Is “intellectual diversity” really diverse?

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Joe Weber

An Indiana case tests what intellectual exchange means in the Trump era

Nov 14, 2025

Ah, the hypocrisy.

Indiana last year passed an “intellectual diversity” law. It requires its public universities to develop policies that ensure that faculty foster a “culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

As reported by Insider Higher Ed, schools must consider whether faculty members have “introduced students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks” when deciding whether to give bonuses or renew contracts.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

But then, enter Jessica Adams, a lecturer at Indiana University’s School of Social Work. Adams was suspended from teaching a graduate-level class titled “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice” after a single student objected to a graphic she showed in class.

The graphic described the phrase “Make America Great Again” as socially acceptable covert white supremacy. The term was listed right up there with Confederate flags and denial of white privilege.

A controversial view? No doubt. The sort of thing that might merit a full-blown discussion, one involving pro and con arguments? One might think so.

But after the student complained to U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, the Trump-allied senator contacted IU. He got Adams barred from the course and landed her in the middle of an investigation of whether she broke the new law. Even though she continues to teach three other courses, she now worries that her job is in jeopardy.

No discussion. No truly diverse viewpoints here, it would seem.

The graphic that Adams used appears to have been updated from one created about 20 years ago by the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence of Boulder, Colorado. Its criticism of the “Make America Great Again” phrase, while something that would certainly offend some folks, is hardly singular.

For years, some critics have seen the term as code for, “Make America White Again.” That’s certainly what former neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini contended in 2017, when he said rightists believe that’s exactly what the phrase means. Indeed, polls have shown that while most Trump supporters see America’s greatest days as in the past, many Blacks disagree.

The “again” part of that phrase seems to evoke far different responses among Blacks and whites, especially at at time when racial resentment seems rampant.

In a 2022 book, “Racial Resentment in the Political Mind,” a dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author argue that many whites believe Blacks are unfairly advantaged in scholarships and jobs — a view likely not uncommon among Trump supporters. “In that context, any racial progress today is perceived as coming at the expense of whites,” argues the dean, David C. Wilson, a political psychologist.

That’s where the “again” part comes in. Let’s go back to the good old days when any such preferences didn’t exist, it suggests.

What’s more, at least one would-be politician in Tennessee in 2016 ripped off the Trump phrase to explicitly call on voters to “Make America White Again.” That candidate lost, certainly an encouraging sign.

Wouldn’t all of that be worth discussing in a university classroom? Adams certainly thinks so. “I feel this is an important issue to talk about — censorship, stifling of academic freedom and this real overreach through this legislation,” Adams told The New York Times.

But, for his part, Sen. Banks seemed to think that anything that makes even a single student twitchy has no place in a lecture hall. “At least one student in the classroom was uncomfortable, and I’m sure there are more,” the senator argued. “This type of hateful rhetoric has no place in the classroom.”

So, in other words, “intellectual diversity” means no one should be made to feel anxious. No instructor, regardless of any evidence she could cite, should suggest there might be racism in the term “Make America Great Again” or, perhaps, among those who embrace it.

Presumably, however, it would be acceptable to praise the “Make America Great Again” phrase and the movement and president who use the term. Just don’t criticize it.

To be sure, lots of controversial ideas merit discussion. Students such as the lone objector in Adams’s class should be free to air their views and, perhaps, bat them back and forth with others who may disagree. Such disagreement would seem to be just what should go on in a classroom, especially a graduate level one, wouldn’t it?

As it happens, last night I attended a “Clean Speech” discussion in Denver where disagreement was tolerated, even encouraged — so long as we all were civil and respectful. At my table, we discussed one of the most contentious issues around: whether there should be a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Not all of us agreed on everything, but all of us learned things.

Isn’t that the sort of thing that should be promoted in university settings, too?

Not to Trumpists, it seems. To them “intellectual diversity” means firing, cancelling, purging those who disagree with them. As summarized well by U.S. News & World Report, their war on higher education has stretched from attacking Ivy League and other schools financially to trying to dismantle tenure and drive out faculty that offend them, often under the guise of combating antisemitism.

Trump has claimed that college campuses have been “infested with radicalism like never before.” He and his allies aim to purge the “woke” agenda wherever they find it.

Adams is just the most recent faculty member to fall prey to the effort,

When the Indiana “intellectual diversity” law was debated, IU law professor Lea Bishop condemned it as “a blank check to fire any faculty member for any reason, at any time, regardless of tenure.” She added it was “radical” and “un-American.”

Many academics slammed the bill. The faculty senates and American Association of University Professors chapters at Ball State, Indiana, Indiana State, and Purdue Universities opposed it. So, too, did the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association.

But the critics are fighting an uphill battle with powerful opponents.

When the Trump Administration attacked Harvard in the spring, it cited “viewpoint diversity” as one of its goals. Its letter to the university demanded that it hire a federally approved external party to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity.”

And it minced no words. “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.” It called even for admitting “a critical mass” of viewpoint-diverse students, whatever that means.

If the Indiana case is an example, “viewpoint diversity” seems to mean little more than excluding certain views that powerful people don’t like. Is that what universities should be about?

The last bulwark

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

Some courts stand tall against Trump’s depredations

Judge Allison D. Burroughs, source: The Boston Globe

Judge Allison D. Burroughs was unequivocal.

Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and should have done more to combat it, she wrote in her 84-page decision in the university suit against the Trump Administration. “Defendants and the President are right to combat antisemitism and to use all lawful means to do so,” she wrote. “Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

But antisemitism on the campus – which she suggested the university has gone far to defeat since the upheavals of 2023-24 — was not what is really driving Donald J. Trump and his administration in their campaign against the university. It was not the reason for the government to cancel billions in research grants to the university last spring, a full year after pro-Palestinian actions at the school had all but faded away.

“… [T]here is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism,” the judge said. “In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA [the federal Administrative Procedure Act], the First Amendment and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act].”

Judge Burroughs’s blunt ruling came amid a flurry of other recent court setbacks for Trump. A federal appeals court shot down many of his tariffs, another court ruled his use of troops in Los Angeles was illegal, and still another harshly ruled that Trump had no standing to sue federal judges in Maryland over immigration rulings they made.

“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate,” Judge Thomas Cullen, a Trump appointee, wrote in the Maryland case.

Such losses by Trump suggest that even as his overreaches grow, critics and clear-thinking judges are not sitting still for them. The court actions offer hope amid a seemingly nonstop parade of outrages.

Let’s consider Burroughs’s order closely. Along with being notable for even stronger language than Cullen’s, the clarity and airtight logic of her ruling is exceptional. It is an outstanding example of how the courts remain our last bastion of resistance to a would-be tyrant’s vindictive assaults.

To many critics, it has long been obvious that Trump has used antisemitism as a club with which to batter Harvard and other schools. But the judge’s decision ripped any shred of a veneer off that claim.

“There is no obvious link between the affected projects and antisemitism,” wrote Burroughs, an Obama appointee. “By way of example (although by no means an exhaustive list), Defendants have ordered immunologists overseeing a multi-school tuberculosis consortium to immediately stop research, … a researcher at the Wyss Institute to halt his development of an advanced chip designed to measure NASA astronauts’ radiation exposure during the upcoming Artemis II mission to the moon … and another Wyss Institute scientist, a recipient of the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, to cease his research into Lou Gehrig’s disease ….”

She continued: “Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs have begun the process of cutting funding for research into, among other life-saving measures, ‘a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized.’” Yet another project involved a defense program aimed “at increasing awareness of emerging biological threats.”

Going beyond the irrelevance of the defunded research to the antisemitism claim, the judge also laid bare Trump’s true motivations. Using his own language on social media, she left no question that the assault on Harvard was driven by his longstanding and broad attack on “wokeism.”

Among Trump’s posts: “[p]erhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Then there was his slam at Harvard for “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots,” followed by his denunciation of the university as “a Liberal mess.”

Her order also shone a light on Trump’s vindictiveness, his rage at the university for having the temerity to oppose him, unlike schools such as Columbia and Brown, which rolled over under his attacks. To placate Trump Columbia agreed to pay $221 million, while Brown agreed to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. Trump has sought $500 million from Harvard.

At one point, Trump said he was considering taking away $3 billion from “a very antisemitic Harvard,” which he would then give to “TRADE SCHOOLS,” the judge noted. Then, during an interview in the Oval Office, Trump said that Harvard is “hurting [itself]” by “fighting,” adding that “Columbia has been, really, and they were very, very bad . . . . But they’re working with us on finding a solution.” He further stated that Harvard “wants to fight. They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked”; “every time [Harvard] fight[s], they lose another $250 million”; and “[a]ll they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

Recall that Trump, far from “smart,” was a middling transfer student at Penn’s Wharton School, where one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Perhaps he still suffers still from an insecure man’s resentment at all those folks who were far brighter than he?

Certainly, there’s little doubt that these were the infuriated reactions of a martinet offended at a school that refused to genuflect to him, as so many other institutions have. Sadly, yet another university president — Northwestern’s Michael Schill — just quit, a few months after Trump’s minions froze $790 million in funding for the school — providing another scalp among many that Trumpists have claimed in recent years.

As for Harvard, Burroughs invalidated the administration’s freeze on billions of dollars in federal research funding for a broad array of projects. But it’s not clear when or whether the school will get any of the money back.

The administration will drag out the matter with appeals as a White House spokeswoman argued that the university “does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars.” As The Wall Street Journal reported, by using agencies across the federal government, Trump has threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, tried to block its ability to enroll international students and probed money it receives from foreign sources. Harvard will also owe higher taxes on its $53 billion endowment under the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Source: Supreme Court Historical Society

Trump’s assault on academia continues, of course. And, in the end, many of his attacks will be adjudicated in the Supreme Court. Good outcomes are far from a sure thing there, given the deference the body has shown to Trump.

But, at least in some quarters, smart people such as Burroughs are seeing the assault for the petty and destructive effort it is. The fight is far from over, but this round has gone to the better side.

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Joe Weber

But Malcolm Forbes’s famous admonition holds no brief in Trumpworld

J.B. Milliken, source: University of California

Talk about a baptism by fire. Only a week into his job as president of the sprawling University of California system, James (J.B.) Milliken, has been plunged into a risky battle with Donald J. Trump. Milliken has had to be unequivocal about a $1 billion extortion demand Trump’s minions are trying to impose on UCLA, one of the pillars of the 10-campus system.

“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” said Milliken, a son and grandson of small-town Nebraska bankers. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy, and protect our national security.”

Ostensibly, the federal demand is being made to settle claims that university officials tolerated antisemitism in demonstrations against the Gaza War in the 2023-24 academic year and that its diversity polices breached anti-discrimination laws. The demand is being accompanied by requirements for policy changes dealing with admissions and gender identity in sports and housing, as well as the abolition of scholarships for racial or ethnic groups.

In fact, however, the diktat is the biggest yet in a campaign inspired by authors of a Project 2025 effort, Project Esther, which nominally targets antisemitism on campuses, but more broadly assaults “wokeism” in the academic world. The project was developed largely by Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump and vice president at The Heritage Foundation. Coates, a self-described committed Christian, holds three degrees in Italian Renaissance art history, and planned on an academic career until she grew alienated by what she called a “very noxious anti-Western worldview” at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, according to The New York Times.

Columbia University, source: the university

The $1 billion demand ratchets up the stakes in the longstanding Trumpist and Heritage Foundation assault on major universities. The administration forced Columbia University into a $200 million deal and Brown University into a $50 million settlement. Negotiations are under way for a resolution with Harvard, with a $500 million figure being bandied about. Still more extortions could well be on the way from other schools under the gun by Trump.

But these deals beg several enormous questions. How will extracting the hefty sums of cash advance education at these schools, for instance? Sure, policy changes that could include cuts in pro-Palestinian academic departments could help foster a balance in curricular offerings, but does cutting diversity efforts have anything but a negative impact? If the administration truly aimed to improve higher education, wouldn’t it be making more money available, perhaps supporting educational efforts more sympathetic to Israel, not imposing brutal penalties?

Already, the University of California has overhauled practices in some areas called for by the Trump administration — including a ban on protest encampments and the abolition of diversity statements in hiring, as the Los Angeles Times reported. So, why does Trump want to humble the system financially? What really underlays his animus toward these schools?

Certainly, part of this must be longstanding Republican animosity to California and perhaps to the likelihood that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom could be a presidential candidate in the 2028 election. The $1 billion proposal came just a day after Newsom said UC should not bend “on their knees” to President Trump, as the other schools have.

“We’re not Brown, we’re not Columbia, and I’m not going to be governor if we act like that,” Newsom said. “Period. Full stop. I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Even more personally, however, one must wonder at the motivations of a disgruntled former academic such as Coates, or of the middling transfer student into Penn’s Wharton School, Trump. Are they driven by grudges, by a need to punish those by whom they feel wronged or who shunned them? Recall that one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Certainly, the rarely articulate Trump’s feelings about schooling are clear from his plans to eliminate the Department of Education.

Explorations of Trump’s motivations are legion. Perhaps one of the best, however, is a new offering by The New Yorker’s David Remnick. As a child, Remnick writes, “Little Donny” was “a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York.” There, “Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him.”

Remnick tells us that Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”

There’s no doubt that Trump exults in having powerful people and institutions quake at his feet. “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’ ” he bragged, after certain law firms started making their pitiful arrangements with the White House. “They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’”

But, even beyond Trump’s need to force schools to quiver before him, other worrisome trends may cloud our national future long after the would-be tyrant is gone. Where we were once a country that built great universities — private and public — because we realized they were essential to national growth, much popular sentiment is against expansion — at least as reflected by rightist politicians. Hostility to higher education is widespread.

California may be case story No. 1. Growth was long the mainstay of the system, which now serves more than 295,000 students. Before he landed in the cauldron he’s now in, Milliken ran other university systems, getting an early start as president of the University of Nebraska, from which he had graduated in 1979. When he led the NU system, from 2004 to 2014, the university was punching far above its weight, so much so that its flagship campus in Lincoln joined the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in 2011.

Milliken, a lawyer, got his post at Nebraska in part because he had worked as the legislative assistant to an influential Republican congresswoman from the state, Virginia D. Smith, the only woman to serve in the House from the state. Republicans such as Smith had long championed higher education and she served on the House Education Committee.

Enthusiastic backing for higher education among Nebraska Republicans for decades allowed officials to build a university where nearly 50,000 students now attend, most hailing from a statewide population barely topping 2 million. Without such crucial support, the school’s flagship campus in Lincoln could never be good enough to rub shoulders with the likes of the University of Michigan, Northwestern, the University of Southern California and Rutgers in the Big Ten.

And yet, some MAGA-inspired state leaders today are now pulling in their horns in ways that threaten the university’s health and prospects. At the flagship campus alone, legislative trims are forcing the chancellor to direct officials to come up with $27.5 million in cuts to a $1.67 billion budget for the coming year, atop several years of smaller budget trims. Thus, the campus and the university overall are offering deals for veteran tenured faculty to quit early, a move that will reduce the school’s vitality, and officials may shrink or consolidate departments that took decades to build.

“I suspect there will be programs, majors, units, departments, all of those things will change,” said journalism professor and faculty senate president John Shrader, a former colleague of mine in UNL’s journalism school. He said the faculty expected some cuts, but the sheer scale—$27.5 million compared to last year’s $5 million—is staggering. “Not one part of this campus will be unaffected.”

Oh, how times have changed. Some time ago, I was privileged to write a biography of an influential Republican leader, Clayton Yeutter, a Nebraska-born statesman who headed the Republican National Committee along with taking on many other crucial government roles. When Yeutter testified at his confirmation hearing to become the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 1989, he spoke passionately about the importance of education.

“We should not aspire to competing with the rest of the world on wage rates, in agriculture or anywhere else,” Yeutter argued. “We must compete on the basis of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, institutional flexibility and personal and institutional freedoms. All those are built on education!”

Certainly, Yeutter knew first-hand about the power of schooling. His training at the University of Nebraska, from his undergraduate years through a law degree and doctorate in agricultural economics, lifted him from the life as the son of a small-town immigrant farmer into some of the nation’s most important jobs. Along with Ag Secretary and RNC head, he served as Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Trade Representative, where he opened the U.S. and the world to freer global trade.

Long before his Washington achievements, however, as a governor’s top aide he had championed funding for the University of Nebraska. His efforts laid the groundwork for the school to expand into its current four-campus system, which now includes membership in the Big Ten for its flagship campus.

The growth in the NU system has been breathtaking. The system’s nearly 50,000 students, spread across Lincoln and campuses in Kearney and Omaha, are a far cry from the fewer than 7,000 when Yeutter graduated in 1952. The university’s growth far outstrips gains in the state’s population, which was below 1.37 million in Yeutter’s time and still barely tops 2 million.

No doubt that story has been echoed all around the country, at least in states where education has been a priority. At least for now, however, the era of growth has been brought to a grinding halt by today’s Republicans. Will they or their successors someday look back on this time with shame, seeing it as a period when they shortchanged the nation?

One can only hope that Milliken and his like can prevail or, at least, show up the Trumpist forces for the damage they are causing and its effect on our young. As a Nebraskan might say, the seed corn must be kept healthy. Today, it’s at great risk.

The sins of the past

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s assault on higher education threatens to repeat them — or worse

Jefferson looks over his university; source: PresidentsUSA.net

Founded by slaveholder Thomas Jefferson in a state where 20 percent of the population is now Black, the University of Virginia might reasonably be a place that owes the state’s minority population something. And yet, only a fraction of the undergraduate UVA student body is Black (variously reported as 6.2 percent or 8 percent). And, after other minorities are counted, nearly 57 percent of undergrads are white, College Factual reports.

Diversity has been even more of a nonstarter among the faculty at Mr. Jefferson’s university. More than 82 percent of the faculty are white, according to College Factual, with the share of Black faculty variously reported as 5 percent or 9.8 percent.

So, it’s not terribly surprising that James E. Ryan, a UVA Law graduate, saw a need to boost diversity, equity and inclusion efforts when he took over as the school’s president in 2018. In his inauguration speech, Ryan committed to redressing UVA’s longstanding racial imbalances.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, he said the campus community should “acknowledge the sins of our past,” including slavery, eugenics, and the exclusion of Blacks and women well into the 20th century. The university needed to recognize both Jefferson’s “brilliance and his brutality,” he argued.

Ryan also praised that fact that most UVA students at the time were women (a demographic reality at many campuses) and spoke highly about hundreds being among the first in their families to attend college. He warmed to the idea that the freshman class then was the most diverse in the university’s history.

As might be expected, this all didn’t sit well with some alums. A couple of the good ol’ boys in 2020 co-founded the Jefferson Council, an advocacy group that the Chronicle described as “committed to reducing the influence of progressive students, faculty, and staff, and restoring a more traditional UVa.”

The alums involved saw the university’s investment in DEI as wasteful, the news outlet reported, and they argued that it forced leftist dogma down the throats of Wahoos, as UVA students are known. They lambasted efforts to rename buildings, diversify admissions, and spend millions on DEI-focused administrators. Through blogs and social-media posts, they documented what they saw as the university’s mistaken priorities, and they put New Jersey-born Ryan into their gunsights.

With Donald J. Trump leaning on the school, the good ol’ boys have now won. Ryan quit after Trump’s Justice Department bridled at his refusal to dismantle the DEI programs and demanded his scalp, according to The New York Times. He stepped down rather than having the school risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, as other universities have.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in an email to the school community, The Wall Street Journal reported. “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

Of course, this is just the latest university administrator’s head Trump or his supporters can claim. Their trophies now include Katrina Armstrong, driven out at Columbia in March after Minouche Shafik was forced out last August; and M. Elizabeth Magill, ousted at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023, just a short time before Claudine Gay was driven out at Harvard. A fifth university chief, Martha E. Pollack surprised the Cornell University community in May by stepping down amid a threatened $1 billion in funding cuts.

Trump has put some $9 billion at risk at Harvard, with another $3 billion or so at risk at those above and other prominent schools. Those under the gun also include Princeton, Brown and Northwestern, as well as Johns Hopkins, a research gem where $800 million in cuts have led to hefty layoffs and where up to $4.2 billion in federal support is in danger.

The attacks are personal to a degree – Trump has a particular animus to Columbia, which once refused a $400 million land purchase he tried to foist on it (it’s not accidental that he cut $400 million from the university, or that the money hasn’t been restored even as Columbia largely capitulated to his demands). Also, recall that Trump himself was a middling transfer student into the University of Pennsylvania, where a professor of his said “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’”

But the assaults also reflect the longstanding hostility rightists have had against the academic world, dating back at least to the days of Richard Nixon. Recall that Nixon famously said, “the professors are the enemy,” a phrase JD Vance reprised in late 2020 at a National Conservatism Conference.

Recall racist Gov. George Wallace’s assault on “pointy headed intellectuals,” which was mirrored decades later by Trump’s attack on “those stupid people they call themselves the elite.” The attack played well with Wallace’s undereducated followers back then and still resounds with Trump’s underschooled loyalists now.

It’s all something of a replay, though those earlier assaults had none of the teeth Trump’s latest ones have. The broad-gauge attack the president and his acolytes have mounted has been enormously costly. Consider what The Atlantic reported at the end of March:

“But college life as we know it may soon come to an end,” the magazine reported. “Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

“Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to ‘the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.’ In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies ‘an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.’”

The administration’s twin rallying cries are fighting anti-Semitism and killing DEI. The former, of course, is just a fig leaf, a handy excuse for bludgeoning administrators because some students angry about the Gaza War misbehaved in the school year before last. Those protests were usually handled, if not always well, and mostly didn’t recur in the year just ended. Still, they are bogeymen the rightists can invoke as example of dissent they just can’t tolerate.

The DEI assault is more substantial. White Trumpians angry about minorities becoming more prominent feel disadvantaged, as they have ever since affirmative action began in 1965. Back then, President Johnson issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equality of employment opportunity without regard to race, religion and national origin. Ever since then, any steps to give disadvantaged groups a leg up – and to adapt to our increasing national diversity – have been castigated by angry whites as unfair.

So, it’s no surprise that at UVA some white alums have resented the modest advances Blacks and other minorities have made and DEI efforts to help them. To them, 57 percent is apparently not a high enough share of whites among students; nor is 82 percent of faculty.

A third rallying cry among the Trumpians is intellectual diversity in the college communities. What that means is that professors are just too damn liberal — another longstanding canard — and they should be driven out in favor of rightists. That is taking root in some places. Just look at what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has done with the New College of Florida in Sarasota, where ideologues have marched in, particularly as scholars in residence. The right sees this is as a model for remaking universities nationwide.

Judging from my days as a student and more recently as a professor, there are indeed plenty of liberals on faculties. That’s likely because liberals generally tend to be more adaptive to social change than conservatives, almost by definition, and being attuned to such change is natural in the academy. Still, there also are plenty of conservatives, and not only in economics departments and business schools. And is the liberal-conservative split even an issue in the sciences, tech and ag areas, for instance?

There are lots of scary elements about the changes Trump and his minions are enacting. One is a very conservative idea — that the drive amounts to social engineering by an elite in Washington — a Trumpian elite — not change coming from the grassroots. It is one thing if spontaneous change is demanded by the public around the country, in various states where legislatures fund education; another if it is directed by federal authorities.

Another troublesome factor is that many of the changes now being forced on private institutions are moving into the public ones. UVA is an example, but not the only one. We’ll likely see more such state universities in the dock going forward. More university presidents are likely to be driven out or quit under the pressure.

And where will this all leave students? Well, federal funding cuts will leave them with fewer intellectual opportunities as programs disappear. What’s more, in some states dominated by Trumpian rightists such cuts are being amplified by stinginess in state funding. As a result, many students are paying more for less.

In Nebraska, where I taught for 14 years, the state government’s contribution to the university system will rise roughly 0.6 percent in the coming year, far below the 3.5 percent increase that the Board of Regents had sought to account for inflation. The Trumpian Gov. Jim Pillen, who wanted the state to have “the courage to say no, and to focus on needs, not wants,” had originally pushed for a 2 percent cut, The New York Times reported.

“We will need to continue to reduce spending and make increasingly difficult choices to ensure fiscal discipline,” Jeffrey P. Gold, the University of Nebraska’s president, said before the regents voted to impose cuts and increase tuition. Students at the flagship campus in Lincoln will pay about 5 percent more.

It took many decades for higher education at both private schools and top-tier public ones, such as UVA, to develop into an international bragging point for the United States, a magnet for the world. That system, moreover, has long been the engine of American economic growth. Tragically, all that is under siege and it’s not clear how or when the damage we’ll see in the coming three and a half years can be undone.

Is the”police state” dawning?

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Joe Weber

Some of Trump’s critics are warning of just that

“Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.”

From the opening above, historian Heather Cox Richardson, a professor at Boston College, went on in her popular Substack to paint a bleak picture of the use of military and law-enforcement forces under the orders of the president.

She noted that the administration has insisted that many immigrants – even some in the U.S. legally – are criminals with no right to due process. Thus, masked officers dressed in black could grab people up off the street or pick them up when they appeared for legal appointments in courthouses. And thus officials could rush immigrants off illegally to the equivalent of a U.S.-funded penal colony in El Salvador.

Richardson also quoted the president’s point man on immigration – deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller – as saying that recent protests at a federal detention center in Los Angeles constituted an “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Thus, the administration could order some 700 Marines to join some 2,100 National Guard troops Trump dispatched to quell protests, even though California Gov. Gavin Newsom did not request the military help and is suing to oust these uninvited soldiers.

Unsettling as all that may be, does it constitute the actions of a “police state?” A usually thoughtful nephew who works in law enforcement panned Richardson’s comments. Everything she writes, he argued in a post to me, is “skewed” and those who don’t see that are “willfully blind.”

While my nephew offered no details on what, if anything, is amiss in her comments on the police and military actions in California, there is no question that the term “police state” is strong stuff. So, too, is the argument that Trump is steering us into one. And so, too, is some of the rhetoric by Democratic officials.

For instance, consider a comment in The Wall Street Journal from Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who as a Marine officer served multiple tours during the war in Iraq. “This is Trump’s dream,” Moulton said. “This is exactly what he has wanted to do: turn the military against the American people. Donald Trump has never respected what Marines do overseas but has always wanted to use them to force his political agenda at home.”

So, the questions arise: Is Richardson’s argument that Trump is out to “establish a police state” unhelpful and “skewed” hyperbole? And is Moulton’s contention correct that Trump – who himself dodged the draft in the Vietnam era – is using the military to force his agenda regarding immigrants and perhaps other elements on us all?

On the first point, let’s turn to Merriam Webster. A police state, the dictionary tells us, is “characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”

So, one must ask, is it repressive federal control when a president overrides the wishes of an elected governor to deploy force? Moreover, do masked ICE officers constitute “secret police?” And does disregarding the “judicial organs” of the government – the courts – reflect the actions of a would-be tyrant out to enforce his will through the military and police?

If the answer to any of those questions is “yes,” then the term “police state” doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Moreover, when combined with the imagery of a military parade in the nation’s capital slated for that would-be dictator’s 79th birthday, is it overwrought to think that suppression of dissent by force is out of bounds? Is not such imagery designed to intimidate both those from abroad who might threaten the U.S. and those at home whom Trump wants to crush?

Parade in D.C. following 1991 Gulf War, source: The New York Times

Is a parade of weaponry and soldiers in the nation’s capital — à la North Korea or Russia — not the action of a would-be fascist (a loaded term, too, but perhaps an apt one)?

One must note that most of the normal checks and balances in our government have evaporated under the one-party control of the Senate and the House, since that controlling party operates under Trump’s thumb. The president has cowed nearly all the potential critics in his party. Stepping up his control of the military seems likely to eliminate one other potential stumbling block.

To their credit, however, one force for checking tyranny – the judiciary – still seems to be operating properly. The courts, right up to the Supreme Court, have been a last bastion of resistance, often on immigration questions.

Indeed, it is heartening that the administration after insisting that one illegally removed immigrant – Kilmar Abrego Garcia – would never return to the U.S., has brought him back in the wake of a Supreme Court order demanding that. Abrego Garcia will soon face charges in a court of law, as he perhaps should have earlier, and we’ll see whether the administration’s accusations against him have any merit.

And yet the courts can act far less quickly than Trump can. At this point, the administration is battling an extraordinary 269 lawsuits (and many more if one regards scores of suits involving foreign student visa cancellations as more than just one giant action). Many of those suits could take years to wind their way through the system, perhaps even long after Trump is out of office. Certainly, they will gum up the courts.

Will judges decide that Trump’s actions in California are improper? That they amount to the uninvited actions of someone seeking to create nothing less than a police state? We’ll find out in time. For now, we do have the comments of academics such as Richardson, partisan critics such as Rep. Moulton, and writers such as those at The Atlantic.

Consider the insights of Tom Nichols, a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College who writes for the magazine. He called Trump’s military callup “yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations.” He argued that Trump’s advisers “seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.” And he held that the president “sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle.”

Alarmingly, Nichols theorized that Trump may be looking long term here, “trying to create a national emergency that will enable him to exercise authoritarian control.” And he pleaded for Angelenos to not rise to the bait, to remain peaceful, saying “the last thing anyone should do is take to the streets … and try to confront the military or any of California’s law-enforcement authorities. ICE is on a rampage, but physically assaulting or obstructing its agents … will provide precisely the pretext that some of the people in Trump’s White House are trying to create.”

As Nichols perceptively put it, “The president and his coterie want people walking around taking selfies in gas clouds, waving Mexican flags, holding up traffic and burning cars.” Of course, most of the demonstrators in Los Angeles have been peaceful, as here:

From his “invasion” rhetoric on, however, Trump has tried to cast himself as the leader of a war. It’s the responsibility of intelligent observers – such as Richardson and Nichols — and of officials such as Moulton to point up the hollowness and buffoonery he instead exhibits.

One could argue that their strong language is over the top. But do we want to wait until there are armed soldiers occupying the other arms of government or patrolling the streets all across the country to find out? Their warnings bear attention.

Go West, young man (and woman)

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

But will the gutting of exchange programs let them come to the U.S.?

A couple decades ago, our family welcomed a high school foreign-exchange student from Sweden into our home. Frida was excited about coming to the United States. And, taking a liking the country, she has returned several times since, particularly at the urging of her National Hockey League-loving husband. Now, Frida’s 14-year-old son wants to do the same by attending a religious summer camp next year in the U.S.

In a delightful couple weeks in Europe and Scandinavia, we just visited these friends in their charming Swedish village. We also spent time with a former exchange student of ours from Stockholm, Johann, whom we also hosted years ago. Johann would like to join us in the Colorado mountains next winter to show us his Alps-trained skiing skills.

Frida, her son, and Johann are much like so many other foreigners for whom the U.S. has been a magnet. For millions, our country has represented freedom, adventure and opportunity. For those who come for education – especially at the undergraduate and graduate levels, along with high school – the country has opened pathways that have enriched them and our country alike.

Tens of thousands of high school students have come to the U.S. under such programs over the decades. Just one of many such efforts, the Future Leaders Exchange Program (or FLEX), boasts some 30,000 alumni, for instance. And it dates back only to the 1990s.

“While in the U.S., FLEX students gain leadership skills, learn about American society and values, and teach Americans about their home countries and cultures. FLEX students perform community service in their U.S. communities and act as ambassadors of their home countries,” the outfit’s website notes. “Many are inspired by this spirit of volunteerism to develop and implement innovative projects in their home countries, using the skills and ideas they gained while on program. FLEX students are naturally curious and enthusiastic citizens of the world.”

Former Moldova PM Natalia Gavrilita, source: NY Times

Some become leaders in their home countries. Natalia Gavrilita, one FLEX alum, for instance, wound up serving as her nation’s prime minister.

But in its xenophobic fervor, the Trump Administration seems to be doing its best to pare back or eliminate such exchanges. First, it suspended State Department grant programs under the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that supported a slew of exchange programs.

And now, the administration intends to defund that State Department unit. The president’s fiscal 2026 budget – largely mirrored by the recently passed House budget bill – called for cutting the funds in the State Department international exchange programs by 93 percent, some $691 million. This could jeopardize such programs as AFS Intercultural Programs, along with the Germany-oriented Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX), the Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX), the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program (YES) and the American Cultural Exchange Services (ACES) program.

Trump’s budget cuts, if enacted by the Senate in coming days, could toss the rich legacy of such exchanges on the dustheap. They will undercut the so-called soft power by which America shows a welcoming face to the world.

“The proposal demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of exchange programs and would do the exact opposite of making America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” wrote Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange. “International exchange programs are a proven investment in America – an investment in our economy, in our people, and in our foreign policy influence and interests. In order to expand America’s global influence, it’s important to invest more in international exchanges, not less.”

In addition, the State Department has just imposed a freeze on consular interviews for visas for foreign students and visitors while it fashions rules for officials to review their social media accounts. “The Department is conducting a review of existing operations and processes for screening and vetting of student and exchange visitor (F, M, J) visa applicants, and based on that review, plans to issue guidance on expanded social media vetting for all such applicants,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio cabled officials.

For now, these swords hovering over exchange programs haven’t been driven home yet. The Senate could restore funding as it reviews Trump’s budget. Indeed, after a recent funding freeze was declared illegal by a court, money needed for AFS and ACES activities was restored – at least temporarily – as reported by the Toledo Free Press.

Moreover, some Republican senators are chafing at some of the bill’s effects – though mainly because of the plan’s trims on Medicaid, as well as its explosive effect on the national debt. In a New York Times opinion piece, Missouri Republican Josh Hawley called “slashing health insurance for the working poor” both “morally wrong and politically suicidal,” for instance. And fiscal hawks, for their part, want even deeper cuts in spending.

Still, Trump is pushing the Senate to pass his bill by July 4.

Will the student exchange programs – with their comparatively small constituencies – survive? Certainly, they are not getting the headline attention of, say, Medicaid and programs to feed hungry American children.

Still, advocates for such programs such as NAFSA: Association of International Educators are doing their best to rally exchange-program enthusiasts to make their voices known. Whether the group can marshal enough power to stand up to Donald J. Trump remains to be seen.

In the face of Trump’s many assaults on international students at the university levels — what remains surprising is that so many foreign students – at all levels — still want to come to the U.S. Even as he erodes the nation’s standing globally, Trump hasn’t destroyed that desire.

Harvard international students, source; NY Times

His attacks on U.S. universities and the limits he has tried to put on international students at Harvard – though temporarily blocked by a court — surely will make a dent. Certainly, schools in Europe will capitalize on fears among foreign university students that they could face harassment and deportation.

But, for now, America still shimmers as a promised land for many. That status took a couple centuries to develop and is well-rooted. Can one benighted presidential administration destroy that? The damage will be real, but it may vanish in time — just as this administration surely will.

‘You say you want a Revolution, well …’

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Joe Weber

If they’re going to change the world, universities need to do more

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, 1830. Source: DiPLO

A couple weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks called for something akin to a revolution.

“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising,” he wrote in a piece headlined “What’s Happening is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.” He argued: “It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

Are we beginning to see the rise of such a rival power or, more properly, rival powers? Glimmers are emerging in some universities that are uniting to fight federal funding cuts and other actions President Donald J. Trump has taken to shatter what he sees as “woke” culture.

But, so far, the efforts seem oddly timid. Either university administrators fear being too out front in hopes they can avoid Trump’s vindictiveness or they think — mistakenly — that they can weather the gathering storm.

Rutgers profs David Salas-de la Cruz, left, and Paul Boxer

Showing less fear, a pair of Rutgers professors — chemist David Salas-de la Cruz and psychologist Paul Boxer — in March drafted a “mutual defense compact.” They proposed bringing together the 18 schools in the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in resistance to Trump.

This compact would commit the schools to provide “meaningful” cash for a defense fund aimed at supporting any member “under direct political or legal infringement.” It would provide legal counsel, governance experts, and public affairs offices “to coordinate a unified and vigorous response” that could include countersuit actions, strategic public communication, amicus briefs and expert testimony, legislative advocacy and coalition-building.

Quickly following suit, faculty senates at more than a dozen of the schools endorsed the idea. Encouragingly, they include those groups at Rutgers, one of my alma maters, and my prior employer, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The resolution passed at Rutgers called on the university’s president, Jonathan Holloway, to “take a leading role in convening a summit of Big Ten academic and legal leadership” to start the compact.

But Holloway has demurred. While he supported the “ethos” of the resolution, he did not formally endorse it, noting that he is stepping down at the end of the academic year, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. “I’m a president walking out the door in two months,” he said in a senate meeting. “Presidents going out the door have no lobbying power with their peers.”

Instead, Holloway encouraged faculty senators to “work with their colleagues in other university senates and shared-governance councils, whether in the Big Ten or beyond, to further test their thinking, understand what may or may not be possible, and identify the local constraints and freedoms that define the actions of peer institutions,” according to a spokeswoman.

Mealy-mouthed? PR-speak for “no way can we do this”?

Already, a spokesman for Ohio State told The Washington Post that “it is not legally permissible for the university to participate in a common defense fund.” Other administrators have not taken up the idea publicly, including representatives for leaders at Indiana and Nebraska who did not respond The Chronicle’s request for comment.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that the top university officials may hope a duck-and-cover strategy will serve them better. But that is likely only because they haven’t yet had to fight, as Harvard has. Recall that Harvard has brought suit against the administration for freezing billions in federal grants.

Some Harvard professors have even pledged to donate 10 percent of their salaries this year to support the university’s fight. “If we as a faculty are asking the University administration to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom, we should also be willing to share in the financial sacrifice that will be necessary,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Dani Rodrik told The Harvard Crimson.

So far, all but one of the Big Ten schools have been spared the sort of attacks Trump had lobbed at Ivy League schools. The exception, Northwestern, lost $790 million.

But Trump’s wrath – and his social engineering – may be unavoidable. Nine of the Big Ten schools have gotten a letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they failed “to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities,” according to The Post.

Of course, the claim of fighting antisemitism is little more than a ruse, an excuse to undertake a far-reaching remake of higher education. Yes, antisemitism is a real issue — especially at Harvard and my other alma mater, Columbia — and needs to be rooted out. But, for Trump, it’s just a pretext.

As for other schools that have stayed clear of the president’s broad-gauge volleys, it is just a matter of time before they are hauled into the fight, like it or not.

Take note that the hit list of Project 2025 – the right-wing blueprint that Trump is following, despite disavowing it during the campaign – has a hefty array of education targets.

The agenda includes so-far incomplete measures such as capping support for indirect research at universities, authorizing states to act as accreditors or setting up alternatives to current accrediting bodies, terminating the public service loan forgiveness program, banning critical race theory and eliminating PLUS loans, among other things. Here is a handy tracker on how the Project’s efforts are proceeding.

As Ms. reports, only one-third of the Project’s efforts have been completed, so much more remains for the balance of Trump’s term.

And perish the thought that any shreds of diversity efforts could remain unscathed on campus. Schools could be prosecuted on civil rights grounds for that, including programming aimed at putting first-generation students on the same footing as others. The administration is investigating at least 45 schools in an effort to end “racial preferences and stereotypes.”

“Big Ten institutions haven’t been in the crosshairs, but they can read the writing on the wall,” Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for the American Council on Education, told The Post. For many college presidents he represents, the prevailing thought now is: “Trying to keep a low profile won’t stop the attacks.”

Yet he said he also suspects they would be wary to sign on to the compact without knowing exactly what it would require.

Only administrators, not faculty senates, can commit their institutions to the united front.

The Rutgers university senate supported the Big Ten compact with its vote on March 28. Organizers there plan a teach-in next week and May Day protests in support of the compact, journalism professor Todd Wolfson told The Washington Post. He expects a protracted fight with administrators over the summer.

“We have had to lead and they have followed us,” Wolfson said. “Now we will demand they actually put resources into defending our campuses.”

Wolfson also serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP is a union with chapters at more than 500 schools, including several in the Big Ten. It was among the first groups to sue the Trump administration over federal cuts to higher education funding.

Separately, about 10 Ivies and elite schools have put together what The Wall Street Journal called a private collective to fight deep cuts already mandated against them.

Perhaps because their schools already are being scorched by Trump, individual trustees and presidents are involved in the collective. The newspaper reported that participants have discussed red lines they won’t cross in negotiations with the White House. One such red line, for instance, is relinquishing academic independence, including autonomy over admissions, hiring, and what they teach and how it is taught.

The group has gamed out how to respond to demands presented by the Trump administration, which has frozen or canceled billions in research funding at schools it says haven’t effectively combated antisemitism on their campuses.

So far, Trump’s minions have been successful in picking off universities and law firms by attacking them one by one. So it’s not surprising that they are fretting about unification efforts, according to a source cited by the Journal. Within the past two months, the task force warned the leadership of at least one school not to cooperate with other schools to defend against the task force demands, one source told the paper.

Additionally, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has come out with a statement condemning what it called “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American colleges and universities.” The petition was signed by more than 500 higher-education leaders nationwide.

“We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” the statement said.

Speaking, of course, isn’t enough. As Harvard has done, taking the fights to court – the last redoubt, given the supine Congress – will be essential.

Brooks’s “uprising” has a long way to go, but Trump is certain to give timid administrators plenty of reason to man the barricades.

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 Big Picture

Category Archives: academics