Last week, the deputy chief of staff of the White House, Stephen Miller, issued one of the now regular chilling briefings on behalf of his fascist administration: “Universities are on notice”. US president Donald Trump and his team are determined to destroy academic freedom in the US, as they are so many other freedoms.
They have Harvard University in their sights and have already witnessed Columbia University cave in to their demands in order for $400 million in federal funding to be restored. Columbia acquiesced to the insistence that security officers be given power to remove and arrest perceived dissidents on campus and that management of the department that offers courses on the Middle East be taken away from its faculty.
Staff hiring, curriculum control and rooting out supposed subversives and anti-Semites is the aim, along with traducing transgender rights and the “woke agenda”. The universities have been slow to find their backbone in response, which is a measure of the power, domination and fear being experienced and abused.
Harvard is fighting back by suing the federal government
Harvard University, the first college in the American colonies, founded in 1636 and renowned as the oldest and wealthiest university, is facing a particularly fierce battle due to the attacks on academic and financial independence. The Trump administration is halting billions in research grants and aids unless it gives in to government demands.
Harvard is fighting back by suing the federal government. Its president Alan Garber insists the government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”. One of Harvard’s former presidents, Lawrence Summers, has said that if Harvard cannot stand up to Trump “nobody else could”.
Battles over academic freedom amid the controversial politics and religious hues of universities have always existed. At the time of the bicentenary of Harvard in 1836, its president Josiah Quincy noted “in every period, its destinies have been materially affected by the successive changes which time and intellectual advancement have produced in political relations and religious influences”.
Originally conducted as a theological institute, its seminary depended for its existence, Quincy wrote, on a “precarious and often penurious benevolence; soliciting aid and repulsed... sometimes tossed on the waves of political, sometimes on those of religious controversy”. But “amid the conflicts of both”, it elevated “as high as the times required or its resources permitted, the standards of the literature of the country.”
[ Trump administration freezes billions of dollars in future grants to HarvardOpens in new window ]
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If ever it needed to draw on that tradition, it is now. It can also look to more recent history; American university academics were sufficiently concerned to define and defend academic freedom that they formed the American Association of University Professors in 1915 to resist those who wanted to control what they taught and wrote.
There were various disputes around academic autonomy in subsequent decades; the McCarthyite communist witch hunts of the 1950s, sexual harassment and race questions in the 1960s, social science ideology in the 1970s, affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s and corporate influence in the 2000s. Most recently, tensions have abounded about trigger warnings, “safe spaces”, campus speakers, trustee and political interference and anti-Semitism.
Keith Whittington’s Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018) notes that there was never a “golden age” of free speech. But he makes the case for universities to be insulated from outside partisan pressures to enable them to embrace the clash of ideas with the aim of promoting greater knowledge.
He quotes Robert Zimmer, the former president of the University of Chicago – “Universities cannot be viewed as a sanctuary for comfort but rather as a crucible for confronting ideas” – to provide learning for students “to make informed judgments in complex environments”. University academics also have obligations and a responsibility to ensure such learning is guided by evidence rather than donors, the media, the political establishment or public opinion.
This is anathema to Trump and his acolytes
Defenders of academic freedom also invoke the words of German philosopher and educational theorist Friedrich Paulsen (1846-1908) who insisted that for academics and students: “... there can be no prescribed truth and proscribed thoughts. There is only one rule for instruction: to justify the truth of one’s teaching by reason and the facts.”
This is anathema to Trump and his acolytes. Their approach instead mirrors that of the Nazis in 1930s Germany, where leading Nazi propagandist Alfred Ingemar-Berndt asked “Does this book help my nation? Is it in harmony with the present situation? Is it designed to make the nation strong and to give it strength? Or is the effect of this book depressing, laming, destructive? We need a political nation and must not lapse into that liberal epoch in which such an important part of the nation dedicated itself to spiritual and aesthetic frames of mind.” Or, as was put more succinctly by Adolf Hitler in 1939, “the intelligentsia are a useless refuse of the nation”.
Trump agrees. Expect book burnings soon to further scapegoat the “enemies of the nation”.
