If we are lucky, if we get through this period with our democracy intact rather than sliding into a Hungary-like competitive authoritarianism (or worse), my hope is we will look back on the recent spate of capitulations of elite higher education institutions to the authoritarian regime with some mixture of disbelief and shame. I hope that individuals who I could but will not name, but who are easily identifiable as being central to these capitulations, are viewed harshly as people who failed to hold to important principles at a crucial time.
The alternative, that these people are either viewed as pragmatists or, more likely, forgotten, means we will have fallen so far from our ideals of a free nation built on free inquiry that whatever continues to exist will be unrecognizable as compared to today.
The editorial board for the Penn student paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, put it plainly in responding to the deal their school struck with Trump, “Penn Descends Into Fascism.” They argue that Penn will be remembered as the school that “welcomed tyranny” “with open arms.”
As bad as it may be for Penn’s reputation, I hope lots of people agree, because if so, it means we have not yet normalized these extortionate practices.
I think these students are correct about what Penn has done. Our only hope is that this welcoming does not turn into a permanent stay. The actions of Penn and other institutions will make achieving this outcome significantly harder. When former Harvard president Larry Summers says, in reacting to Columbia’s capitulation to the authoritarian, that it was “the best day higher ed had in a year,” we should understand Summers is positioning higher ed as something other than an important part of our democratic institutions.
A major institution paying out extortion money in response to a nonmeritorious “investigation” and submitting to government surveillance of its policies is not a good day for higher ed.
The present constantly shapes the future, and even small adjustments now may have large impacts down the road, butterfly-effect style. It is a big problem that so many schools have bent the knee to Trump, but the problem can get bigger if more schools follow suit. Each individual act of resistance continues to matter.
It doesn’t take significant hindsight to see all the factors and choices that have made higher education institutions so vulnerable in this moment. The early 2000s saw a spate of books warning how the values of higher education were being compromised by a “corporate culture,” a problem coming fully home to roost as universities strike “deals” in order to preserve funding.
One of these books, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, was written by Derek Bok, who served as Harvard’s president from 1971 to 1991, and then again from 2006 to 2007 as interim president following a faculty vote of no confidence in, wait for it … Larry Summers.
In Universities in the Marketplace, Bok recognizes that it seems as though, for the right price, everything in the modern university is for sale. By contemporary standards, Bok’s book seems a little quaint, as the practices he’s worrying about, such as institutions and professors reaping financial rewards from intersections with the growing knowledge economy—particularly around tech—has gone from a potentially questionable practice to almost de rigueur at elite institutions. But Bok argues, convincingly, that these compromises erode public trust in higher education.
Fast-forward to today, when preserving access to federal money no matter the cost to institutional independence is deemed by one of Bok’s successors as the high calling of institutional leaders, a sign of success.
While Bok could not have had the foresight to see his institution contemplating paying extortion money to an aspiring authoritarian president, his book all but predicts this outcome by showing that when money is involved, there is no principle. That this is true even for the wealthiest higher education institution of all time suggests no one is capable of resisting.
Or maybe it’s the opposite: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Is it a coincidence that it seems as though corporate America and our most corporatized educational institutions are most vulnerable?
I do not think the battle over preserving some semblance of independent and free higher education is irretrievably lost, but it does seem possible that we already have some permanent casualties.
Columbia has submitted to government monitoring. Penn has altered its record books, and Brown, too, has acceded to an agreement that maintains a mere fig leaf of independence belied by its president protesting too much about criticism of the deal.
As student journalists at The Harvard Crimson report, Harvard, too, has already allowed government pressure to alter its programs, but those same journalists also suggest that, for now, the school is holding firm against paying the—let’s be frank—kind of bribe handed over by their Ivy League compatriots. The Crimson reports that stories about an impending $500 million payment were byproducts of strategic leaks from the Trump administration rather than trial balloons out of Harvard.
This is good news, because any act of resistance is, well … good news. Whatever relief Columbia, Brown and Penn have experienced by paying these tributes is inevitably temporary. Contra David Leonhardt of The New York Times, who decries Trump’s methods but does not wholly lament the changes the extortion schemes have wrought, there is no good way to cede power to Donald Trump.
Those who think there may be accommodations to be made better hope others continue to fight on their behalf, because failure to do will result in a world where Columbia, Brown, Penn and maybe even The New York Times will exist at the pleasure of the executive.
When we win, should I still be around, personally, I’m not going to let them forget this moment.
