[[link removed]]

ESCAPE TRUMP'S TRAP: ACT LIKE A UNIVERSITY, NOT LIKE A BUSINESS  
[[link removed]]


 

Masha Gessen
April 14, 2025
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up
your campuses and expand your reach by bringing education to
communities. Create a base. Become a movement. Or else grovel before a
mafia boss. _

, image: gemini

 

_MODERATOR'S NOTE: TODAY HARVARD UNIVERSITY BLUNTLY REJECTED
[[link removed]]
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S DEMANDS._

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

There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than
refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and it requires more than forming
a united front. They must abandon all the concerns — rankings,
donors, campus amenities — that preoccupy and distract them, and
focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of
knowledge. Intellectuals have adopted this strategy to fight against
autocrats in other countries. It works.

Because Trump views everything as transactional and assumes everyone
to be driven by profit, he has approached universities the same way he
approached law firms and, arguably, countries: by deploying
devastating financial threats against each one individually, to compel
compliance and prevent coalitions. Trump could have started by
imposing a tax on universities’ endowments, a move that almost
certainly would enjoy broad popular support. That, however, would
presumably affect every major university, which could prompt them to
band together. Research grants, which are specific to each university,
are an ideal instrument to divide and weaken them.

His first target, Columbia University, acceded to his demands within
two weeks of losing $400 million in grants and contracts. When
Columbia’s first sacrifice didn’t bring back the money, the
university made another: its interim president, Katrina Armstrong.
That didn’t satisfy Trump, who now reportedly
[[link removed]] wants
Columbia to agree to direct government oversight. He is also
brandishing financial threats, separately, at the University of
Pennsylvania, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern
— and still there is no sign of organized resistance on the part of
universities. There is not even a joint statement in defense of
academic freedom or an assertion of universities’ value to society.
(Even people who have no use for the humanities may see value in
medical schools and hospitals.)

It shouldn’t be this easy to cleave universities from one another,
but, so far, it seems to be easier even than making law firms compete
for the don’s business and favor. This may be because law firms
define success in a way that is at least marginally closer to their
ideal function (helping to uphold the rule of law) than the way
universities define success is to their ideal function, which is
producing and disseminating knowledge. Most prominent American
universities, most of the time, measure their success not so much by
the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the
world as by the size of their endowment, the number of students
seeking admission and their ascent in rankings by U.S. News & World
Report and others, which assess the value of a university education in
part by looking at graduates’ starting salaries. As for professors,
while universities do compete for the best minds, they more frequently
compete for the loudest names, in the hopes that these will attract
the biggest bucks.

In conversations
[[link removed]] with
my colleagues on these pages, I have compared the universities’
current predicament to the prisoners’ dilemma, the game-theory model
in which two people accused of a crime have to decide to act for
themselves or take a chance and act in concert. It’s a useful model
to think about, but it doesn’t quite fit. The universities are not
co-conspirators: they are competitors. And they want more than to
return to the status quo ante: They want growth. They might even want
to win the research funding that the other guy lost.

Trump has threatened to use many different tools against universities:
pulling federal financial aid, revoking accreditation, rescinding
nonprofit status, imposing an endowment tax and blocking the flow of
international students. Nor — as the case of Columbia has already
demonstrated — will submission end the attack. Slashing and burning
its way through the National Institutes of Health, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Wilson Center, the United States
Institute of Peace, the Smithsonian, and others, the administration
has shown that it considers knowledge production worthless. In the
rare areas where the president — or perhaps Elon Musk — may see
value in research, the emergent mafia state is almost certain to
distribute funds to its friends. One shudders to think what
universities would have to do to fit themselves into that category.

IN THE LATE 1970S AND THROUGH THE 1980S, Polish dissidents operated
what they called a “flying university” in apartments across the
country. Run by the country’s leading intellectuals, this university
wasn’t selective and didn’t charge tuition; its only goal was to
get knowledge to as many people as possible. These were the people who
went on to build the only post-Communist democracy that, so far, has
been able to use electoral means to reverse an autocratic attempt. In
the 1990s, Kosovo Albanians responded to the Serbian regime’s forced
takeover of their education system by walking out and creating a
parallel underground school system, from first grade through
university. Classes met in boarded-up storefronts. I met Albin Kurti,
the current prime minister of Kosovo, in 1998, when he was a student
— and a student activist — in the underground university.

Adopting such a radical approach, and forsaking the usual concerns of
development offices and communications departments, would be costly,
to be sure. The universities most actively targeted by Trump have the
resources necessary to weather such a radical reorientation. But as
Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, told me, “Too many of
our wealthiest universities have made their endowments their primary
object of protection.”

I called Botstein because he has long practiced the approach I am
advocating: At Bard (where I taught for three years and continue to
work with an archive of Russian media), he seems to respond to every
crisis by figuring out ways to teach more people. In the last
quarter-century, Bard’s expansion has focused on people who would
ordinarily not have access to a university education. The university
works in New York State prisons, where it currently has more than 400
enrolled students; in six cities it operates 10 high schools from
which students graduate with a Bard associate degree; and it runs
“microcolleges” at the Brooklyn Public Library, in Harlem and at a
center for young mothers and low-income women in Holyoke, Mass.

The students at these places, who far outnumber students at the
college’s main campus, don’t pay for their university education,
are unlikely to boost Bard’s post-graduation income statistics, and
probably won’t be able to make significant donations to the
endowment in the future. But their lives are often transformed by
Bard’s intervention. Many private universities have extension
programs and several have prison programs and other community
projects, but they tend to position them as charity sidelines rather
than part of their core mission. Bard, on the other hand, is a private
college that acts like the best kind of public university.

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

So this is my radical proposal for universities: Act like
universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more,
not fewer students. Open up your campuses and expand your reach not by
buying real estate but by bringing education to communities. Create a
base. Become a movement.

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

* universities
[[link removed]]
* Harvard University
[[link removed]]
* Colombia University
[[link removed]]
* Bard College
[[link removed]]
* First Amendment
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]