If the University of Virginia
agrees to the terms dictated by a memo sent last Wednesday by Secretary of
Education Linda McMahon, then this essay you are reading could cost the
university all of its federal support—research funds, financial aid,
everything.
“Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as
necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to
transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish,
belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” states the
“Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that McMahon sent to Vanderbilt
University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University
of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the
University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the
University of Virginia.
I am purposefully “belittling” a
“conservative idea.” Or maybe I am not. I’m not really sure what the legal
threshold of “belittling” is, and while I have a pretty good idea which ideas
should be considered “conservative” (I studied American conservatism in
graduate school with one of the premier historians of the subject), I am pretty
sure McMahon does not.
So let’s run this “belittlement”
experiment: The policies and goals of the “compact” McMahon proposed to nine
university presidents is silly. It’s written by a team of people who have no
idea how higher education is run or funded. It’s a petty effort at federal,
centralized control of a collection of private and state-run
institutions.
Okay. So that’s belittlement,
almost certainly. But is the idea of tight federal control of private and state
institutions “conservative?” Not by most notions of American conservatism,
which have traditionally deferred to private actors and toward a model of
federalism that vests more authority in state and local governance than in the
national bureaucracy.
It’s important to note that this
intervention into higher education is unlike the previous mob-like extortion
moves on Columbia, Harvard, the University of California, and (again) my own University
of Virginia. In those, the Trump administration told these universities they
had to make specific changes in how they do their work or who runs the
university under the threat of losing substantial research funding—regardless
of the public value of that research.
This “compact” is more like an
invitation to borrow money from the mob, with substantial control and future
penalties assured. If any university agrees to this proposal, it will be under
federal control and subject to some unpredictable, arbitrary, extreme
penalties.
But let’s assume that
“conservatism” now means “things President Donald Trump and his Cabinet want to
do.” Then imagine that the University of Virginia, my employer, signed on to
this statement, as McMahon has requested.
If I am considered a representative
of the Department of Media Studies, or as head of the Center for Media and
Citizenship, then either or both of those must be eliminated for facilitating
my public statements belittling a “conservative idea.”
If, as the text of the compact
reads, the Department of Justice—without
any clear due process or standards—determines that the university “willfully or negligently violated this
agreement” by retaining my academic department or center, it “shall lose access
to the benefits of this agreement for a period of no less than 1 year.” Those
“benefits” include some vague promise of more federal support. The letter and
text of the “compact” do not list or outline specifically what such benefits
might be.
If the Justice Department determines that signatory universities fail to
live up to the compact by, for example, tolerating faculty such as myself writing articles
such as this, for two years in a row “all monies advanced by the U.S.
government during the year of any violation shall be returned to the U.S.
government.”
So yeah. If I keep writing what I’m
writing and teaching as I teach and supporting students as I have been
supporting them, then there is a very good chance that the University of
Virginia—if it signs on—would have to fire me or face the complete elimination
of federal support and thus have to shut its doors and turn off the
lights.
It gets worse. Right after the sentence banning the “belittlement” of
“conservative ideas,” the document proclaims, “Given the importance of academic
freedom to the marketplace of ideas, signatories shall adopt a policy
protecting academic freedom in classrooms, teaching, research, and
scholarship.”
Yes, that next sentence directly
contradicts the previous one. You are not misreading it. This document is that
stupid. Whoops. That’s more belittlement.
Now, those who work at the Department of Education should probably know
that every major, non-religious, and state college and university in the United
States has had policies protecting academic freedom since the 1950s, when state
and federal leaders frequently purged faculties of professors who studied or
proclaimed positions that ran counter to the mainstream values of the time.
Academic freedom policies came from faculties, not the government. Governments
are the enemies of academic freedom, not their protectors. This current
administration is the greatest threat to academic freedom and scientific
research since the ebb of McCarthyism. And this compact is just more evidence
that it wants to dictate what we teach, what we research, what drugs we develop,
and how we express ourselves.
However, the document is chock full
of reasonable-sounding proclamations, all of which are already embedded in
academic governance and culture.
“Signatories commit to rigorous,
good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among
faculty, students, and staff at all levels and to sharing the results of such
assessments with the public; and to seek such a broad spectrum of viewpoints
not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department,
school, and teaching unit,” the document reads. Now, that sounds pretty good.
And it is. It is, in fact, what every major university strives for and mostly
achieves.
The trick here is that McMahon does
not actually care about intellectual diversity. If she did, she would see that
every department is loaded full of ornery, argumentative, eccentric voices
trained in different methods of research, pursuing vastly different subjects,
and often battling out their differences ad nauseum. That’s the boring, ugly
truth about intellectual diversity at universities. We are so intellectually
diverse we put ourselves to sleep.
What McMahon means to say, along
with too many pundits who can’t be bothered to do any research or reporting, is
that she wants political diversity—as if truth and knowledge map along the twenty-first
century American partisan spectrum. I’ve never understood why it mattered
whether a calculus or Spanish professor votes for Bernie Sanders or Donald
Trump. But apparently it matters to some people. Anyone who pays attention to
how and what we teach would not bother with such trivialities. Standard U.S.
politics hardly ever enters most classrooms. We are too busy for all that. Or
maybe we are just too disengaged for that. Either way, it’s not really a problem.
Still, I happen to know of no
Marxist professors in the University of Virginia department of economics. Like
most such departments it’s overwhelmingly populated by those who embrace
econometric analysis and model-building in the neoclassical tradition. I know
of no Marxists in either of the two business schools either. I know of none in
the public policy school.
If the university signs this
compact, would it have to hire a slew of extreme left-wing scholars to
“balance” out those four influential units of the university? I would hope not.
Marxist theory has little to offer those fields of knowledge (fighting words
for some, I know, but it’s true).
But maybe someday the biology
department would have to hire a Biblical creationist to “balance” out all the
real scientists. Or the astronomy department would have to better represent the
voices of the millions of Americans who believe the Earth is flat and no human
has ever walked on the moon. Don’t laugh. Not so long ago no one took
anti-vaccination cranks seriously. Now look at us.
Still, because the economics
department is embedded in neoclassical ideology and because it’s rigorously
empirical, my colleagues in that department are more than happy to teach
students and proclaim publicly that Trump’s tariffs are terrible for the global
and U.S. economies.
They would be glad to explain to
anyone who would listen that the Great Depression was deepened, if not caused,
by high tariffs that stifled the abilities of various countries to leverage
their advantages and let goods, labor, capital, and ideas flow freely. In the nineteenth
century people called that position liberalism. We more recently call it
neoliberalism.
Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of twentieth-century
conservatism, hated protectionism and fought for free trade. Since Reagan’s
time it’s rare to find an academic economist who would argue for high tariffs
or other forms of protectionist policy. There is a reason for that: Emprically,
Reagan was right about tariffs. He trusted the economists who had run the
numbers and debated it all out over 40 years.
So does the University of Virginia
economics department “belittle” a “conservative idea” now that the right-wing
of the American political spectrum opposes free trade and rejects solid
economic analysis? Well, I suppose that if it does, then Reagan did as well.
Thus all universities that sign on to the compact would be in serious danger
just by having economists on staff who are honest and open about the
established principles of the field.
This essay and most of what my colleagues and I write for the public would
also be dangerous if not forbidden under this compact. It states, “All university employees, in their capacity
as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to
societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a
direct impact upon the university.”
I could no longer write publicly or
do interviews about copyright law, social media policy, and media ownership.
Maybe that’s no big loss to society. But when my colleagues in the medical or
nursing schools may not do public service work encouraging the HPV vaccine or
sickle-cell anemia research, then we do suffer greatly.
When I teach, I look out over a
field of young faces filled with curiosity, all with different skills,
interests, and potential contributions to the university community and society.
That is the value of true diversity. Every ecologist and economist will tell
you that monocultures are paths to misery and demise. That’s why admissions
offices take seriously when an applicant has a talent for playing trombone,
dancing ballet, writing poetry, coding software, or hitting a slider. Holistic
admissions has given the university and the country a panoply of excellent and
energetic leaders and creators.
Under this compact talent diversity
would end. “University admissions
decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria
published on the University’s website and available to all prospective
applicants and members of the public,” it states. “Universities shall publicly report anonymized data
for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or
other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin,
and sex.”
Grades and SAT scores would dictate admissions. Not only would this favor
applicants from wealthier families and school districts (and we all know what
that would mean), it would squeeze out any other factor, such as interest,
ambition, grit, or wisdom. I wonder if the enthusiasm for this compact from the
University of Texas (my alma mater) would wane once the board of regents
realizes that it would end football recruiting as we know it.
Other provisions of this compact
would rig admissions against the empirical standards it seems to guarantee.
Signatory universities would have to cap admission of foreign students at 15
percent of undergraduates, regardless of how those applicants score. And by
enforcing archaic and unscientific definitions of gender, universities would
exclude excellent students who might otherwise thrive, but for a federally
enforced culture of discrimination, cruelty, and the constant threat of
harassment, humiliation, and violence.
Despite defunding vast areas of scientific research and continually
deriding the work of scientists, the Trump administration, through this
document, seems to hate students of art, music, and history even more. “Any
university with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student
will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs
(with exceptions, as desired, for families of substantial means),” the compact
reads. That cost would be made up by those pursuing degrees in French, just
like the degree McMahon earned from East Carolina University.
The incoherence and contradictions
of this compact reveal just how little thought goes into Trump policies, even
those that affect millions of people and billions of dollars. There was no
accompanying or supporting study offering data analysis and conflicting
perspectives on how to address the very real challenges to American higher
education and how it succeeds and fails. That would require effort. It would
demand patience. It would examine complex causes and effects. It would delve
into history. It would trust expertise.
It would require … all the things
the great American university system demands of its scholars and students. Any
university leader who signs on to this compact would betray everything good and
solid about the university and would do deep and permanent harm to the United
States and the world.
The post Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down appeared first on New Republic.
