health at Cornell, and defense and energy at Princeton, and much more.

Now, with his reported plans to put Columbia under the control of a federal judge, Trump is poised to cement his engineering. Independent governance at the private university would, for all practical purposes, be eliminated. Such a judge would oversee the university’s compliance with any formal agreement to change a host of policies in Trump’s efforts to suppress dissent and academic freedom, setting up years of oversight and putting the school at risk for contempt proceedings if it fell short.

If Trump succeeds, a consent order providing for such oversight at the New York school would be a model for other schools he is attacking.

It is social engineering at its worst. Trump seems determined to humble such schools, to prove he can bring them to heel and gratify is base’s hostility to elite education. It seems to be all about control, reining in institutions that could defy him – whether they are law firms, Congress or educational outfits.

And, pathetically, Trump’s effort has little to do with his claimed battle against antisemitism at Columbia and the other schools. As Ben Olinsky of the Center for American Progress put it, is Trump’s effort is just weaponizing antisemitism for political gain.

“It does nothing to keep Jewish students or any other Americans safe from hate or prevent terrorism, which pose legitimate threats to America’s Jewish communities,” Olinsky said. “Instead, it forsakes education and dialogue while attacking protected political speech. It’s clear that Trump’s real goal is to silence opposing voices, whether they be from pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, Black Lives Matter marchers, clergy who pray for mercy, or journalists who report news that is critical of him. The right to free speech, protest, and exercise of any religion or none are bedrocks of America and must be protected in our schools and universities.”

To be sure, real dangers arose last year for Jewish students at many of the schools. They do need to do more to root out antisemitism among students and faculty alike. And there’s no doubt much ugliness persists, as became clear in protests at an April 7 visit to Princeton by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Jewish students at the event were taunted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. “You’re committing a holocaust!” and “You’re killing babies!” some said. Some were told to “go back to Europe.” As student Danielle Shapiro reported in The Free Press, “We also heard many shouts of ‘They’re all fucking inbred!’ and ‘inbred swine!’ At least two or three protesters used their hands to create the shape of the Hamas triangle.”

Ugly and ignorant as such language is, it is not against the law. Vile, uncivil and disrespectful as it is, it is legal.

Where such protests cross the line is in preventing others from speaking.

Saying he was “appalled at reports of antisemitic language directed by demonstrators at members of our community” after the event, Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber promised an investigation and disciplinary moves, if appropriate. Since some students disrupted the talk and others set off a fire alarm, the university may have reason to take action.

But, to Trump’s critics, the president’s use of such protests to move against universities is just a fig leaf covering up his assault on any dissent he dislikes. It also gives him an excuse to attack such rightist hobbyhorses as efforts to build diversity and erode inequality, so-called “woke” culture, and moves to preserve academic freedom.

“Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, this is just an expression of his authoritarianism,” Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House of Representatives, told The Guardian.

“Once again, the President is weaponizing the real pain American Jews face to advance his desire to wield control over the truth-seeking academic institutions that stand as a bulwark against authoritarianism,” Nadler added in a statement. “Withholding funding … will not make Jewish students safer. Cutting funding to programs that work to cure cancer and make other groundbreaking discoveries will not make Jewish students safer. Impounding congressionally appropriated funding will not make Jewish students safer. Trump’s ‘review’ is part of a larger effort to silence universities and intimidate those who challenge the MAGA agenda. It is a dangerous and politically motivated move that risks stifling free thought and academic inquiry.”

So far, Columbia has rolled over in the face of Trump’s bullying, much as several law firms, some media magnates and some corporations have. Princeton’s Eisgruber has called on fellow academics to fight, writing in The Atlantic: “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research. Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

Schools are not without weapons of their own. Columbia, for instance, has a nearly $15 billion endowment and a wealthy alumni base. Princeton could tap a $34 billion endowment.

As lawyers for many of the universities argue, moreover, there are grounds for legal action. The government cannot cut off funds until and unless it has done program-by-program evaluations of alleged Title VI violations, given schools notice and “an opportunity for hearing,” limited any funding cutoff” to a particular program, or part thereof, in which… noncompliance has been…found,” and submitted a report explaining its actions to relevant committees in Congress at least thirty days before any funds can be stopped.

The problem, of course, is that for all his stupidity and power-hunger, Trump is a master of using the courts to delay and obfuscate. While prospective lawsuits would wend their way through the judiciary, researchers would be sidelined and their work and, often, their livelihoods put on hold. And there can be no assurance that a sometimes servile Supreme Court, where the fights could wind up, would rein in the president.

Still, as the discrediting of the “torches of freedom” demonstrates, good sense can in time prevail. As with tobacco, though, one must wonder how long it will take to do so? Will it take a regime change? And, in the meantime, how much will universities, students, faculty and the public suffer?

The “deep state” has a long history

Posted on April 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump is little more than the John Birch Society in action

In 1962, Bob Dylan gave us “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a wonderful ditty that tragically reverberates today. Among the lyrics: “Look behind the cloths, behind the chair/Lookin’ for them Reds everywhere/I looked way up my chimney hole/Even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.”

The song echoes for me now because of the revival we are seeing in the John Birch Society approach to Washington, the national economy and the rest of the world. Consider those attacks on “the deep state,” the tens of thousands of government workers being fired, the influence of conspiracy theorists such as the loony Laura Loomer, and, perhaps surprisingly, the tariffs that make the notorious Smoot-Hawley levies look like small change.

Allow me to get personal on this. In high school, I was privileged to have an American History teacher who was a chapter leader in New Jersey of the John Birch Society. That group, popular in the 1960s, maintained that communists had infiltrated the government up to and including President Dwight Eisenhower, that they were eroding U.S. culture with pollutants such as rock and roll and drugs, that higher education was filled with dangerous lefties, and that the only solution was for internal purges and for the U.S. to wall itself off economically, becoming self-sufficient. Tariffs were a good thing to them.

For Birchers such as my teacher, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 were not to blame for deepening the Great Depression, as just about all economists now maintain. Indeed, he would argue, the U.S. was better off ignoring the freezing of world trade and cheering on the isolationism that tariffs led to, especially since this would force us to develop our own independent economy better. And, by the way, the only legitimate level of government was at the county level since Washington was corrupt and in the thrall of the Reds.

Does any of this sound familiar?

My classmates and I were privileged to have had that teacher – whose name, I kid you not, was Schreck (German for fear) – because that insufferable year with him at the dawn of the 1970s gave us insights into Donald J. Trump and his acolytes that we would otherwise not have. Consider Trump’s bizarre conspiracy theories such as Barack Obama’s noncitizenship, the overrunning of the U.S. by Mexican drug dealers and rapists, the involvement of Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination, the evils of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the fraudulent and fixed 2020 election, and on and on.

Such ideas don’t arise in a vacuum.

My classmates and I got insights into what a well-regarded Columbia professor, Richard Hofstadter, called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.” In fact, because so much of Schreck’s blather seemed so off-the-wall, one chum and I sought out an academic for explanations and he turned us on to Hofstadter’s work.

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” the professor wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”

Referring to Birch society founder Robert H. W. Welch Jr., Hofstadter wrote: “Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”

Messianic? Sure. False. Absolutely.

Recall that in Trump’s mind – or, at least, his rhetoric – God spared him for a mission to transform America. “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump proclaimed during his victory speech early on the Wednesday following Election Day. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together. We’re going to fulfill that.”

And remember Trump’s frequent references to Marxists and communists. He vowed to bar them from entering the U.S. And recall him labeling Vice President Harris a communist and Marxist.

No matter that economists of all stripes fear that Trump’s policies — especially his economic ones — will plunge us into hard times. No matter that the world is now engaged in a trade war that could easily spiral out of control. Trump, much like Welch, is convinced that he knows best.

Some have written eloquently about the Bircher viewpoints that have coursed through our society like a poison that just won’t quit, a pathology we can’t cure. At times, those attitudes have risen and fallen particularly in the Republican Party, now fully captured by such attitudes as embodied by Trump. Northeastern University historian Edward H. Miller, in “A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, The John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism” in 2021, for instance, had Trump’s number on this.

“Today, all of us are strapped into the roller coaster in the fantastical theme park of Welch’s political imagination,” Miller wrote. “And we can’t get off.”

Welch’s echoes are indeed pervasive in today’s political culture.

“Many of the issues, themes, and causes the Birchers seized upon six decades ago can still be found on the political right today,” book reviewer James Mann wrote in The New York Review. “In an essay titled ‘There Goes Christmas,’ Welch complained that department stores were, in Miller’s words, ‘stocking subversively secular UN holiday propaganda’; because the stores did not have enough ‘Merry Christmas’ decorations, Welch complained, they were trying to take Christ out of the holiday.”

Mann continued: “The Birch Society called for defending the police against charges of brutality, opposed putting fluoride in the water supply with the fervor of today’s anti-vaxxers, and fought efforts at gun control, which they depicted as the preliminary step for confiscation and a Communist takeover of the United States. Much like Donald Trump and his base today, the Birchers refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of political opposition, suggesting that those who disagreed with them were acting in bad faith, if not as part of a sinister conspiracy.”

Can we miss those reverberations today?

It’s far from clear whether the Smoot-Hawley revival now under way in the White House and in Washington will plunge us into recession or worse. Economists at J.P. Morgan and Moody’s Analytics now say there’s a 40 percent chance of such a decline. Those at Goldman Sachs peg the chance at 35 percent. Whether they are on target or not, many economists expect to see lower growth, at least. Yale’s Budget Lab, for instance, expects higher prices and a substantial decline in growth both for the U.S. and the world.

Trump’s attitude seems to be that all the pain his efforts are causing are short-term problems. As The New York Times reported, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said Trump’s policies are “worth it” even if they cause a recession. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has said the economy may need a “detox period” after becoming dependent on government spending. And Trump has said there will be a “period of transition” as his policies take hold.

But others, including some traditional conservatives, think this is pablum.

“The idea of short-term pain for long-term gain is not a crazy idea in and of itself,” said Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, told the Times. But Trump’s trade policies, he said, are “short-term pain to get more long-term pain.”

Welch died in 1985. His ideas, however, are living on. With the market collapses and the expectation of economic strain, we already are seeing just how crazy they were. Buckle up, friends, it’s likely to get worse.

There are no sidelines here

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Joe Weber

The academic battle against Trump calls for unity

In 1931, the wife of a United Mine Workers organizer was terrorized in Harlan County, Kentucky, by Sheriff John H. Blair and his henchmen, who worked for the local mining company. The woman, Florence Reece, in response wrote the memorable song “Which Side Are You On?”

Reece included the lyric: “They say in Harlan County/There are no neutrals there/You’ll either be a union man/Or a thug for J. H. Blair.”

Academics today face a similar fight. There can be no neutrals among them in the battle against today’s thug, Donald J. Trump. And yet, we are seeing splits, with some laboring to stay away from the fray, unable to overcome differences they have with other academics to unite against a common enemy.

Today’s major cleaving isn’t a matter of labor vs. management, of miners versus the company. Instead, the battle is joined over Zionism and antisemitism, and it pits supporters of the First Amendment and academic freedom against Trump Administration overreach and the pretext of antisemitism the anti-“woke” president is using.

Troublingly, some of the least popular people on American campuses — especially at elite schools — are carrying the water for the rest at the moment. And that could cede the fight to Trump.

Consider a new lawsuit brought by the American Association of University Professors and local AAUP chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and NYU, as well as the Middle East Studies Association. The case, in which Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute is providing legal counsel, is aimed at stopping Trump’s “large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other related expression and association (the ‘ideological-deportation policy’).”

The complaint points to administration actions such as the arrests of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, the revocation of permanent legal status for Columbia student Yunseo Chung, the arrest of Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, the persecution of Cornell University doctoral candidate Momodou Taal, which led to his self-deportation, and other student visa revocations. The common denominator: the targeted students all protested the Gaza War, backing Palestinians.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned in early March on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” But is Rubio, a lapdog for Trump, really attacking Hamas supporters?

The AAUP-MESA lawsuit assails that Hamas contention. It argues that administration officials “have stretched that label beyond the breaking point to encompass any speech supportive of Palestinian human rights or critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.”

By contrast, the suit notes that demonstrators, including some Jews, had varying motivations. While some backed Hamas or damned Zionism, others just called for peace.

“Many of the pro-Palestinian protests included calls for a ceasefire and for humanitarian aid to displaced or wounded Palestinians,” the complaint says. “Others centered on calls for institutional divestment from Israel. Many included criticism or condemnation of Israel’s campaign in Gaza; and some included denunciations of Zionism.”

To be sure, many thoughtful people hold that the protestors were way off base. Certainly, they would have been better served to call on Hamas to lay down its arms and seek peaceful coexistence; clearly the simplest, fairest and least bloody solution. For various reasons — mostly bad ones discussed in other Substack pieces — the demonstrators didn’t see it that way, though.

Whether they were wrongheaded or misguided, however, those protestors were within their rights to speak their minds lawfully on campuses. And whether they were citizens or not, they remain protected by our First Amendment while they are here.

And, surely, there should be agreement among academic organizations in supporting academic freedom and those First Amendment rights.

Much as Jewish members of the American Civil Liberties Union such as David Goldberger decades ago supported the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, so should campus groups such as Hillel and Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies join in lawsuits such as the AAUP-MESA case. If they don’t sign on as plaintiffs or file amicus briefs, the could at least offer intellectual support for the principles involved.

Instead, the Middle East Studies Association — an organization many rightly find repugnant because of its calls for boycotting Israeli academics — is standing alone among non-AAUP professional associations in this lawsuit. Where is the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, a group founded by a Princeton scholar in 2007 as a reaction to the anti-Israel bent of MESA? Yes, these rival groups are riven by deep differences, but do they not share a commitment to academic freedom and open discussion?

And none should miss the bigger picture here. The lack of a united front can only weaken all academic institutions in this fight.

Surely, all academics should decry the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that the Trump Administration is spawning in its intellectually bankrupt attack on “wokeness” at universities. Even as schools such as Columbia must root out antisemitism that darkens too many departments there, they should not bow to Trumpian financial extortion.

Columbia may or may not get back the $400 million in cut federal funds because of its genuflection to Trump, but the bully surely won’t relent, finding other ways to hound the school (note that he drove out the latest interim president, Dr. Katrina Armstrong). Emboldened by Columbia’s submission, he’s now threatening to withdraw billions in funding at Harvard and Princeton. In reaction, all such institutions should unite to fight him in the courts, not succumb to being picked off one by one.

As the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, wrote in The Atlantic, the government’s assault on Columbia presents “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.” He urged universities to speak up in defense of their rights.

“Every citizen and officeholder who cares about the strength of our country must also care about free speech, self-governing thought, and the untrammeled quest for knowledge,” Eisgruber wrote.

Just how bad are things on some campuses now? Take note of the claims in the AAUP-MESA suit. Academics avoid open discussion of Middle East matters for fear of retaliation, the suit maintains. The Trump policy, it says, “is accomplishing its purpose: it is terrorizing students and faculty for their exercise of First Amendment rights in the past, intimidating them from exercising those rights now, and silencing political viewpoints that the government disfavors.”

The suit provides several examples, including:

Noncitizen students of City University of New York history professor Beth Baron fear leaving the U.S. for research because they may be unable to return. Some who teach avoid discussion of Israel, Palestine and U.S. foreign policy for fear of deportation. At Columbia, a noncitizen organizer of a longstanding online community shut down the channel for fear of jeopardizing the status of noncitizen members. English and comparative literature associate professor Patricia Dailey says this denies her of access to information about the region and the university.

Another associate professor at Columbia, classics scholar Joseph Howley, last spring criticized the university for arresting student demonstrators and he now finds noncitizen graduate student instructors shunning his regular teaching sessions in fear. And a Rutgers English professor, David Kurnick, avoids publicly discussing the Middle East with noncitizen students and he limits his communications with noncitizens to in-person chats, all because he doesn’t want to endanger them.

With these and other detailed cases, the suit paints a picture akin to the darkest days of McCarthyism, an atmosphere that differs little from the repression once common in the old Eastern bloc. Back then, academics and others were forced into samizdat, secretly recording and distributing government-forbidden literature. Will that sort of system arise anew in the United States as Trump assaults more and more freedoms?

There’s no question that many Jewish students at Columbia and other universities lived in unacceptable fear of anti-semitism. And there’s no question that the pathology must be rooted out in every academic department polluted by it. Moreover, the best tack for the schools to take is to require protesting students to take coursework that would inform them fully about Middle East history, so they can understand how Israel has long been victimized.

But trading one fear for another is not the answer. And neither is allowing Trump to win by dividing those who should unite behind larger common aims.

By picking off his targets one by one, Trump prevails against some and weakens all — just look at how he has divided big law firms. Even as they differ on other important things, academic groups should stand shoulder to shoulder in supporting principles they can agree on.

Indeed, there can be no neutrals in this fight. That’s the way the bully in the White House wins.

The Big Picture

Monthly Archives: April 2025