James Orr
I’m going to restrict myself in the time available to ten quick reasons as to why Trump is going to be positive for academic freedom, not just in the United States, but all across the West. The first nine points are really just sort of dull policy points. It’s the tenth point that dwarfs the first nine, and although it’s got nothing to do with public policy it constitutes the primary basis for my optimism.
First, dexterous use of federal purse-strings. In his first term, Trump explicitly tied federal funding to an institutional commitment to academic freedom. It’s a popular and obvious move now, but not in 2016, when on this issue (as on so much else) it was Trump contra mundum. Thank God for his narcissism! Who but an egomaniac would have had the gumption to take on the entrenched interests and ideological corruption of higher education. Whatever the actual impact of this approach, Trump 1.0 surfaced a debate around academic freedom that did not exist before he did so. I should note in passing that funding and freedom are distinct: academic freedom protects the content of research and teaching, not the means to conduct it. American taxpayers should not have to subsidise sclerotic institutions that are demonising perfectly lawful and reasonable views held by millions of them.
Second, enforcement. Trump has been consistent in insisting that universities that cancel speakers who are exercising their lawful right to freedom of speech or fail to prevent Antifa rent-a-mobs from disrupting events are going to get sued. The Trump 1.0 supported a lawsuit against the University of Berkeley in 2018 and that seems to have had a chastening effect and a number of other universities. It was perfectly reasonable for Trump to do this — nothing unlawful about it, just ordinary enforcement of the law via due process.
Third, protests. Now I know that this is a controversial, neuralgic issue, and that Trump’s law-and-order agenda is not popular, certainly among the academic left. But the fact is that free speech is not the same as academic freedom. This debate is about academic freedom, which is a species of free speech, but not coterminous with it. Academic freedom is the specific legal requirement to ensure that intellectual cultures are free and flourishing places for diverse, plural, and contentious perspectives. We’ve had this debate in Cambridge recently. I remained silent when the Palestinian protests set up on King’s Parade outside King’s College. To my mind, if the Fellows of King’s were, as one would expect them to be, entirely relaxed with encampments on college premises, that’s absolutely fine. I refused to sign some of the letters circulating to contest that. However, disrupting graduation ceremonies and daubing red paint on ancient buildings plainly crosses a line. Why? Yes, they were exercising their free speech, but they were disrupting the ordinary business of the university. In that scenario the university should have stepped in (naturally, it did not). Trump understands this. And frankly, if you’re breaking the law, committing vandalism, and harassing your peers, the First Amendment should not protect you either. Tough!
Fourth, accreditation. For a long time, accreditation has been dominated by a radical left cabal. Trump is going to break this down which will allow other universities to be set up; we’re already seeing this with the emergence of a handful of new institutions all across the States. Granted, we’re only talking about half a dozen or so at this point, which is not exactly a re-tipping of the balance, but it’s a start. Granting degree-conferring powers to a wider spectrum of universities should ensure that over time we see a greater degree of ideological breadth being represented in our academic institutions.
Fifth, bureaucracy. Trump has also promised to dismantle the $200 billion a year racket that is the Department of Education. Essentially, this has become a bloated bureaucracy which oversees Federal Student Aid, research grants, and compliance rules like Title IX. It is under the control of a single dominant ideology that is flatly antagonistic to the majority of people who are subsidising it all. Trump intends to pass down autonomy to the local, state level for universities, a move that should make accreditation more conducive to fostering a diversity of perspectives and a more plural pedagogical culture across the States.
Sixth, reforming research funding. The National Institutes of Health has an annual budget of around $48 billion, which Trump has now said will face a grants cap. Not a drastic cap, sadly, only 15 per cent, but Trump is also making valuable use of executive orders to mandate the purging of DEI from curricula and providing a template for broader reform.
Seventh, improving secondary education. There have been some encouraging developments in the area school choice. I recognise secondary education is not directly relevant to the question of academic freedom, since academic freedom is a professional privilege that school-teachers do not enjoy. But Trump’s moves to expand school choice will undermine ideological monopolies and help to foster thinkers who will be more sceptical of the ideological gatekeeping at the Ivy League level. Professor Kaufmann has argued that much of the groupthink is fixed by the time one leaves school. There’s not much a university lecturer can do to challenge groupthink among the students that effectively, since one’s basic ideological outlook largely crystallises at school. Measures that catalyse a broader range of outlooks among those who start at university should be a positive for academic freedom.
Eighth, Trump’s approach to university endowments. While US university endowments are worth upwards of $800 billion, Havard’s endowment alone is more than $50 billion, which is larger than the combined endowments of all 150 universities in the UK. Harvard is essentially a hedge fund with a university attached. Trump is proposing to tax those endowments and issue lawsuits to penalise institutions that prioritise indoctrination over education.
Ninth, Trump’s SCOTUS appointments. In his first term, the appointments of Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett led to some obvious victories. In 2023, for example, we had that vital case of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. Harvard was found to have been unlawfully discriminating against Asian-Americans on the basis of their ethnicity for decades. In the 6-3 decision which overruled affirmative action, three of the justices were on the bench because of Trump.
Having covered significant ground on the policy front, my final argument is something quite different and, I think, more important than any actual policy levers that Trump could bring to bear. It is what the commentator Santiago Pliego has called “the vibe shift.” Anyone who’s been to Washington since 5 November last year will know what I’m talking about. There is a sense of freedom in the air. No longer does one feel the leaden weight of leftwing dogma — you can just talk about things. If you’re critical of climate catastrophism, or if you don’t think you can castrate your way into the sisterhood, or if you’ve got qualms about mass unchecked immigration of tens of millions across the southern border, bringing in drugs that are killing more Americans in one year than the Vietnam War killed in twenty years, you are now at liberty to say so.
That cultural shift will, I suspect, prove to be far and away the most powerful antidote to the groupthink that continues to dominate these elite institutions. It will put them on the backfoot, even if the degree of political conformity across all disciplines, but especially the humanities, remains off the charts. A perfectly sensible solution to this, and one that Trump 2.0 is seeking to promote through a variety of measures, is a stress on what binds the nation together across the political divide — in particular, a soft patriotism and a pride in America’s heritage and history. There are, of course, justifiable criticisms of every nation, but it is the one horizon that stitches that fractious polity together in a way that transcends divisions of race, ethnicity, language, sex, and political alignments. A stronger sense of unity and common purpose in the country may yield the enabling conditions for productive disagreement and resistance to settled orthodoxies that are essential to any university worthy of the name.
Helen Pluckrose
I think that publicly funded universities must be reformed to make them fit for their purpose of knowledge production, and that this requires the active mitigation of ideological bias. There are two methods for this. We can prohibit the ideology, or we can prohibit the bias.
Banning ideas doesn’t work. We have just seen this here in the UK with wokeness, which tried its hardest to suppress gender critical views and criticism of immigration. These were pushed out of mainstream spaces and penalised as “non-crime hate incidents”. Did it work? From a country now dubbed TERF Island which has seen the meteoric rise of Reform on an anti-immigration platform, I’d say “no”. In the US, countless surveys indicate that wokeness was highly influential on the election of Donald Trump.
It is more ethical and more effective to ban the bias. It is clearly better in the immediate and direct sense for freedom of speech and academic freedom etc. Moreover, establishing anti-bias policies thinks long-term, while banning ideas perpetuates a system in which academics have to wait to see who wins an election before they know which ideas they’ll be able to have for the next political term. Most importantly, academic freedom is the way to genuinely defeat bad ideas rather than forcing them into alternative spaces while increasing sympathy for them and allowing them to explode again as soon as the time is ripe.
I have argued that universities should be required to show that their courses include competing hypotheses, and academics with a range of political views and from different schools of thought and fields. For example, a course on gender studies would need to show that it did not only include queer concepts of gender but also the work of gender critical feminists and human biologists as directly relevant.
I suspect that this would, in practice, cause most queer theorists to resign. But they would not have been silenced or pushed out and so would not be able to claim the glamour of being oppressed and gain the sympathy of the public. Those who choose to remain and present their ideas alongside those of gender critical and biologists will, I suspect, find that they don’t shape up so well. This is how academia is meant to work — by rooting out failing theories.
Mr. Trump has the opportunity now to establish a system that protects academic freedom and begin the process of dismantling woke properly. Is he doing this? I don’t think so. We see signs of overreach already. There is the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University. FIRE is currently helping students across 11 Texas campuses oppose an unconstitutional ban on drag acts on the grounds that it demeans women,” “promotes gender ideology,” or runs contrary to their “values”.
However, at the moment, we are still primarily seeing a lot of intimidating but non-specific rhetoric. Take this highly alarming post on X:
All federal funding will stop for any college school or university that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!
What does this mean? It’s specific on dire consequences but not on prohibited actions. It says “illegal” protests but protests are legal so what does this refer to? It is “agitators” who will be penalised, but this just means people who urge others to protest. Organising or posting about a protest cannot be illegal, can it? And if we don’t know what is banned or what actions are considered agitating, what does it mean for a university to “allow” it? Does it mean giving the “all clear” to unambiguous crimes like violence or does it mean that if a college allows posters about a protest to go up and a protestor breaks something, they have “allowed” an illegal protest? Nobody knows and this, many are arguing, is the point.
Timothy Snyder’s concept of “anticipatory obedience” is being heard frequently. This refers to people responding to intimidating yet vague threatening rhetoric by taking steps to stop doing anything which could be covered by it. It works quite a lot like ‘non-crime hate incidents”: it sounds intimidating and official but is entirely non-specific. Its main function is to make people fearful while keeping them uncertain about what actually is legal or illegal.
The American Association of University Professors is one of several voices urging people not to engage in anticipatory obedience and highlighting the ways in which universities appear to already be self-censoring. Florida State University is reviewing all its course content for antisemitic or anti-Israel “bias”. The University of North Texas censored over two hundred academic courses, mandating the removal of words like race, gender, class, and equity from course titles. Arizona State and North Carolina State have required academics to stop any federally funded research that could be considered DEI-related.
Florida has cut general education courses that refer to race or gender. Northeastern University has changed references to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to “belonging”. Georgia Tech is deleting all content that includes words related to DEI. Meanwhile biomedical-research agencies have been withdrawing manuscript submissions to remove terms like “gender” and “transgender” while taking down their data sets from public view.
There is a lot of potential for collateral damage here. Not all courses or content that relate to race or gender are DEI related. Some seem to be history. “Class” is relevant to important social issues that have nothing to do with wokeness. Scholars in international relations may need to criticise Israel at times. Making it harder to find writing on gender theory will also make life harder for gender critical feminists trying to show the problems with it. The removal of biomedical data sets for scientific publications could hinder organisations like Genspect challenging the “science” that allegedly justifies the medicalisation of children.
Further, this seems like the perfect recipe for making the very academics and activists whose ideas we need to criticise bunker down, hide their ideas on campus, grow them in alternative spaces, garner public sympathy, and be ready to reseed in four years when they hope the left to be in the ascendent again.
It is public sympathy that will make the left ascendent again. Trump won narrowly, partly because those who oppose authoritarianism had finally been convinced that woke is authoritarian. Ross Douthat addressed the potential danger well in 2023. Defining liberals correctly as free speech oriented, he wrote:
In the Trump years we saw that in an atmosphere of political emergency… many liberals struggled to resist demands of ideological fealty made by movements to their left.
Now the emergency mentality has retreated, and resistance and skepticism are easier. But what if it comes back, whether under a Trump restoration or in some other form?
If liberals accept loyalty oaths under calm conditions, what will they accept in an emergency? Probably too much — in which case the next peak of wokeness will be higher, the next revolution more complete.
My observation is that this is starting to happen. I now have people writing to me saying they can’t support the “anti-woke” anymore because they’ve got so illiberal, threatening women’s rights, racial equality and same sex marriage and, of the two options, “woke’”is better. I see an atmosphere of political emergency, and this is supported by polls showing Trump’s popularity to have plummeted to the lowest of any president ever (except himself last time).
My fear is that, by squashing academic freedom from the right rather than implementing policies to protect it consistently, Trump will drive wokeness into hiding for four years while also increasing sympathy for it. I fear he is silencing bad ideas rather than providing the opportunity to defeat them. There is a risk that when his term is over, we will see a backlash, and we’ll again get illiberal left-wing policies that clamp down on academic freedom. And so, the pendulum will swing.
