Right now people are arguing about whether cancel culture is back — this time, coming from the right. It certainly looks as if the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and other controversies are examples of a kind of conservative revenge for the great woke cancellations of 2020 and 2021.
But I really think that you need to understand the conservative cultural strategy much more in terms of institutions than celebrity individuals.
Long before the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Trump White House saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try to push America’s cultural institutions, movie studios and TV networks meaningfully to the right. This week I want to talk about the most significant of these efforts, more important even than the late-night-TV wars.
That effort is the administration’s attempt to change elite academia — the way big universities admit students, hire faculty members, handle free-speech debates and much more. My guest, May Mailman, is the perfect person to discuss the Trump administration’s strategy because she’s been in charge of it.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: May Mailman, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
May Mailman: Thanks for having me.
Douthat: So I want to start with a big picture question. Tell me: What is wrong with the American university?
Mailman: I don’t think it’s every university, but I would say the biggest one that comes for me is a culture of victimhood — a glorification of victimhood — that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country.
You can notice it in little pieces, like when Justice Kavanaugh was going through his confirmation hearings, the need for grievance sessions, the need for coloring books, the amount of emotional support people needed to suffer through Trump’s electoral victory. And I think that there’s this culture that universities have been perpetuating as well — maybe I call it Meghan Markle syndrome, where like the greatest good, the greatest height that you can be is a victim. So I think that’s one thing.
And then pieces of it trickle down to racism in admissions, racism in hiring. You’re hiring people to do things based on their identity rather than their ability. But I think, at the end of the day, it all boils down to a glorification of victimhood.
Douthat: What do you think universities are teaching their students that they’re victims of?
Mailman: It’s not necessarily that they are victims but that they should be victims. That it’s good to be a victim. That in admissions, what is it better to be? It’s better to be in a minority class, whether that’s a sexual minority class, whether that’s a racial minority class. There’s something better to being underrepresented, to being somehow downtrodden, that should be treated as preferential or better.
That type of behavior is not only illegal — you can’t treat people differently on the basis of their race — but it’s harmful for so many reasons beyond that. You just want the best people, no matter what they look like. The type of students that you want, you obviously want diversity — and I think Justice Thomas, when he’s talking about this, he’s in favor of diversity, not aesthetics — but the whole idea of treating people differently based on whether they are oppressed or oppressors, and if it’s seen as Meghan Markle — why does she want to appear like a victim? Because then she’s special — there’s something good about the queen not liking you, because you can then be a victim.
Douthat: I’m not sure it’s actually worked out that well for her.
Mailman: She has a TV show!
Douthat: She does. She does have a TV show.
Mailman: I don’t have a TV show.
Douthat: Not yet. But you just mentioned that it’s reasonable for universities to want diversity. An obvious argument that a university might make in thinking about how these issues impact admissions is to say: Well, obviously, if you’re trying to have a diverse student body, you do to some extent want to look at the actual experiences people have. And if someone has been victimized in some way by some set of forces in their life — material, financial, familial, whatever, racism included — let’s call it adversity — can you rule out adversity entirely as a reason to maybe give someone a kind of preference?
Mailman: So I think experience is obviously relevant. Maybe a 3.8 student body president is a better applicant than a 4.0 video game basement dweller. That seems perfectly fine to take into account experience, and it does create a much better student body than if it was just totally blind, based on your SAT score.
But I think the question is what you’re celebrating. Are you celebrating the fact that this is somebody with nothing? Or are you celebrating the fact that this is someone who has shown that with nothing, they can be somebody?
Douthat: So you’re effectively saying that what universities are failing to do is adequately reward merit, whether in their applicant pool or in who they’re hiring to get on the tenure track, do research and so on.
Mailman: Right. And in many ways fail to reward merit in ways that are illegal and violate our civil rights laws. So the failure to reward merit is, I think, not only just a problem with the universities, but it is then therefore relevant for its relationship with the federal government.
Douthat: And you said at the start that it’s not every American university that has these problems. Talk a little bit about your own experience. So you went to a red or reddish — Kansas is sometimes politically complicated — state flagship university for undergrad. And then you went to a school of some note in Cambridge, Mass., for law school. So you had two distinct experiences of different forms of elite education in America.
I’m curious whether you saw the problems that you think the Trump administration is fighting in those places and also if you felt like there was a big difference between Kansas and Harvard.
Mailman: Yeah, so my experience at the University of Kansas — I felt more like a diverse student. Kansas is not a very — it’s a white state. [Chuckles.]
Douthat: It’s a fairly white state. Yes.
Mailman: I think we can say that.
Douthat: I’ve noticed that on my visits. Yes.
Mailman: And so I participated on the multicultural board my freshman year, which is where anybody can come and talk about your experiences and what needs to change and everything. My sorority that I was a part of — sororities and fraternities pair with each other for all these events, and I wanted to pair with the Black fraternity associations rather than just the traditional I.F.C. fraternities. So I really identified or felt like I was, I don’t know, a diverse person, and I really wanted to think about those issues and pay attention to them in ways — not like victimhood necessarily but like cohesiveness and bringing everybody together.
And then I did Teach for America.
Douthat: Just to locate us, roughly when were you an undergrad?
Mailman: So I graduated in 2010, before some of the larger racial issues with — I think, for me, things started to change around my third year.
My last year in law school, which was when Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Mo., and you had “Hands up, don’t shoot” riots all the way around the country. And I went to a few of the Ferguson die-ins, just to walk around and see what people were doing. And it was a bunch of professors and a bunch of students, and nobody did anything crazy, just went to the middle of a road and, you know, lay down.
And there was a community feeling to it. There was something about chanting the same thing with all of your friends — “No justice, no peace, no racist police” — that felt communal. And maybe you weren’t achieving anything, but you were doing it with your friends.
As the president of the Federalist Society at Harvard, I felt a little bit of pressure, I think, to have a position on what I thought about all these things going on in the country.
Douthat: And did you think of yourself as a political conservative or a Republican through all this, when you were in college and afterward?
Mailman: Yeah, I definitely saw myself as a conservative, which made me way more attracted to the Trump movement than being a traditional Republican. And I don’t exactly know why that is. I think it’s just that growing up in the middle of nowhere, there’s no —
Douthat: Where did you grow up?
Mailman: On the Kansas-Colorado border is a small town called Goodland.
Douthat: That is, in fact, the middle of nowhere.
Mailman: It actually is.
Douthat: No judgment, but it is. Statistically, yes,
Mailman: Definitionally, yes. So yeah, I was definitely a conservative, but weighing in on societal issues, especially on some of these really tough ones, was a tough spot for me, because why can’t we all just get along? [Chuckles.]
Douthat: As a wise man once said. Yeah.
So I’m interested in this because we’re going to get into the actual things that the Trump administration is asking of universities in just a second. But one thing that’s striking about the argument about universities is one that’s been going on since William F. Buckley emerged on the political scene and wrote “God and Man at Yale”: the conservative argument that campuses are too liberal, too ideologically conformist, that they reward victimhood over merit, that they use affirmative action in discriminatory ways. These are arguments that are decades and decades old, but there’s a clear sense, both among conservatives and some liberals, that something substantially changed in the middle of the 2010s that took all of these existing things that conservatives complained about and just made them much worse.
It seems like that’s what you think. I’m curious why you think that happened and how much worse it got.
Mailman: Yeah. The why — and maybe everyone was already this liberal. Smarter people than me have blamed social media and the iPhone — you found your community in Facebook groups over campus groups, and you were able to retreat and hold your positions more closely — and I buy into that.
The shutting down of speech — what we used to call political correctness and now call wokeism — I felt that. So the Obergefell decision was right after my third year of law school.
Douthat: This was the same-sex-marriage decision.
Mailman: And most people that are young and educated are in favor of gay marriage in some way, shape or form. But you could always talk about it in some way — what about this and that? — and I felt like the speech element, where all of a sudden now it’s “Oh, I’m sorry, you said ‘traditional marriage.’ What do you mean by that? What does that mean?” And as the speech got more constrained, then the ideas had to be pushed aside a little bit.
And actually, people at Harvard currently will say that some of that had to do also with the rise of social media because you could be shamed a little bit easier. I got in trouble one day at Harvard because I had an event with Chick-fil-A sandwiches and the Chick-fil-A people left their hot bag that you put all the sandwiches in, so I threw it in a room with all of the student group’s lockers. Somehow, this bag was in front of the gay student group’s locker.
There was a group chat going around saying that the Federalist Society is trying to basically threaten the gay student group because there was this Chick-fil-A bag — no, that didn’t happen. But the same type of discourse that might have previously happened or benefit of the doubt or conversation — now it’s much easier for them to go to their group and say “I’ve been discriminated against” than to actually have a conversation.
That got cleared up. But I do think this shift, which involved both a curtailing of speech and retreat to groups online, does have a lot to do with the iPhone, social media and the way that we communicate.
Douthat: And what about protest culture? You clearly had in the mid-2010s the rise of a general new atmosphere of protest culture on campuses. And part of the argument from the Trump administration has been that this led to a culture of overt physical intimidation — for Jewish students, in particular, when the protests were around issues related to Israel and Gaza and so on. But I think, generally, that protests became a means of intimidating speech.
Mailman: So I somewhat attribute the rise of this protest culture, which I will agree did occur around then, to the same underlying cause that I just mentioned, of people retreating online. As people get lonelier, they want to find groups. So the George Floyd protests, when everybody was locked down and no one could do anything and you couldn’t see anything, and here’s this community. I mean, it was a community. It’s your buddies, it’s your friends, and I can’t actually fault that feeling — that’s a very human feeling that you want to be a part of. And especially if you lose a friend group and you lose some of the things that you otherwise would’ve done, then yeah, protests seem very attractive.
Douthat: So I want to be concrete, because we’re going to talk about the universities as institutions, because that is obviously where law and policy come in. What you’re describing is a cultural shift. How is it the responsibility, or to what extent is it the responsibility, of universities as institutions to have some kind of reaction? It’s not the university’s fault that all their students were on iPhones, and it’s not the university’s fault that students started protesting. What did the institutions themselves, in your view, do wrong in response to this shift toward political conformism, protest culture and so on?
Mailman: I think the universities were too late on just basic safety issues. So let’s just take the post-Oct. 7 antisemitic violent episodes breaking out across college campuses. If you’re letting tent cities fester on your campus — and we’ve heard a lot from Harvard specifically, that they were concerned about shutting some of those down or citing students, because you can’t just say, “Hey, leave.” The students aren’t going to leave. There has to be “Leave, or I’m going to suspend you” or “I’m going to write you up” or “There’s going to be some consequences here.” But if you’ve got a bunch of international students and such a thing might threaten their visa, then you’re not going to do that.
Douthat: Discipline would threaten their visa.
Mailman: Yep. So I think there was too much fear from university officials, that by taking basic safety measures, that would somehow reflect badly on them, and they were scared because they didn’t want to be criticized.
I think there has been some learning on that — like, “No, we’re going to protect our students.” And I think universally, people learned some lessons after Oct. 7. University presidents were fired and replaced, including at Harvard, at Penn, at Columbia.
But in general, what should they be doing about this? I think it’s just buying into the notion that there has to be some community aspect that’s continually fostered around a culture of excellence. Otherwise, you will let a culture of victimhood and intimidation and harassment and negativity thrive. And recognizing that there was a problem, which I don’t think they still have done, is an opportunity that has just not been seized.
Douthat: Yeah. Just for maximal clarity: You then have a problem that is, in part, about a set of ideas having to do with the value of victimhood that undermines the academic and professional mission of the universities. You have that, and then you have concrete failures to provide basic public safety. Is that a fair distillation?
Mailman: Yes.
Douthat: OK, good. Now let’s talk about what the Trump administration is trying to do about it. Why don’t you describe for me, from your perspective as the point person for this strategy, how the Trump administration has thought about its conflicts with universities and its attempts to attack both of those problems?
Mailman: Yeah, there is an executive order that discusses universities. Specifically, Title VI says that for any federally funded educational institution, they can’t discriminate on the basis of race or national origin. This has been used both on the antisemitism front, which is national origin and race, and then also on what people broadly describe as the D.E.I. front. And so if you’re going to be federally funded, then we’re going to make sure that you don’t discriminate on the basis of race.
It started with investigations, sending letters, and then some people just changed their policies at the beginning.
Douthat: Pause there for a moment. First of all, how did you pick which schools you sent letters to?
Mailman: So I think we primarily relied on the Department of Education to pick what they either knew, based on complaints that have been received, and you had House investigations. A lot of this information was public, here and there. It was in government databases. Some of them are just very out loud, like the U.C. system. So I think there was some flag waving by certain universities.
Douthat: Where they would basically say: We’re primarily hiring minorities for these positions. That kind of thing?
Mailman: Exactly, yes. So let’s just take Harvard, for example. Harvard has since taken down its statistics, but they used to have a big comparison chart of what their new hires used to look like and what their hires looked like, I don’t know, three years ago, something like that. And it used to be pretty heavily white male, and now it’s not. Then they deleted that website.
So you have all of the pieces, where there’s an overt focus on this, where we absolutely want to lower our white males, and then there’s an embarrassment piece of it, where they then took the thing down. That’s what I would consider flag waving.
So the Trump administration has lots of data, and you can’t do everything all at once, so there is a prioritization issue. And I think people have picked up that the Ivy League has been prioritized, which they’re not the only ones, but when you’re thinking about what the consequences are, if you are violating Title VI or just otherwise have bad policies, the federal government doesn’t have to give you grants.
Douthat: But is there also a sense in which the Ivy League sets the tone for elite education, and if you effectively make an example of these schools, you would assume that other schools will fall into line? Is that part of it, too?
Mailman: Yeah. So you want leadership but leadership in the right direction. I think that’s actually something that Harvard would agree with. If you were to ask Harvard: What makes Harvard Harvard? Why is it special? Why don’t you just shut Harvard down, not have it, but you can have all the rest of the Ivies, and like, will the world be the same?
And Harvard would say: No, the world will not be the same. We must have Harvard.
Why is that? Because they’re leaders.
Douthat: I mean, also, the federal government doesn’t actually have the power to shut down Harvard University.
Mailman: No, but in theory —
Douthat: But you can defund Harvard.
Mailman: Right. And what’s Harvard’s special thing? It is that it’s, in theory, a leader, and the question is: A leader in what direction?
So if you get signals from the heights of the leaders in academia that we’re making these changes, then yes, that’s obviously hugely influential for the rest of the country.
Douthat: So what are schools supposed to do to prove to the Trump administration that they are being good examples for the rest of higher education?
Mailman: We actually do plan to have a formal way that universities can say, “We’re doing the right things.” The Trump administration does not want to be all Whac-a-Mole or all negative, but these are the principles that universities and the Trump administration and, frankly, private donors can ascribe to to say, “This makes a great university.” Those have not been public yet, but they will be public, and I think we’re going to have a lot of great universities signing up as the forerunners and saying, “We affirm these things.”
But nothing will be shocking. It will be things like merit-based admissions, merit-based hiring. We’d also like to see some attention to the cost of admissions. Things that are going to just very directly benefit students.
Some look at what your foreign student base looks like — are you importing radicalism? And how are you assessing that? So a commitment to cleaning that up. Foreign funding —
Douthat: Is that primarily about the ideology of students admitted, or is it a problem with the numbers? Like, does the Trump administration have a problem with how many foreign students are at elite universities?
Mailman: I think there’s a fairness issue that the president has talked about with the numbers. These are universities that have huge amounts of federal funding and are supposed to serve American students, and instead they’ve taken on — I think Columbia’s numbers were roughly 50 percent. Harvard’s are around 30 percent foreign students. And that’s not to say anything bad about foreign students. It’s about: What are the opportunities remaining for American students?
Yes, I think there will be some focus on: What’s the right sizing there? And as a university, are you relying on foreign students for money? Or is your number calculated to having a good student experience?
What I think about with the foreign exchange program is that this was supposed to be a program where students come, and it’s an exchange program. You come to the United States, you learn about the United States, you learn about the U.S. culture, and then you take everything that you’ve learned about how great our country is, and you go back to your home country and you spread those ideas.
Instead, if you have so large of a number, you don’t get that, because the percentages have grown so much that you can actually just end up having your own siloed culture.
Douthat: How qualified is the federal government — whether it be the White House, the Education Department or any other unit — to assess some of these things? I think you would concede that it is already tricky, to some degree, to assess how fully in compliance a university is, just with the Supreme Court’s admissions decision.
Just a minute ago, you said: Well, we wouldn’t want universities to just use SAT scores to admit kids. But it seems like if you wanted to have a system where you could rigorously assess racial discrimination in admissions, aren’t there just endless gray areas where it’s just going to be really hard to say who’s complying and who’s not?
Mailman: Definitely, and I think nobody in the Trump administration is trying to run a university. It is too taxing.
Douthat: Nobody actually wants to run a university.
Mailman: Nobody ever, yes. I think there’s a line of: How do you ensure compliance with civil rights and that your taxpayer money is going to a good place versus a bad place? Which is broader than a civil rights question, so you need some level of control. But at the end of the day, you want independent entities.
On the one hand, there’s the Hillsdale model: If you’re going to take the money, then, yeah, there’s going to be strings attached, but you don’t have to take the money. And if your research was —
Douthat: Hillsdale College, just so listeners know, is the conservative liberal arts school in Michigan, one of a few schools that don’t take federal funding.
Mailman: Right, and that’s always an option. If anybody thinks that any of this is too burdensome, especially very well-funded universities, then just do none of it. Just be Hillsdale.
And it’s funny, because for research — I mean, people don’t really understand the massive amount of money that goes to research. It’s billions and billions. Harvard right now has something like $7 billion of promised grants. These are huge, huge numbers. But if all of the research was good, something that was going to cure cancer, then a donor would love to fund that. I mean, to be the person that cured cancer?
Douthat: Well, wait a minute, though. I mean, everybody wants to cure cancer. But donors have finite resources.
One of the assumptions behind public funding of universities is that there are certain goods, including medical research and research for all kinds of different diseases, that you can’t just rely on donor funding for. That has been the theory behind public-private partnerships in American life going back decades.
Do you think that’s good? Do you think the federal government should be funding cancer research?
Mailman: Absolutely.
Douthat: OK. So it’s not just that donors will pick up the slack. There is good research that we want the government funding.
Mailman: There is good research. But your same question of how closely can you actually monitor a university’s ability to just do a good job, be merit-based, not be importing radicalism? These are difficult questions. How are you going to assess that?
It’s the same question, frankly, for all these grants. How are you actually going to monitor where this is being used? What types of research? How great the overhead? When you do have the overhead, is it going to the sports stadium, or is it going to salaries? If it’s going to salaries, then whose? These get to be difficult questions.
The problem is not whether the government should or shouldn’t be funding cancer research — it absolutely should — but the unwieldiness of it has led to basically an unchecked situation. I think it is actually proper to have a right sizing, where universities are relying on the federal government to a certain extent, where these are things that are maybe not close to a breakthrough and that there is an opportunity for the private sector to spend money in ways that are beneficial to society.
And to the extent people have problems with billionaires buying an extra jet or an extra yacht, what are we doing to incentivize people to actually spend on beneficial causes?
Douthat: In effect, you’re saying that Harvard is very good at getting billionaires to give it money and that if some of Harvard’s research funding is threatened, then it’s not a bad thing at all. If Harvard calls up its billionaire donors and says, “Hey, we don’t like what the federal government is asking of us. We want you to fund this cancer research instead,” you’d say, “That’s fine.”
Mailman: Wealthy people funding universities, funding science, funding our future is something that has history in this country.
Douthat: No, it’s absolutely a good thing. But the reason I’m asking about the difficulty of assessing these things is not because you have to have a perfect system in order to have a federal relationship to universities. It’s more that you guys are involved in negotiations, specific negotiations, with universities that have concrete asks. I’m just trying to understand how you get to the concrete ask.
One aspect of this is that the Trump administration has been asking and in some cases has successfully induced elite schools to pay pretty big settlements — fines effectively — to the federal government. How does that fit into the picture? Is this just punishment? Is it revenue for the federal government? What is the purpose of those kinds of settlements?
Mailman: Yeah, these are large numbers. Not to minimize that, but the Brown settlement and the Columbia settlement each represented 1 percent of the endowment. These are things that the universities can afford, and in a sense, it’s giving back a very, very small percentage of money that goes to these schools every year.
So I think there’s a recognition. It’s all — of course, there’s no recognition of fault. These are settlements. But by paying some of this back, I think there is, somewhat for the public, a sense of acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Not a legal sense but sort of a moral sense of “We’ve taken all this money, and we did it in ways that were not merit based, or they weren’t safe for our students, and so we’re paying a small amount of it back.”
But then I think, also having that dollar figure, it actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention. So if you see a headline, and it’s “Columbia Sends $200 Million to the Treasury” and “$21 Million, Largest Ever E.E.O.C. Religious Discrimination Settlement,” actually, when you see numbers like that, then you pay attention, and you look, and then you’re able to learn a little bit more, something maybe you wouldn’t normally learn.
Douthat: And are there people paying attention — not just the public but other college presidents?
Mailman: Yeah, you want to get in early, before the fines are too large. But in general, a settlement on its own without a fine might not be taken as seriously by the public or by other universities as when there is a fine — which, like I said, these are small dollar figures compared to the amounts that they are getting every year from the federal government and from their donors — but I think it provides a seriousness and a focus on these in ways that promises only wouldn’t.
Douthat: Do you think the biggest schools are just too rich? The federal government, under the first Trump administration, passed a very modest endowment tax. Do you think generally it would be better for America if the biggest schools had smaller endowments?
Mailman: So it’s not necessarily the size of the endowment; it’s the application of them. Are you putting your endowment to some sort of positive use, or is this just generating capital so that later you can have a bigger building? There’s no problem with being wealthy. There’s no problem with universities being wealthy, but what are you using your wealth for? I think you can judge on that.
If you’re saying: I need all this money for this research. Where am I going to find it? Well, I did find some of it. And then if you were using some of that money to fund research that would generate a patent that would be very valuable, then that would be beneficial for everybody because you have put that money to good and productive use.
Douthat: I want to ask how ideology and ideological diversity enter into this. Because in one of the publicized letters that the administration sent to Harvard, there was a specific focus on the idea that Harvard should be looking for intellectual diversity in hiring, considering seriously why there are so few conservative and Republican faculty and trying to do something about that.
And the letter took this quite far. It specifically said that Harvard should consider that “each department, field or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse” — I’m quoting from the letter here — and that there should be an audit that goes on a “department-by-department, field-by-field or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis, as appropriate.”
I should stress, this is an area that I, as a conservative with a lot of experience of higher education, take very seriously as a big problem for elite academia, that it isn’t intellectually diverse. But it does seem like, in this ask, you can see the problem with the federal government trying to micromanage this, because it just seems like you get very quickly into an absurd situation where someone in Washington, D.C., is scrutinizing Harvard’s geology department — I don’t even know if Harvard has a geology department, but you take my point — to see if it has enough Trump supporters.
Mailman: This is, I think, the most difficult question, because the answer is, on one hand, obviously I think conservatives want universities to prepare their students — students are going to be, in the real world, confronted with all sorts of thoughts, and they should be prepared for that — so a good university would have some level of intellectual diversity.
Not only that, but to the extent you have universities that are just hotbeds of radicalism, that’s not good for the student. That’s not good for the culture. That’s not good for the campus. That’s bad for the country. So that is all true. And I think the administration believes that intellectual diversity is a key factor to a good university that we would send our kids to.
At the same time, I think we all acknowledge that the federal government’s role in policing that is necessarily limited in the sense that we don’t want the next administration to come in and say: Well, actually, this is the mix that I think is the best.
Douthat: Meaning, a Democratic administration coming in and calling up the University of Kansas and saying: Why haven’t you hired 17 more leftists for X department?
Mailman: Exactly. And it’s a ridiculous thing to think through, because how many more leftists can you possibly hire if you are this saturated already? But we —
Douthat: Well, but I think that that particular example would not happen, but we saw in the Obama administration and, to some degree, in the Biden administration, that Democratic administrations were very comfortable using some of the same levers the Trump administration is using to push college campuses in particular directions on how to handle sexual assault and how to handle transgender issues and so on.
I think one of the critiques from a libertarian perspective of what the Trump administration is doing is that you are taking that model and turbocharging it, and a Democratic administration could say: Hey, all these Catholic hospitals seem to be getting a lot of public health care funding, and yet they won’t perform gender reassignment surgeries. Let’s do something about that.
There’s an endless escalatory spiral once the federal government is providing private institutions that get public money with marching orders, right? I think that’s a reasonable right concern.
Mailman: Right. So civil rights, I think, is easy. Meritocracy is good, and the hope is that if you are actually treating people on the basis of their merit — whether that’s test scores or whether that’s personal successes or whatever — you do tend to handle the intellectual diversity piece by accident, because it’s not going to be the case that every excellent person thinks the same thing. So there’s that.
But then also, that’s why it’s important that this process come underway, where there’s a conversation, with universities and with donors and with the Trump administration all together, about what it actually means to be a great university and to have buy-in. Because I think one of the reasons why some of these universities have made changes without provocation from the Trump administration — or, in the case of Columbia, even though there was provocation and even though it was a deal — it’s because they wanted to. They wanted to, and they thought that this was a good thing, and they were tired of being held hostage by their left wing.
And actually they want intellectual diversity. They don’t want another person who’s just going to have the same, like, “We’ve got another climate change person,” “We’ve got another gender studies person” — I think they want it. And so giving the universities the permission to do this sometimes requires a strong statement from the government that’s almost like a scapegoat, but I think —
Douthat: I think that’s right, just based on my own experience living in a college town and speaking to people who work in higher education. There is some degree, first, to which the Trump administration is pushing on an open door and also some degree to which leaders of universities are happy to say, “Oh, we didn’t want to do this, but the Trump administration made us do it,” but in fact, it’s something that they themselves want to do.
At the same time, though, I do think that there is some tension between saying “We want schools to hire just based on merit” and “We want schools to have a lot more intellectual diversity,” because the reality is — and this is where the traditional left-wing argument around affirmative action always made a certain sense — like, you have to create pipelines. I think it was reasonable in the 1960s to say there just aren’t good pipelines for getting a lot of African American kids into elite colleges. I think it’s reasonable for conservatives today to say there aren’t good pipelines for getting people who aren’t left wing into certain academic departments. But I just think you aren’t going to get there by saying “merit alone.” You have to say, “No, universities have to do proactive things that are going to be intentioned a little bit.”
Mailman: The affirmative action for the conservative is an actual reality. When I was in Harvard, we had maybe one and a half conservative professors. And I think the university —
Douthat: Surely Adrian Vermeule counts for at least, like, 3.7.
Mailman: [Laughs.] That is true. But the pipelines thing, I think, is different than actual affirmative action and looking at your criteria, too.
If what you are prioritizing is how many times you’ve been published in some leftist magazine, then of course a conservative is not going to compete there. But I think other universities have found successes in having some adjunct programs. You’re not a professor, but we’re going to bring you in, and you can teach a January course, or you can have a clinic or something like that. So I think this problem starts incrementally solving itself in a way that doesn’t ultimately require affirmative action.
And then groups like the Federalist Society try to identify people who they think would be good professors and try to teach them how to do that.
Douthat: Right. I don’t think there’s any problem with the pipeline in law schools, but I think the Federalist Society is a fairly distinctive case.
Let me throw out another seeming tension here, which is around issues about antisemitism. Clearly there are certain things that universities have tolerated or allowed in protests in the last few years — just overt harassment and intimidation of Jewish students. And I think there, it’s very straightforward what the administration is asking for.
But then there’s a larger, very blurry zone of critiques of the policies of the state of Israel and critiques of Zionism, where the administration has seemed to ask in some cases for something that, again, looks more like micromanaging of particular departments, saying: Well, we’re not going to have radical critics of Israel here and there and so on. That, again, seems like a thumb on the scale in intellectual debates.
Mailman: When you say the Trump administration has asked for them, I acknowledge that there are some letters that were sent by the antisemitism task force, in some way, that either incorporated the I.H.R.A. definition or otherwise were perceived to have been speech codes.
Douthat: Right, these are strong definitions of antisemitism that at least some people on the left would say rule out what should be legitimate critiques of Israel.
Mailman: Right, but when you look at what President Trump and at the senior level, what has actually happened — it’s not that.
The Columbia deal — and I think everyone would acknowledge that Columbia had a major antisemitism problem — but the Columbia deal in no way creates any speech code, whether it be on Israel or anything else. It does not — it specifically says that this is not intended to create any First Amendment conflict or otherwise govern speech on Columbia’s campus.
There’s a concern, and I think there are people in the administration who probably are more in favor of speech constraints and then people who are less in favor of speech constraints, and that’s just the way the Trump administration works, where people have different views of where that line is. And I think it’s a difficult conversation of what’s the line between harassment and being unable to actually function on campus versus fair criticism that people, even if they don’t like it, should hear. That’s not a definable line. That is a difficult line.
In sussing that out, at the end of the day, where the Trump administration landed is on the more free speech side of things, which is evident in the final terms of the Columbia deal.
Douthat: OK. Let’s talk for a minute about the legality of the approach the Trump administration has taken, because I think you have conceded, to some degree, that in all of these zones, there are gray areas and blurry lines.
However, the administration has also moved pre-emptively to cut funding to — correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that what has happened repeatedly is that critiques have been lodged, investigations have been opened, and then funding has been cut before the investigation is complete. And this is where the Trump administration has been rebuked in court for this, most recently in a case involving Harvard itself, that you are essentially assuming the violation before the negotiation is actually finished. Is that a fair critique?
Mailman: That is certainly what Harvard says.
Douthat: Yes.
Mailman: I think it’s different than that, though. So, yes, Title VI, which says you can’t discriminate on the basis of race, is a bar on funding. If you are found to violate Title VI, that’s not grants that are at issue. That’s your student loans. That’s Pell Grants. I mean, that’s a big deal.
Douthat: If you are found to have violated it.
Mailman: If you are found. Now, what the Trump administration has done is not find a Title VI violation prior to the process. I mean, the Title VI violation was found — H.H.S. did find them in violation of Title VI and referred that case over to D.O.J. to litigate and informed the accreditor for Harvard. But this is an entity that doesn’t share the values, basically, of the administration, and there are various statutes and various regulations that give the administration that sort of discretion over how it can spend its own money.
The lawsuit was basically an argument that, oh, well, they’re just saying that, but what they’re actually doing is short-circuiting the Title VI process.
Well, no, that —
Douthat: It does seem, in fairness, from our entire conversation, that the goal of the Trump administration’s strategy is not to micromanage how Harvard does cancer research or whatever; it is to change university policy on hiring and discrimination and antisemitism. So doesn’t it seem like that’s true, that you are picking these grants as a lever to affect something unrelated to them?
Mailman: Having Harvard change its policies would be great. But at the same time, if they don’t, that’s fine; we’re just not going to fund it.
It’s not like it’s taking over Harvard. They sued us. We didn’t sue them. It’s not a forced change. It is actually just that there’s a portion — not even all, there is a portion — of Harvard’s grants that we just decide should go to somewhere else, maybe another university, maybe Brown, maybe Princeton, maybe Yale.
Douthat: I’m just going to express some skepticism that the Trump administration has sat down and said: We really think that the University of Kansas’ cancer research program is just way better than Harvard’s, and we’re just going to cut that funding.
It seems like the administration is going after the areas where Harvard is, by general agreement, most effective and successful, because that seems like a useful lever to change other areas of administration policy.
Mailman: Yeah, but at the end of the day —
Douthat: Isn’t that a naïve reading? A simple reading, right?
Mailman: It’s not a full comparison of all universities across the nation. But at the end of the day, Harvard reacted to a letter that asked for a few simple changes with a lawsuit that basically said: Instead of us showing any amount of good faith effort to commit ourselves to the policies that are important to the United States, we’re going to instead say we refuse to even answer you.
These are billions of federal dollars, and I think that the funder of that can ask for a basic relationship.
Douthat: All right, well let’s end by looking at the future. Imagine it is 2030, and I guess we can imagine it’s either a Democratic or a Republican administration. Give me a definition of success in higher-ed policy. In five years, in seven years or eight years, what does the landscape look like if your negotiations with and pressure on universities are successful?
Mailman: I think universities will return to a merit mission, and that’ll be in admissions, hiring and research, and that’ll be with its relationship to the federal government, that the federal government will be funding institutions that can be perceived as excellent. And maybe they’re not today excellent — maybe they’re these institutions that are trying to be excellent — but that the mission of universities will not be diversity. The mission of universities won’t be equity, but they will be excellence, and that will be rewarded with a tighter, closer and better federal relationship. That’s with regard to the federal government.
I think policy’s larger than that. Policy is: What’s its effect in the world, and how does it change our culture? And my hope is that the people who are graduating from our universities carry values that will uplift Western civilization and our country.
That installation of values is obviously not something that the federal government can necessarily micromanage, but it’s something that the university itself can recommit itself to, in determining: How can we prepare our student body to be true leaders and to advance our country in ways that’ll be better for everybody?
Douthat: And to the extent that universities don’t act collaboratively with this change, do you imagine a landscape where there really is a shift in prestige and where students go? Let’s say, from the Northeast to the South or Southwest? Would you imagine a shaken-up U.S. News and World Report rankings or something as a possible outcome of all of this?
Mailman: Yeah, I do think that as universities decide that they don’t want a merit-seeking mission, that’s not attractive for parents, that’s not attractive for students, and it’s not attractive for the federal government. It’s also not attractive for donors.
And they’ll have to be more out loud about that. I think that’s the goal: You can choose who you want to be. You want to make no changes? You want to commit yourself to victimhood? You want to oppose the idea of merit? Say it out loud, so that students, parents, donors and the government can know and that each can dedicate their resources to those universities that are making our country better.
Douthat: Last question, then. From my perspective — you can probably sense this from some of the questions I’ve asked — the core weakness, to me, of university culture is a kind of stifling intellectual conformism. But it also seems to me, just from watching the Trump administration in its battles with universities, the hardest for government policy to address without either falling afoul of the First Amendment or getting into impossible micromanaging.
And it seems to me that a really shrewd federal strategy could take you from a world where 2 percent of the Harvard faculty are conservatives to a world where 4 percent are conservative and could get you some slightly more meaningful intellectual diversity. But to get beyond that, you need — as you just suggested — some kind of larger cultural shift.
Universities did not become liberal because the federal government told them to become liberal. They became liberal because academic culture moved substantially to the left in an organic way. The same with student culture. Can you imagine a shift in the culture that would create greater intellectual diversity on college campuses?
Mailman: If we’re talking about federal and nonfederal levers, a couple of things. One, I think the same change that the Federalist Society has brought for law schools could be focused on.
And I want to take a moment for Charlie Kirk and Turning Point, because the sort of quiet loserness of the Republican Party when I was in college doesn’t exist now. I think people are braver now and they have community now. You can see a Turning Point-type organization try and figure out how to make professors and how to bring that energy into leadership levels. I think you could do some conservative organizing around already successful groups.
And then, I think, just competition. President Trump said he wanted to take Harvard’s money and give it to trade schools. Obviously you’re not going to take N.I.H. research money and give it to the local cosmetology school, but I think the general idea there is you can have a robust intellectual environment in a lot of different places, and it doesn’t have to be the traditional university model.
If you just want to learn about A.I. or if you want to do something different and it’s maybe not your traditional liberal arts, then having more options and universities wanting to still attract those people — that type of competition, I think, will increase the amount of intellectual diversity that universities have to offer. Continuing to find ways to provide competition is also important.
Douthat: All right, May Mailman, thank you so much for joining me.
Mailman: Thank you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Raina Raskin, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Betanzos and Victoria Chamberlin. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker, Efim Shapiro and Sophia Lanman. Cinematography by Marina King, Valeria Verastegui and Nathan Taylor. Video editing by Arpita Aneja. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
The post The Grand Strategy Behind Trump’s Crackdown on Academia appeared first on New York Times.
