Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens about Donald Trump’s attacks on Columbia University and other elite colleges and how they became vulnerable to a political and ideological reckoning.
Patrick Healy: Bret, Tressie, Masha, I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?
He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.
So I want to start by asking you the question I asked the university president — what went wrong for higher ed? How did colleges become easy pickings?
Bret Stephens: Big question; lots of answers.
The moment I realized something had gone terribly, maybe irreversibly, wrong in higher ed came in 2015, when Nicholas Christakis, a distinguished sociobiologist at Yale, was surrounded, hounded, lectured and yelled at by students furious that his wife, Erika, had suggested in an email that perhaps students could be entrusted to make their own Halloween costume decisions. The incident seemed to encapsulate the entitlement, the arrogance and the unbearably petty grievances of a generation who seemed to find their voice and power in the taking of offense. I was left asking: Who admitted these students? Who taught them to think this way? And why weren’t they immediately suspended or expelled?
Healy: I remember that moment. A Harvard friend texted me and said, Glad you didn’t go to Yale? Then she backtracked with there-by-the-grace-of-God-goes-Harvard humility.
Stephens: That was also the moment that it became apparent that two values of the modern university were colliding in a bad way: diversity and free expression. In theory, the two should be complementary; a faculty and student body with different backgrounds could bring more views to bear on important scholarly questions. In practice, the promotion of diversity tended to foster a form of identity politics in which questions of truth, or the ideal of the open contestation of ideas, tended to yield to demands that certain opinions be shut down because they insulted a group or ran afoul of a political orthodoxy or were being said by a person from the wrong racial or ethnic identity.
At some point, university administrators were going to need to take sides in the debate. Some did courageously — I always think of my friend Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago — but too many dithered or tried to appease both sides or were highly selective in their commitments to free expression. Now they are suffering the political consequences, including some that, as we’ve seen in the past week, are themselves wrong, stupid or awful.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: I have taught the most quintessentially tense courses my entire academic career. My course names often have the words race, class and gender in them. I do this as a Black woman. I have never had a problem with students refusing to have debates. It could be that I am a uniquely gifted pedagogue but I reject that idea.
I simply do not recognize the universities that conservative critics often describe in their portraits of diversity run amok. It is possible that this is unique to places like Yale and Harvard. Or, it could be that we extrapolate from regular quotidian student conflicts. One of the worst things to possibly happen to higher education is that we started covering student bodies as if they are national news.
Healy: I see it a little differently, Tressie. When I was the higher education reporter at The Boston Globe in the early 2000s, stories about student controversies at Harvard would sail onto the front page. It wasn’t because I was a uniquely gifted journalist, to borrow your phrase. A lot of arguments, ideas and debates in society and families (and among Globe readers) were playing out within those student bodies. I think U.S. higher education is a mirror of society — but many Americans see it as a fun-house mirror, where the left takes on caricatured and scary dimensions.
Cottom: I am eternally grateful I attended college before the internet and attended a college that the national media has little interest in. I cannot imagine encountering new ideas, debates and relationships in my fragile late teens and having it all documented for the record. We are obsessed with college debates. But we also rubberneck traffic accidents. At some point, the social value should outweigh the shock value.
M. Gessen: I feel that this question is sort of parallel to the problem (or a problem). We have started using the word “elite” as though it were a slur. But universities are elite institutions in the classic sense of the word. They set the agenda: the intellectual agenda, the scientific agenda, but also the political agenda. Things that start at universities — ideas, scientific discoveries, certain kinds of fashion, music, art — become trends. This is as it should be.
The problem is not that universities are elite institutions; the problem is the relationship between the elites, in and out of universities, and the rest of the population: the wealth gap, the glaring difference in access to goods and services, the widening chasm between the worlds inhabited by the elites and other people. It’s not the universities’ fault, but they have certainly played their part in creating and perpetuating these inequalities. And now that we have a president who came to power on a wave of anti-elite sentiment, it is no wonder that universities are prime targets (though it’s not the only reason they are targets).
Healy: Yes. I remember how much Trump liked Representative Elise Stefanik’s tough questioning of the presidents of Harvard and Penn over antisemitism, which led them to resign. I think Stefanik was tapping into anti-elite sentiment and weaponizing it against the elite left in higher education.
Stephens: Hmmm. Not least among the reasons Stefanik was so politically effective in that hearing is that the university presidents were intellectually pathetic. When you can’t adequately answer a question about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates university rules, you should not be in those jobs. When, as in the case of Harvard’s Claudine Gay, you are revealed to have multiple instances of plagiarism in your scholarly record, you especially shouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t say that anti-elite sentiment was “weaponized” at that hearing; I’d say that a segment of that elite self-destructed.
Healy: Their weak answers further undermined their schools’ image as a “public good.” But I think Stefanik knew what she was doing in putting the presidents on the spot. They were always going to lean into context and nuance in their answers, and Stefanik knew that would come across as elitist and clueless to many Americans.
Gessen: I think about how those Americans who live in the vicinity of elite colleges or universities experience their presence. I have been following the social media of this giant group that seemed to come out of nowhere, Mothers Against College Antisemitism. What strikes me about so many people in this group — many of them apparently middle-class women — is the fear and resentment they feel toward these universities.
They look at these giant and ever expanding compounds — Harvard, which has an enormous footprint in Cambridge and across the river in Boston; Columbia, which stretches for more than a dozen blocks in Upper Manhattan; N.Y.U., whose presence is vast in Lower Manhattan, and so on — and see places where they would not be welcome, where they would feel inferior. And these things are not only closed to them but they are constantly expanding, encroaching on the city around them. Universities really are a perfect embodiment of the way the wealthy and powerful act toward the rest of American society.
Stephens: I’m not sure I agree, Masha. The people I know who are most disenchanted with Penn, Barnard, Columbia and so on are its alumni, and I don’t just mean the Bill Ackmans of the world — I also mean well-educated liberals who just became disgusted with their alma mater’s tolerance for all the campus bullshit. And that points to a deeper problem for the universities: It isn’t just MAGA voters they’ve lost. It’s also a lot of thoughtful, well-educated people who feel sick at seeing how universities have so often lost their way, how pedagogy has been replaced by ideology, how students have become zealots.
Healy: I’ve heard from some Ivy League alums who are skeptical about sending their kids to their alma maters. I want to pick up Masha’s point about Americans feeling unwelcome by higher education, because it connects to how I see this moment. It’s about a crisis of trust. Too many Americans don’t trust higher ed or feel any stake in it. Professors, presidents, boards of trustees should have realized how fragile trust is. Top schools depend so much on reputation and image — but when America goes from generally admiring Harvard to mistrusting Harvard, to take just one school, I think elite higher ed has a real problem. How do you see it?
Cottom: I’m both a professor and someone who has studied higher education as a system. There are two things that overlap my professional experience and my expertise. One is how much we insist upon conflating a handful of elite colleges with all of “higher education,” when the vast majority of institutions are not particularly rich, elite or prestigious. The other is how much the beneficiaries of the small, powerful set of prestigious colleges and universities enjoy bashing the institutions they pay an arm and a leg to be affiliated with.
Healy: Yes — as Trump likes to remind us, he’s an Ivy League grad. Stefanik, who was so tough on Harvard, was Class of ’06 at Harvard.
Cottom: And his administration is stocked with as many elite anti-elites as he can find. Our current crisis is an amalgamation of two tensions: We want the elitism of prestigious universities and yet we do not want them to have any control of our culture or status. Studies show that when you expand the question to include the colleges that most Americans attend, people tend to trust higher education. Certainly, we trust them enough to send our children to them. Declining trust in elite institutions coincides with their moderate increases in student and faculty diversity. So, declining trust is less about how elitist these institutions have become and more about how their elitism is now conferred on more minorities.
Having said that, I agree that higher ed is in trouble. Elite institutions completely abandoned their 20th-century noblesse oblige to the rest of the sector. There was a time when Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the like lobbied on behalf of institutions that were less powerful. The race to increase endowments broke the compact. Leading a university now requires a vicious brand loyalty. We are seeing the consequences of a lack of leadership.
And higher ed is in trouble because its economic promise is in trouble. We accepted the elitism of prestigious universities because a college education could give some people a ticket to the middle class. The labor market broke their part of the deal. Stagnating wages and job-hopping created a sense of precariousness even among the educated middle class. People take that resentment out on the institutions that promised them stability.
Stephens: Tressie makes an important point: Too often, college isn’t worth it, economically speaking. If you’re coming out of a second-tier institution with a degree in some subject matter that has the word “studies” attached to it, you aren’t going to be a first-round pick for many employers. And you’re probably going to wind up thousands of dollars in debt. Who needs that?
I’d also add that I’m not sure most colleges and universities are worth it educationally speaking, either, except when students are being taught very specific skills like engineering or chemistry. That’s a tragedy because I’m a big believer in the humanities — provided they are taught well. With a nod to Matthew Arnold, that means rooting students in the best that’s been thought and written. It means academic rigor, it means the contestation of ideas, it means a spirit of inquiry, curiosity, questioning and skepticism. Outside of a few colleges and universities, I’m not sure that kind of education is being offered very widely.
What it means is that colleges don’t contribute as they once did to the creation of a common civilization with common cultural touchstones. Worse, they sometimes seem to contribute to the antithesis: students and faculty wedded to the idea that Western civilization is nothing except oppressive, colonialist, racist, exploitative and so on. That’s not only false, but it also invites the very reactionary tendencies we’re seeing with the Trump administration’s assault on the universities.
Cottom: There is some conflation here on the value of college majors — a degree with “the word ‘studies’ attached to it” is not all humanities degrees — but it is worth pointing out that data on labor market returns really challenge the well-worn idea that such degrees are worthless. We love the joke about your barista having a liberal arts degree, but most of the softness among those degree-holders disappears when you look at state-level data and not just starting salaries after graduation.
What is closer to the truth of what Bret points to is that we did create too many low-quality institutions from the 1990s to the 2010s. Many of those schools preyed on students with few choices, sucked money from our student loan system, and trashed the idea of higher education’s value. I would also put the Wild West of graduate-degree programs in the cross hairs.
Stephens: I’d say the lowest-quality institutions created since the 1990s have names like Columbia and Berkeley — these are essentially factories of Maoist cadres taught by professors whose political views ranged almost exclusively from the left to the far left.
Cottom: I would counter, Bret, that the lowest-quality institutions are the for-profit colleges created as paradigmatic economic theories of exchange value that churned out millions of students in “career ready” fields who found it hard to get a job worth the debt — colleges not unlike the one that our current dear leader once ran as a purely economic enterprise.
Healy: I spoke to another college official this week who said that the goal of presidents, boards of trustees and general counsel offices was to keep their heads down and out of Trump’s line of fire. And I told this official, you guys are kidding yourselves. It made me think of John Ganz’s essay about “Vichy America,” and your recent columns, Masha, about people choosing “anticipatory obedience” — rationalizing that it’s their job to protect their schools from Trump, and live to fight another day by getting rid of D.E.I. and cracking down on antisemitism and anything that looks like wokeness. But when does “keep your head down” become obedience to or even collaboration with the Trump administration?
Gessen: There is a familiar tension here that Trump, like other autocrats, instinctively knows how to exploit. The tension is between surviving right now and, plainly, being able to exist in the future. For most universities, the best tactic is probably to try to stay under the radar. This means being careful with language (D.E.I., etc.) on their websites, hoping that they don’t have particularly noticeable protests or especially outspoken students or faculty members and so the Trump administration will not single them out for investigations or funding cuts. This would probably allow most universities to continue functioning, substantially as they have been, for a couple of years.
But in the end — and by the end I mean in two, three, four years — federal funding cuts to financial aid and research and the White House’s meddling in the politics and policies of education will be devastating for all institutions of higher learning.
Cottom: I agree with this assessment. Here is the brutal reality. Only a few universities have the kind of eye-popping endowments that make them politically resilient. Many others manage the decline in state revenue by attracting international students who pay full freight and winning big grants. That’s why Trump targeting a student on a green card, demonizing immigrants and cutting grant dollars is an existential threat.
Gessen: The only thing that would work against Trump is a united front of higher education leaders who would both push back on him and articulate some new ideas about why their institutions are essential for our society’s future. Some college presidents, like Wesleyan’s Michael Roth, have been arguing for this kind of resistance. But others — most — try to stay below the radar or, like Columbia’s Katrina Armstrong, are trying to fall in line and demonstrate loyalty even as the administration makes clear its intention to destroy them.
I keep saying that we are all in a prisoner’s dilemma now — our only chance for protecting the long-term future of higher education (and everything else) lies in collective, coordinated action, which is the least likely thing to happen.
Cottom: Few things annoy me more than the overpaid, cowardly university president. No institution wins if the sector is demoralized, defunded and delegitimized. Our profession has never selected leaders on courage, but the lack of even basic survival instincts is an embarrassment. Anticipatory obedience, indeed. Donald Trump is not loyal enough to reward obedience should it conflict with his own interests. Better to fight like men than die like cowards, or something like that.
Healy: Last weekend, immigration agents showed up at the New York apartment building of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, and told him that he was being detained. He had a green card; it was revoked, and he was removed to a detention facility in Louisiana.
Masha, you went to a court hearing on Khalil’s case this week, and Bret, you have written about the Columbia protests writ large. Tressie, you teach at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, one of America’s great universities — and part of what makes them great is freedom of speech, thought and dissent. I want to hear from each of you about what stands out to you most about the Khalil case, and in what ways do you think it’s a sign of things to come for higher ed?
Cottom: This is a stress test, like many of this administration’s actions. There is no defensible legal argument here. As legal tests go, this is a weak one. But it will have several effects that this administration wants. It wants fear and compliance. Look, I don’t think you can separate this case from the decades-long push for graduate student labor unions. Punishing protesters solves for two G.O.P. interests. It looks like power and it threatens organized protest.
Stephens: We ought to be able to have four thoughts alive in our mind: First, that Khalil was a prominent spokesman for a campus group that believed Hamas’s violence against Israelis was a legitimate tactic — a despicable point of view, in my book, and something no university would tolerate if he had been an advocate for, say, white-supremacist violence against a racial minority. Second, that the secretary of state almost certainly has the statutory effect to remove him from the country.
Third, that making a public martyr of Khalil is a stupid idea, which will do more to energize his fellow travelers than it will to deflate them. Fourth, that arresting and possibly deporting a green card holder, entitled to free expression, sends a dreadful signal about the kind of country we are becoming. “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it” — the great Jeffersonian line — should be and remain a conservative standard.
Gessen: The things that stand out to me about the Khalil case are only tangentially connected to universities. This is one of those times that I feel shocked but not surprised. As an immigrant, I am all too aware of how few rights immigrants — including legal residents — have in this country. Noncitizens have no political rights. This is not normal. In many European countries, for example, legal residents who are not citizens vote in local elections; immigration lawyers in the United States routinely advise their clients who hold green cards that they should not take part in protests. This is not new: It has always been possible to strip someone of legal-resident status, and this punishment can be wielded politically.
But there is something else that stood out to me about the Khalil case — he and his wife were clearly not prepared for ICE agents to show up at their apartment building. It seems they didn’t know that they didn’t have to answer the agents’ questions, identify themselves, or show them documents. I have talked to several leaders of large New York City institutions — not just universities — that are being targeted by ICE. Some of them have put in place elaborate protocols and also distributed “know your rights” cards to their students and clients, instructing them on how to (not) interact with ICE agents.
Columbia had every reason to expect ICE, and it apparently did put some protocols in place, but it seems that the preparations likely didn’t include telling the most vulnerable members of the university’s community how to protect themselves, legally.
Healy: One of the things I find so striking is the use of “anti-antisemitism” to assail higher education — that the failure of universities to punish antisemitic speech and attacks on campus is now being used as a broad justification to cancel all kinds of federal funding and denounce various schools and leaders. You have Education Secretary Linda McMahon sounding like judge and jury about campus antisemitism. You have Donald Trump saying that Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore.” The right has trolled Democrats and “owned the libs” for years, but now you have Johns Hopkins University cutting more than 2,000 workers funded by federal aid while the school is under scrutiny by an executive branch antisemitism task force. Bret, is the Trump administration weaponizing antisemitism against higher ed in ways that cross a line? If not, how do you see it?
Stephens: One of the tragedies of what is happening is that universities did so much to give the Trump administration the opening that it is exploiting to the fullest. When the presidents of three major universities that hitherto had not exactly been notable in their defense of free speech — at least when it came to forms of speech that offended some constituencies — suddenly averred their free-speech bona fides when it came to students calling for Israel’s annihilation, it created that opening. When schools like Columbia and U.C.L.A. tolerated noisy encampments on their quads that made student life difficult or impossible for other students, particularly Jewish ones, it created that opening. When schools tolerated students in face-covering masks chanting slogans that meet the State Department’s definition of antisemitism, it created an opening.
Now the administration is using the universities’ failure to confront this kind of radicalism and hypocrisy to terrible effect — like the revocation of $800 million of funding to Johns Hopkins. But it’s an old story: When diffident liberal administrators fail to confront the far left, the winners ultimately tend to be on the far right.
Cottom: I don’t find it so striking, Patrick. Many people accurately predicted the Jewish conservatism that has made peace with Trumpism. What I find interesting is how well it is working across the map. A place like North Carolina, for example, would have at one time been immune from these coastal conflicts. It’s a sign of the nationalization of politics. I was driving in rural eastern North Carolina on a work trip in January. I saw a billboard denouncing antisemitic liberalism on college campuses. This is the poorest part of the state. There is no elite college here. There are very few leftist elites to caricature and yet this is how removed from the reality of the conflict we had become.
Gessen: Tressie, that is fascinating. I’d love to be able to understand how “antisemitism” functions in this context. Also, let’s go back in history a bit, to those ancient times, in the fall of 2023, when Congress started holding hearings on “college antisemitism.” I am putting “antisemitism” in quotes because the entire enterprise appeared, to me, to be antisemitic from the very beginning.
Its premise was this: If we show these university presidents to be “antisemitic,” then wealthy Jews will pull their money from these universities and the universities, which we hate, will be greatly weakened. This wealthy-donors trope is transparently antisemitic. And, I think, the anti-intellectualism of the entire campaign, embodied by Elise Stefanik, a politician who has dabbled in white-nationalist rhetoric, had a clear antisemitic subtext.
Now fast-forward to March 2025, when they no longer have to appeal to “wealthy Jewish donors” — Trump is using “antisemitism” as a pretext for gutting university funding in amounts that far exceed any private donation. And the anti-antisemitism is starting to show its true antisemitic nature, as when Trump says, in effect, that he will decide who is a Jew. In the meantime, a number of important Jewish organizations, established ones like ADL and grass-roots ones like Mothers Against College Antisemitism threw their lot in with this antisemitic anti-antisemitic campaign.
Cottom: Masha, I was also fascinated by the context. Or the lack of context, as it were. Without a fancy college as the backdrop, antisemitism here could only mean a vague threat to the status quo. I still puzzle over it.
Healy: I’m going to pause here and ask you three — are professors, presidents and others awash in some kind of hysteria? I mean, for all of Trump’s actions, most students are going about their days, classes are being held, professors are teaching what they want. Are people being whipped into a frenzy — maybe suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Cottom: I don’t know, Patrick. My colleagues have lost their jobs, their decades-long research projects, are receiving death threats, and their students are concerned about being surveilled and deported. Hysteria — if that is what we will call protest, outrage and fear — seems reasonable.
Stephens: Hysteria isn’t usually a very productive frame of mind. The question is: Is the Trump administration firing a loud shot across the bow of academia to get it to clean up its act? Or is this just Act I in a drama whose end is the complete subordination of the academy to political power? If the former, fine: Universities do need to do better, especially when it comes to honoring the principles of free expression. If the latter, then university leaders will need to gear up for a very tough and necessary fight.
Gessen: I suspect most people outside academia don’t realize how devastating the funding cuts and policy interventions that have already taken place have been. People have lost their jobs. Research projects have been halted. Universities are scrambling to close funding gaps (many federally funded research projects are based on a reimbursement model: the university spends the money and then gets reimbursed by the government).
And this is just the beginning. With the apparent devastation of the Education Department, universities stand to lose financial-aid funding. Many schools are also concerned about disruptions in the visa system. And then there is the unrelenting campaign of intimidation and outright hatred focused on diversity programs, gender studies and universities as institutions. Higher education as we have known it is disappearing before our very eyes. Not that it was perfect or even good — I have a lot of criticism of the American higher education system — but it’s not being reformed; it is facing a campaign of annihilation.
Cottom: Masha, two scientists told me that they were finally conducting biomedical research that included women. For the first time ever. That research has been canceled because they lost N.I.H. funding. The price we will pay for Pyrrhic victories will burn us all.
Healy: I think some colleges didn’t realize just how vulnerable they were to a reckoning because they thought government leaders saw the benefits of higher ed and university research. After all, some of the biggest champions of the N.I.H. academic research and National Science Foundation grants used to be Republican senators and House members from red states who knew those federal grants were manna from heaven for their public and private universities. Tressie, you’re at Chapel Hill — are Republicans cutting off their nose to spite their face as they go after federal dollars for their own home state universities?
Cottom: There is an idiosyncratic tension in the way most Americans understand higher education. Public colleges are overwhelmingly controlled by the state. Yet voters will complain to Congress or the president about these colleges. Congress listens to that; it sells well to constituents and partisans. But I’m curious to watch Republican-controlled states where local elected officials have to explain why they gutted one of the primary economic and social engines of their state’s economy. There was a moment during the 2014 election when I realized we had reached a tipping point. Wisconsin proved that a governor could win in part by attacking his state’s public university. That was prescient.
Stephens: There is a potential upside to this. I don’t think we can have this discussion without acknowledging that we might not be having this problem if the political coloration of universities hadn’t, in many places, become almost monochromatically progressive. That’s a political problem, but it’s also an intellectual problem: Intelligence dies in groupthink. Now university presidents may be able to get politically recalcitrant faculty members to understand that the question of viewpoint diversity isn’t, if you’ll forgive the pun, merely academic. It’s a matter of life-or-death for these schools.
Gessen: I do not see an upside to this. As I wrote above, this is a campaign of destruction. A Russian scholar I know wrote recently that he thought that Trump 2.0 would be like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but it’s turning out to be more like the Russian Civil War — just utter devastation, the effects of which will be felt for generations. In the face of such destruction, it strikes me as almost quaint to gripe about the excesses of lefty preciousness, which is a real thing, but really, if you put it on the scale opposite Trump’s attacks, it’s a snowflake. Not that the disagreements between universities and Trumpism aren’t real. Trumpism is fundamentally anti-intellectual and mean. It’s barbaric.
Cottom: I have as many frustrations about how students and academia has changed. It happens as you age and students continue to be young. I ask myself if they are more progressive or if I have gotten older?
Healy: What’s the answer?
Cottom: Usually it’s the latter. I think we overstate the rampant ideological uniformity in higher education. We take political identification as ideological destiny. There aren’t droves of raging Marxists yelling people down on the college campuses where I spend a lot of my time. And every college campus I am aware of has an economics department or a science department that teaches that Western civilization is the gold standard. Students may not be exposed to the type of political conservatism some pundits prefer. But they have a lot of opportunities to learn from people who disagree with each other.
When I walk Franklin Street on a beautiful day, nothing about what I hear and see sounds like the liberal hotbed people demonize. I agree with Masha — there is no upside to this. For one, there is no real ideological commitment here. Trump isn’t an ideologue. This is a convenient way to amass power. The only one who wins is Trump and eventually JD Vance.
Healy: So — who’s the next target? If higher education is a really easy mark for Trump to caricature as full of Communists, woke D.E.I. warriors and antisemites, and no one effectively bats that back, won’t Musk and Trump be coming next for schools, libraries, liberal churches, blue-city chambers of commerce and of course the news media and more of the federal government, which they see as proxies for the Democratic Party? Where does this end?
Cottom: This ends in one of two ways: the privatization of public goods institutions or a political coup. I don’t see leadership on the latter.
Stephens: Universities could more effectively bat that back if there weren’t a large grain of truth to it, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Physician, heal thyself!
Gessen: Patrick, I’m afraid I have bad news. If other autocratic breakthroughs are any indication, next they come for the journalists.
Cottom: Masha. Oh.
Healy: I don’t doubt it, Masha. And that sets up my final question. It comes from the university president I spoke to Thursday. I told him I would be talking to you and asked what I should ask you on his behalf. He said: How do you think college presidents and professors and scientists — as well as journalists — can capture and show what’s going on in higher education in such a way that helps more people understand what’s happening in America under Trump right now?
Stephens: University presidents need to do three things: First, remind the public of the vast good that universities still do as institutions that prize intellectual excellence, knowledge creation, genuine scholarship and learning through the sharing of expertise and the intelligent contestation of ideas. Second, acknowledge that what is happening now with Trump would not have been possible if universities hadn’t done so much to harm themselves through ideological homogenization and a spirit of intolerance masked in Orwellian phrases about tolerance and diversity. Third, don’t join the Resistance. Trump wants to goad university leaders into being his political enemies. Don’t give him that gift.
Gessen: I’ve taught at very selective universities (I worked at Amherst College and then at Bard College) and am now a professor at the journalism school at the City University of New York. One thing that is true of both wealthy private and not-wealthy public universities is that these are, at their best, intentional communities united by values such as intellectual curiosity and freedom and respect for a plurality of opinions. In other words, universities are the cultural opposite of Trumpism.
I think that university presidents need to gather together their administrators, faculty members and students — don’t forget the students! — and remind them of these values and call on them to unite to affirm them. This is a very hard thing to do while under attack, to get out of a defensive crouch and try to stand up and lead, but it could point the way forward, and not just for universities.
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