A recent announcement on Truth Social reads:
“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 on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”
As usual, this is a mix of what our increasingly personalized federal government could do (to rescind visa status of a foreign student, or to arrest someone suspected of a crime under the federal jurisdiction), what it couldn’t do (stop funding for any action not falling under a federal law, like “allow[ing] illegal protests”), and what it wants the colleges to do: expel, and imprison “agitators.”
There is a certain symmetry between the campus protest movement of 2024, and the current attack by this administration on the universities and colleges. In both cases, the actors appropriated genuine injustices to nefarious ends.
The organizers of the campus protests used the sufferings of Gazans to justify calls to eliminate a troubled democratic state, Israel, fighting an aggressor, and to weaken the US administration supporting the Jewish state in a measured way.1Notably, as the November 2024 elections (during which the Democratic electorate stayed, to a degree, at home, ensuring the defeat of their candidates) approached, the campus protests drastically diminished. It is safe to say, their efforts did not bring any reprieve to the Palestinians, allegedly the primary goal of the protests.
Similarly, the attack by the administration on the universities (which is going, rest assured, far beyond a mere social media rant) under the pretext of combating antisemitism won’t achieve the stated goal (if anything, it reinforces the key antisemitic notion that Jews have a special, secret hold on powers that be). It will go, however, a long way into forcing the higher education institutions to restrict any agitation, – protest or disagreement with the federal policies or actions, – on campuses. As with the so-called pro-Palestinian protestors, the actual goal of the administration is different from the pretext and seems to be to suppress the freedom of expression on campuses.
As a member of the faculty organization fighting antisemitism and restrictions of academic freedom, I did my fare share resisting the ugly happenings on our campus in 2023-24. The assault on academic freedom we witness today is far more dangerous.
Its primary method is to restrict research funding, imperiling the humming R&D engine powering the (current) American global technological superiority. Its primary tool is a war on words: the research is deemed suspect if some taboo expressions are detected. If this modality takes hold, emergence of a US version of Lysenkoism is inevitable.
We are facing opposing antidemocratic forces. One’s politics can tempt a faculty member to align with one of them. That would be wrong. The right course is to be fact-driven, intellectually honest, – and to reject both.