Cristian Farias:

Did you know that colleges and universities have First Amendment rights? This is Cristian Farias, and on this week’s episode of The Bully’s Pulpit, we’re taking a hard look at how Donald Trump’s campaign of extortion against colleges and universities, which he’s threatened to defund, is incompatible with freedom of speech and academic freedom. All the chaos we’re seeing with Trump’s supposed concern for anti-Semitism, the mass cancellations of student visas, the travel bans, and critical research funding that’s hanging by a thread among other overreach is designed to bring institutions of higher education to heel.

Michael Roth:

The Trump administration is using anti-anti-Semitism as a cover for trying to get control of colleges and universities. Canceling hundreds of millions of dollars of grants on quantum computing or Alzheimer research or diabetes research has nothing to do with protecting Jews. It is a way of insisting to these schools that they toe the line, that they express loyalty to the administration, and that they act in accord with the priorities of the president.

Cristian Farias:

That was Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University and an academic leader who has been unafraid to use The Bully Pulpit to denounce how higher education is under assault like never before. This week, HEA legal scholar Genevieve Lakier will help us understand how this First Amendment problem concerns all of us and thus goes beyond just elite universities. What better way to start our weekly news segment, which once again is more bad news than good, than with the latest from this brave new world of extortionist dealmaking.

As many have been predicting, including us on this show, the Trump-dominated Federal Communications Commission has allowed entertainment companies Skydance and Paramount to merge. This $8 billion acquisition comes with strings. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has said CBS News, which is part of this transaction, will have to install a so-called bias monitor, apparently not to protect its editorial independence, but rather to ensure the storied news organization, which produces award-winning 60 Minutes, meets the standards of the president. We cover this deal in depth and the sorted tale of Trump’s baseless lawsuit against CBS on episode five. Anna Gomez, the FCC commissioner who was a guest on that episode, called the approval, “another part of this administration’s campaign of censorship and control.”

The Guardian reports that federal prosecutors in or near Los Angeles have been dropping charges against protesters accused of violence during the mass demonstrations that rocked LA in June. Many of the charges, initially filed by the Department of Homeland Security, have either been dismissed outright or downgraded to lesser charges. Leading local advocates are condemning the prosecutions as intimidation tactics and violations of people’s right to protest. One advocate described it as, “a way to detain people, hold them in custody, instill fear, and discourage people from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

The following item has flown under the radar somewhat, but not for First Amendment watchers. According to the New York Times, Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog that keeps close tabs on right-wing extremism in the news, is fighting for its life. Its troubles are yarn, but they stem from a lawsuit that X, formerly known as Twitter, filed against Media Matters over its report claiming that X was allowing ads to appear next to user-generated anti-Semitic content. This, of course, led a number of advertisers to flee the platform, and then X retaliated Against Media Matters in federal court. This litigation plus a separate investigation by the Federal Trade Commission have dealt a financial blow to Media Matters, which believes that this legal campaign against it is in affront to its own First Amendment rights to report on right-wing extremism. The organization has vowed to continue fighting back.

After months of backroom uncertainty and fears of capitulation, Columbia University has struck a deal with the Trump administration to restore billions in unlawfully suspended research funding. Under the terms of this unprecedented agreement, which happened without judicial oversight, Columbia has agreed to pay a $200 million fine to the federal government to restore the funding and to make pending investigations go away. Columbia will pay an additional $21 billion to settle an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. None of these concessions guarantee Trump will leave them alone. Quite the opposite. It emboldens the administration to keep going.

This week, Bryan University struck its own deal with the government following the Columbia blueprint. Although their deal was not nearly as bad as Columbia’s, it signals trouble for other institutions. Indeed, Duke University was just targeted with its own list of demands from the Trump administration, which means the shakedowns will continue. Case in point, Harvard itself, which has drawn praise for defending its First Amendment rights in court against the administration, is reportedly considering its own deal. In other words, its own ransom to get Trump off its back. A judge held a major hearing in its lawsuit last week, and the legal odds seem to be in the Ivy League’s favor. So what to make of these reported negotiations? Harvard is not talking given the litigation, so this could be yet another trial balloon from the administration itself to gauge public sentiment, which in Trump world can always make or break a deal. With all this talk of dealmaking or rumors of dealmaking, we thought we’d focus this week on the scary time for colleges and universities and how their own First Amendment rights are under siege like never before.

With us, to go deep on the legal issues surrounding these shakedowns of higher ed, is Genevieve Lakier, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Chicago and a former senior visiting scholar at the Knight Institute. She and I shared the stage last fall during a great conference on the First Amendment rights of immigrants. We’ll put the YouTube link in our show notes. Genevieve, it’s so great to share the mic again with you. Welcome to The Bully’s Pulpit.

Genevieve Lakier:

Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Cristian Farias:

This week’s show is all about Donald Trump’s campaign of extortion against colleges and universities in which he has withheld federal research money and demanded and seems to be winning major concessions. In what ways is this a First Amendment problem?

Genevieve Lakier:

That is the million-dollar question because in so many ways, it should be a First Amendment problem. I complain all the time that the First Amendment is not strong enough. There was a line, I think, for many years among progressives that the First Amendment has been weaponized, and it’s too big because it extends to commercial speech and corporate speech, and that might be a problem, but my line had always been, it’s too weak. It doesn’t protect us enough against government repression, but this campaign against the universities, this is actually an area of law where the First Amendment should provide very strong protection.

First of all, there is a huge body of law about how much the First Amendment cares about academic freedom and about universities. So in targeting the universities, Trump was targeting not just private institutions, speech institutions, expressive institutions, which we typically think get strong protection under the First Amendment, he was also targeting universities which are among the most protected of all private institutions because they not only have free speech rights, they have academic freedom rights, and yet, here is Trump attacking these universities, trying to say they need to change their admissions policies. They need to change how they teach about the Middle East. They need to change how they regulate speech on campus. You would think that this would be an easy First Amendment problem.

However, in many contexts, it just hasn’t become a First Amendment problem at all in the sense that the universities are choosing not to defend themselves on the extremely strong First Amendment grounds they have, which makes me think that there is actually a bigger First Amendment problem here. There’s a problem with the doctrine because the people, the rights holders, the universities who should be invoking it to protect themselves against exactly what Trump is doing are not using it.

Cristian Farias:

Implicit in what you just said is the concept of the government jawboning these private actors to do its bidding, which is something you’ve also thought a lot about. Can you explain a little bit how this concept is related to what we’re seeing today and whether or not the jawboning doctrine provides a useful framework to understand what’s going on?

Genevieve Lakier:

I’d be happy to because actually, it’s the fact that the court so recently has provided such strong protection against jawboning. That makes the failure of university administrators to rely on this doctrine especially maddening and puzzling. Jawboning refers to basically when the government threatens a First Amendment rights holder like a private institution like a university, say, and says, “Look, if you don’t shut up or shut up someone else’s speech, I’m going to do something really bad to you using my authority. I’m going to not approve your merger, or I’m going to deny you federal funds, or I’m going to put your best friend in jail.” Whatever it may be, it’s a threat of some kind of legal sanctions. It’s just a way that officials get private actors to participate in their own censorship. So you make Columbia agree to suppress its speech and speech of its students because if they don’t do that, bad things will happen.

There had been protection against this in the cases just last year in a case called NRA v. Vullo, a unanimous Supreme Court reaffirmed that the First Amendment rule against jawboning is very strong. It’s categorical. The government may never use informal threats of punishment in order to coerce the suppression of speech by private institutions or by private speakers and also made clear that it applies even when the government is not threatening to put you in jail, it’s merely threatening enforcement actions, and even when in another universe, it could do what it’s doing perfectly fine, it’s just doing it for the wrong reasons. And until Vullo, it wasn’t entirely clear that was a violation of the First Amendment, and after Vullo, it is crystal clear. This was excellent unanimous Supreme Court precedent that is very recent. And so, jawboning is available as an extremely strong weapon that not only universities, but law firms, media companies, schools, all of the private institutions that are being threatened in this way by the Trump administration, they have it available to them. The question is whether they choose to use it.

Cristian Farias:

One of the institutions that has used it is Harvard, and they’re the ones that have sued the administration under the First Amendment. Now, this case, obviously, is still in its very preliminary stages, and it’s a very complex case insofar as it involves numerous agencies and enforcement actions. How do you think the Supreme Court will react to it if and when it gets there?

Genevieve Lakier:

Honestly, I doubt it’s going to get there. I don’t think so because Columbia didn’t bring a case. AUP, an organization of which I’m a member, has brought a case on behalf of Columbia researchers, but the university absolutely refused in the face of appeals from all manner of First Amendment scholars and administrative law officials and interested stakeholders begging Columbia to stand on its very strong First Amendment rights and defend against what the Trump administration was doing. It didn’t. Harvard also, I think, tried very hard to appease rather than to fight, and it was only when it was pushed to by the extreme nature of the government’s demands that it decided to fight. Since then, I think it is still fighting with one hand tied behind its back because it really wants to make a deal. And so, my guess is that this case will go away, although you never know because the administration may be so aggressive in what they demand that Harvard feels like it cannot comply.

But I think the problem here is that the court cases, they’re like you put a brick in the wall when the water is coming in, but the Trump administration has a sledgehammer, and it’s pulling down so many bricks. And so, as you say, it’s complicated. It takes lots of hours and lots of work to put together these briefs and to file these motions, and you’re defending yourself against innumerable agencies, lots of different actions because the thing about jawboning is that it involves any use of government power to try and pressure a private institution into not speaking or censoring other people’s speech.

The Trump administration has proven itself to be incredibly aggressive and creative in the tool that it’s willing to use to try and bully these universities into submission. And so, I do think that both Columbia and Harvard and Brown and Johns Hopkins and Chicago and Stanford, all of the universities that are in some ways in a similar position who are maybe the next in line even if they haven’t already been targeted, I think they think, “We can fight this. We have strong legal grounds to fight this particular act, but there are so many other things that Trump administration can do. Do we really want to fight it again and again?” I think they should. I 100% think they should, but I do think that is the logic that led Columbia to act as it did, and my guess is it will lead Harvard to seek a deal rather than to continue to fight this in court.

Cristian Farias:

The ABA recently filed a lawsuit against all the law firm executive orders, and I’m curious if maybe there’s a more overarching collective kind of case that could be brought to deal with this once and for all because it strikes me that perhaps this piecemeal approach is what is both a weakness and the reason why they’re not fighting these orders.

Genevieve Lakier:

Yeah, I agree. I think that there should be much more collective action, and it is interesting that the law firms initially seem to be following the same path, that there was individual deals, and then some firms were trying to resist and it wasn’t clear that there was collective action occurring. But since the early days, I think there has been an effort by at least those who want to fight to band together, and the ABA has been playing a very good, I think, useful role in that, although it has also then in response become the target of the administration’s attacks, which would happen to anyone who defends themselves. I wish universities did the same thing. I’ll just say practically speaking, the administration’s lawyers, the lawyers in the DOJ are overburdened.

Cristian Farias:

Yes, totally.

Genevieve Lakier:

So much litigation. They’ve lost so many lawyers. It is so hard to be fighting all of these court cases. So I think the administration strategy is to flood the zone, and it is working very effectively in lots of different ways. I do think those being targeted by the administration should also try and flood the zone. They should just fight everything all the time because I don’t think the administration right now has the resources to defend itself.

The problem is though the two parties are not equally situated. The administration can flood the zone without that much fear because it controls our tax revenues. It controls the army. It controls regulatory permissions. It controls everything. Any institution that chooses to fight the government is putting a target on its back, and there are lots of institutions that just do not want to do that. And so, I just think lots of administrators of universities are just really risk-averse, and they do not want to just fight because they think, “Well, my institution is going to be harmed, or I’m going to be targeted.” And so, I think there is a real collective action problem.

Cristian Farias:

Yeah, totally. Now, obviously-

Genevieve Lakier:

And can I make one other point about that?

Cristian Farias:

Sure, go ahead.

Genevieve Lakier:

Yeah, I think the bad dynamics of the university versus the law firm campaigns, and I’m not saying we don’t know what the end result is going to be. We don’t know what we’re going to end up, but right now, law firms look like they’re defending much more vigorously against these attacks than most universities. It’s a product of lots of different things, but at least one of the factors I think that must be impacting this is the different internal structures of control. The people who are making the decisions at universities are not the faculty. It’s the administrators and the boards of trustees, the presidents and the boards of trustees, many of whom have been appointed there or placed there because they are very rich or they represent important corporate interests. And so, their interests are not aligned with the faculty. They are thinking, “Oh, how can we maximize the revenue potential of this institution? The way to do that is to maintain good relations with the federal government, not to fight it.”

If you ask faculty at the universities, I think across the board, they would say, “Fight, fight,” but the faculty don’t really have a say. Whereas in law firms, although there are still decision-makers, the partners, the actual lawyers who are being targeted here have much more institutional sway. They’re, especially among the partners, much more I guess horizontally structured, and I think that makes a difference. I think the internal governance crisis of American higher education is having a very significant and detrimental effect on its ability to fight back against Trump. I guess I would put it internal authoritarianism in the university is making it weak when faced with the very external, very serious authoritarianism of the Trump administration.

Cristian Farias:

What do you make of the, quote, unquote, “settlement” that Columbia reached with the Trump administration?

Genevieve Lakier:

I think it’s pretty sad. I know that or I imagine that the Columbia administration thinks that they got away with a pretty good deal because there is language at the top of the settlement agreement that says the administration doesn’t have the right to interfere with teaching and research and things like that. I think the administration probably thinks, “Okay, we’ve defended our core values. We’ve done a good job.” There are two things to point out. The first is that the provisions in the agreement create an ongoing monitoring relationship between a government-approved auditor essentially who’s going to be constantly looking over the university’s shoulders and trying to check what it’s doing. It’s not exactly consent to agree with a judicial monitor. In some ways, maybe it’s worse because it’s all private. None of this is going through the courts. It just means that the administration now has an entree into Columbia where it can constantly and consistently say, “Oh, you’re not doing this right, or you’re not doing this right.”

Now, I think that is very disturbing, and I think it is surprisingly strategic and clever, I think, of the Trump administration to realize that, in fact, the best way to wield power is to create a permanent structure essentially within the university where the government can continue to dictate to the university how it shall act in certain ways. And so, I find that extremely distressing and a bad sign, and I think something that the administration is going to demand of all other universities that want to come to the table. And the second is, Cristian, just as you said, the fact that this is ungrounded in any judicial proceeding or law, the fact that the settlement agreement is in effect, Columbia is saying, “We’re not going to defend our rights.” We have extremely strong procedural grounds under Title VI to defend against what the administration is doing.

We maybe have other administrative law grounds, and we have incredibly strong First Amendment rights that we could defend here, but instead. We’re just going to give in. We’re going to waive all of those rights and say, “Hey, administration, this is what we’re doing. Please don’t be mad at us.” And I think it is both a mistake. I do not think appeasement goes anywhere good, but it is also sacrificing the rights and interests of their students and faculty by allowing the federal government ongoing information and capacity to continue to demand of the administration that it do things to repress their rights, both to be in this country and to speak, to protest, and to assemble. So I think it’s just very sad.

Cristian Farias:

All of this dealmaking is happening without the courts. They’re out of the question, so it seems to me, almost by design, courts can’t be the answer here. So what does that leave us with? What is the answer?

Genevieve Lakier:

I think courts are playing an important role right now. There is a lot of First Amendment litigation occurring. A lot of the lower court opinions, I think, are excellent, and the judicial decisions have been stopping the administration in a lot of different ways. And so, I guess I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the courts. I think we are seeing the First Amendment play an important role in limiting and being a obstacle that the administration has to route around. So it’s not that the courts are not doing anything. They’re just not doing enough. When faced with this barrage of actions and with all of these institutions like Columbia that don’t want to come to court because they don’t think it’ll be good enough, they don’t think they will get enough relief to actually protect them, the courts are just doing a tiny fraction of the work that needs to be done.

And so, honestly, as a First Amendment scholar, I don’t know what to think. I think it is a profound problem for the doctrine that this moment in American history is what the First Amendment is primarily designed for. At its core, it is supposed to be there to protect American persons and not just citizens, but all persons in the United States against efforts by the federal government to tell them what they can say and not say and how they can associate and to fight their political opposition. That’s what it’s supposed to do, and it is failing us. This is the moment. This is the test. The Trump administration is the evil, the villain, I think, in its authoritarian impulses, that the First Amendment is supposed to be protecting us against moments where the government tries to trample on the rights and liberties of the people it’s supposed to be representing and protecting.

And that is this moment. This is the pathological moment, and the First Amendment is just failing, not entirely, but largely. I don’t know. I think that this is the question that all First Amendment scholars and, frankly, everyone interested in democracy in the United States needs to be thinking about. I guess I have two initial thoughts. One is that part of this is not a First Amendment problem, it’s a problem of how we’ve structured society. Civil society, political society, which is a formal legal guarantee that is supposed to protect important democratic rights, I think, can only be sufficiently effective if society’s itself pretty democratically structured and if the formal legal rights are on top of a whole set of institutional designs and norms that are rowing in the same direction. Nothing can do it on its own. It’s just the demands of creating a democratic system are so big that you cannot rest in any one instrument. And so, I do think that this is partly a product of the failings more broadly in society, and so I guess I don’t want to put everything on the First Amendment itself.

But second, I think maybe it’s just too hard to get to court, and the way that we’re thinking about dispute resolution and how to bring claims and how to stop the government from acting is just too hard. The courts are slow. Standing rules are hard. Institutions are risk-averse. All of these features of our legal system are really working against the private institutions that are trying to defend against the Trump administration. And the Trump administration has none of these constraints. They can just act. I was joking actually the other day that someone in the Trump administration has a great idea. Let’s take away a billion dollars from Harvard, and it takes them half an hour to write up a letter, and they send it off. And then, 100 very good First Amendment scholars have to spend the next three months trying to craft very careful legal arguments that they can present to a court about why this is a bad thing.

So there is a lack of parallelism between how onerous it is if you are complying with the rules and procedures of the legal system versus if you’re just not. There’s a way in which the Trump administration is just playing by different rules. They don’t really care. And so, I don’t know what doctrine can do in the face of it, but I do think our judicial system could be designed in a way that makes it much easier for people whose rights are being attacked to defend themselves.

Cristian Farias:

Sobering words from Genevieve Lake here. She’s a First Amendment scholar at the University of Chicago and a longtime friend of the Knight Institute. Genevieve, it was a pleasure, but also, you gave me a lot to think about with this conversation. Thank you.

Genevieve Lakier:

Thanks for having me. I wish it was under better circumstances.

Cristian Farias:

Given this all-out assault on higher education and what that means for administrators, faculty, and students, we felt the need to talk with someone who has been using his pen and position to speak up. With us is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University. He has been very busy since the start of the second Trump administration sounding the alarm about these issues. President Roth, welcome to the show.

Michael Roth:

Thanks very much for having me.

Cristian Farias:

Before Donald Trump took office, but after he was reelected, you wrote an essay in the New York Times where you distinguished opposition to elitism from opposition to education, and you seem to have some sympathy for the complaint that some of the nation’s biggest universities perhaps aren’t doing enough to create opportunities for ordinary people. Can you unpack that a little bit more?

Michael Roth:

Sure. I think there’s been a criticism of higher education for some time now that we fail to provide enough opportunity to enough people, economic opportunity, cultural opportunity, opportunity to improve their lives, and this is particularly vexing for the highly selective schools. I’m president of Wesleyan, which is one of those schools. It’s vexing for us because on the one hand, we want to conduct the education at the highest possible level. And on the other hand, we don’t want to have an exclusive club that’s just hard to get into because you’re either not rich enough, not white enough, or not whatever enough. We want it to be a club that you get into because you have the capacity to work very hard on challenging topics and make original contributions to research across any number of areas. What we’ve seen in the last several years is that the promise of higher education for most Americans is, especially through those elite schools, has not been kept.

Raj Chetty, now at Harvard, has shown in great detail that the engine of social mobility that colleges are supposed to provide has really stalled for most Americans. It’s still the case if you go to one of these schools, you’re much more likely to be much better off than if you hadn’t, especially if you come from a family with low income or no income. Your chances of really advancing are enormous if you go to one of those schools, but your chances of going to one of those schools is minuscule. Chetty and others have really pointed out how schools should do a better job of recruiting students who can do the work and work at the highest level and for whom this education would be really a life-changing event, so I do think there’s much more we can do in that regard.

Wesleyan, now, a couple of years ago, got rid of legacy admissions, which is symbolically a block against people who don’t come from the right family, in that case, the family of people who have gone to that particular school. The elite schools, especially the wealthiest ones, they just could educate a lot more students, and they choose not to. And so, that’s again a failure to fulfill this promise of American higher education.

Cristian Farias:

Now, what were your experiences as an educator during the first Trump administration? Did you have a sense at the time that rough times were coming for universities?

Michael Roth:

I wrote a piece in the summer of 2016 right before the Republican Convention that nominated Donald Trump as their candidate. I wrote a piece called Stop the Trumpian Calamity. I think it was in Inside Higher Education. I wrote that because the things that his campaign was saying about higher education, about science, about the importance of learning as a vehicle for economic and social mobility, the things they were saying were just anathema to what we believe in schools and colleges, universities, community colleges. I thought it was foolhardy to pretend otherwise. I wanted to make clear that people should beware of a candidate who promises to undermine the missions that we espouse.

First Trump administration was much less coherent and much less effective, much more poorly prepared than this version. So I think although there was lots of fear, especially in the beginning about the overt racism of the Muslim ban, the attacks on reproductive rights, these things were, of course, evident and Trump won and frightening for many people who didn’t share those views. But no one I know was prepared for the intensity of the flood the zone tactic that has been the hallmark of this administration and the vindictiveness with which they pursue their goals.

Cristian Farias:

Obviously, now that he’s in power again since his inauguration in January, he has issued, as you noted, this flood the zone approach, an onslaught of executive orders and other enforcement actions aimed at higher education and also against the pursuit of knowledge more broadly. Do you remember a moment during Trump 2.0 where you thought, “This is not normal,” and where do you think is the threat level to US higher education now?

Michael Roth:

Well, I think the threat level is very high. I mean, the Manhattan Institute just published this manifesto against higher education, and it seems that Chris Rufo is one of the architects of that, and Christopher Rufo has been very clear for years now about the desire to dismantle the power of American higher education. They think American higher education has been an engine of indoctrination rather than of economic and social mobility. And so, early on in the administration, seeing the attack on DEI as a umbrella for all kinds of anti-scientific mischief, that was a wake-up call early on and then just the extensive use of executive orders to ensure that the new interpretation of civil rights statutes would really have bite for higher education.

Some of that is not shocking. I mean, Obama and Biden did similar things, but with less focus, really. Take for example, the Obama-Biden efforts to change the way sexual assault hearings were held on campuses. They had the goal of eradicating rape on college campuses, and they saw this, and I think they were right, as a way of really improving the equality of women in higher education. But what the Obama-Biden administration did was to say, “If you don’t actually change the way you adjudicate these cases on campus, for example, the accused can’t cross-examine the accuser, if you don’t do that, you may lose all your federal funding.” And that’s-

Cristian Farias:

On their Title IX of the civil rights laws?

Michael Roth:

Yeah, and the threat was there. They never did that. I mean, I don’t know of any school that lost its funding or got fined hundreds of millions of dollars, but Trump said, “Okay, that was their interpretation. They were very worried about sexual assault on campus.” Trump administration, not so worried about that. Trump administration is worried about anti-white discrimination. They feel that the last decades of civil rights law has tried to compensate for previous historical injustices at the expense of contemporary white people. And so, they are on the hunt for reverse discrimination.

Their threat to withhold federal funding, they are much more serious about using that threat as leverage to change many, many practices across colleges and universities, from admissions to hiring to the conduct of science and of teaching. They’re much better prepared than they were last time and their willingness to use emergency powers. In other words, a lot of the work they do through executive order is a response to so-called emergencies in the United States, and they’ve been able to do that so far very effectively, and they have really chilled oppositional speech from colleges and universities. People are very afraid to speak up about this tactic of the administration.

Cristian Farias:

Because the administration has been using brute force, so to speak, on all of these issues, do you feel it at the margins or do you feel it in another kind of way?

Michael Roth:

There are a couple of different levels to that. I mean, so let’s take the financial one first. It’s easiest to describe. There’s a big difference between the schools that have hospitals and the schools that don’t. Whether the hospital is directly part of the university or an affiliate of the university, the pressure or the threat of withdrawing funding from hospitals is really dramatic. You have patients who will go without medication and clinical trials that will just halt, and many schools, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars. A school like Princeton though doesn’t have a hospital, but it also has hundreds of millions of dollars of research grants that depend on federal support. Damage to those universities, to science, and to the people served by science is really enormous. In our case, let’s say there’s 15, $20 million a year and a $300 million budget. I have had reporters ask me, say, “Isn’t it easier for you to speak out because you don’t have as much money at risk?”

But that’s, I think, like going to a rich person and saying, “Isn’t it hard for you because you could lose so much money because you’re so rich.” All schools feel this pressure because if they can do it to Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and Penn, they can do it to other schools. Some schools are reacting by what have been called anticipatory compliance, trying to make sure that they don’t step in the wrong lane. So all of these things are real threats, and very dramatic threat is that the way we go about our business will be changed because we will be afraid to say things that will get us in trouble with whoever’s in the White House. And that, I think, is a much deeper threat to American higher education.

Cristian Farias:

So having said that, what real world harms you do feel, not you personally, but perhaps your staff or your students, maybe international students who do feel that they might be next?

Michael Roth:

I think that’s certainly going to have a chilling effect on international students at colleges, universities across the country. It’s hard to know how much it is chilled speech. Certainly, immigrants who are working in and around Wesleyan or other colleges and universities are feeling the threat of ICE raids, whether they’re here legally or illegally, if they’re documented or undocumented. I mean, I think there’s just a lot of worry as you know in immigrant communities because people are getting picked up because of racial profiling and related techniques. But I think if people in my kind of position don’t exercise their right to speak out, it’ll be much easier to take that right away.

Cristian Farias:

Correct me if I’m wrong, President Roth, but it seems to me that maybe college leadership or college administrators have a collective action problem. They don’t realize that there’s power in numbers and that there’s no way the government can descend upon every single campus where their president is speaking out in favor of their students and faculty. Am I onto something there?

Michael Roth:

The favorite example is the kind of NATO pact, an attack on one is an attack on all. That’s a little hard when they’re competitive institutions. There was the document put by the AAC&U and the American Academy a couple of months ago, and I helped with that process too, a statement of a few hundred university presidents and college presidents expressing solidarity in support of academic freedom. Eventually, they included also solidarity in the face of the arrest of international students for speaking their mind, and I think that was a good thing to get folks to actually do more than sign a statement. It’s a challenge, I think. Many presidents seem to be inhibited by their boards of trustees. The president of the University of Virginia was recently forced or pressured into resigning, and I thought more presidents would speak out because that seemed clearly inappropriate use of government pressure.

But it seemed to me such an obvious abuse of power that people should speak out about. I think some of my colleagues think, “Well, you speaking out, Roth, just performative. You’re not helping and if they don’t want to speak out because they don’t want to make things worse.” I guess that’s as charitable an interpretation as I could put on it. And then, there’s just the doctrine of neutrality. They shouldn’t speak out because now, they have a policy that they shouldn’t say anything because if they say something, then no one else will say anything. I think it’s nonsense, but there are schools that do that. They all took action about the endowment tax. That, many schools were actually very active about. But I think the real test for your defensive freedom is when you defend the freedom of people you don’t like or people you don’t agree with. It’s not like when you defend your pocketbook or your grandmother. It’s defending somebody else’s right to speak that you don’t necessarily agree with.

Cristian Farias:

One narrative that has taken hold during Trump 2.0 is this idea that the administration is working to combat anti-Semitism. What do you make of that narrative?

Michael Roth:

Yeah. Well, there are people who did stupid stuff in the name of being progressive, trying to cancel someone from speaking, deplatforming people who they happen not to like. I mean, there were some... We usually call it now the liberal left. Bad stuff happened, but that became a galvanizing force for this broad agenda of attacking woke culture or DEI. Anti-Semitism is real anti-Semitism. People at Columbia or Harvard or other schools, they took their moral outrage about Israel’s war in Gaza and used that as a vehicle for ostracizing Jews more generally or Israelis who happened to be on campus and really thought that their anger about the policies of the Netanyahu government justified their broad assault on things Jewish, although that certainly happened, and there’s some great documentation of that at Columbia and, to some extent, at Harvard. At the same time, I think that became the boogeyman that the right then uses to attack these institutions more generally.

I think years ago, I was quoted as saying, “There are more anti-Semites in Congress than in Cambridge.” There are some, but the president of Harvard is Jew. The new dean of the law schools is a Jew. There are a lot of Jews who are thriving, and there is also some anti-Semitism. And the fact that the university didn’t do as good a job as it might have addressing anti-Semitism because it got bound up with criticism as Israel, that’s a problem and they should work on it. And the government can be helpful or not in getting them to do that, just like the government was helpful in trying to get rid of sexual assault on campus. They can actually do some things to put pressure on schools to take anti-Semitism as seriously as they took racism, let’s say, after George Floyd’s murder, and to really not allow anti-Semitism to take hold.

But that’s not what’s going on now. The Trump administration is using anti-anti-Semitism as a cover for trying to get control of colleges and universities. Canceling hundreds of millions of dollars of grants on quantum computing or Alzheimer research or diabetes research has nothing to do with protecting Jews. It is a way of insisting to these schools that they toe the line, that they express loyalty to the administration, and that they act in accord with the priorities of the president. When grants are canceled, in many cases in the humanities and social sciences, you get an email from the organization saying, “Your grant is no longer aligned with the priorities of the White House or of the President.” That is crazy to me. I mean, grants shouldn’t have to be aligned with the priorities of the president, and they never have had to be in the past.

So this anti-anti-Semitism move from the Trump administration seems to me hypocritical at best. This is the same administration that cozies up to Christian nationalists and to far-right groups that are viciously anti-Semitic. So I have a hard time believing that they’re there to be friends of the Jews, but they use that as a way of gaining control over colleges and universities.

Cristian Farias:

President Roth, on everyone’s mind right now is the so-called deal Columbia University reached with the administration. I’ve seen reporting that Brown, Cornell, and Harvard, the same Harvard that was so celebrated for taking the administration to court, are also nearing so-called deals. What do you make of these developments?

Michael Roth:

Well, it shows you how powerful the federal government is, really. That the chance of outlasting the government and litigation is really slim, not zero, but it’s hard. This is an administration that, I think, a professor at Columbia called it policy by deal.

Cristian Farias:

They posed it, regulation by deal.

Michael Roth:

Yeah, right. I thought that was a really interesting blog post and seemed to be right on. I think that another way of looking at it is really paying protection money or extortion to continue to stay in business. What I have said is, “Let’s change the metaphor. I don’t blame the parents for paying a ransom to get their child back when it gets kidnapped, but I don’t praise the deal. There shouldn’t have been a kidnapping.” You said this in the beginning that there haven’t been findings of fact. There haven’t been been investigations that led to finding that there’s been specific acts of anti-Semitism that caused this much damage, and that’s why you owe this much money. That hasn’t happened. These are amorphous fines or penalties that are meant to actually give the schools a chance to get back in business. I think it’s a terrible sign for American higher education because I think the government will just be further emboldened to try to control more of what happens on campus.

And I think that’s really bad for American higher education. I think it’s bad for America because I think they’ll be emboldened to say, “Well, we got Colbert canceled. Let’s see. Who else can we get canceled, or we can take this newspaper out of the press pool, see who else we can get out of journalism.” I think this really erodes the freedoms of civil society. Some schools will be able to make deals because they’re so wealthy, and other schools will just have to pay the piper in other ways. They’ll just have to tone down their opposition or their independence. And that, I think, is really a sad thing for American higher education and for the country, generally.

Cristian Farias:

One day, Donald Trump will be long gone, but these tactics and playbook will be his legacy. How do we protect higher education from future authoritarians, do you think?

Michael Roth:

I think just reminding people of why democracy is so important for learning and why being able to think for yourself in the company of others is the great gift of American higher education. Whether it’s physics or history or English or anthropology, you engage in inquiry to lead to better questions and more thoughtful answers to the questions you used to have. Other people say, “You lead it for truth.” I’m a little suspicious of truth with a capital T, but you can’t have productive inquiry if you’re always worried that you might annoy someone with power. And so, I think we protect the American higher education by reminding ourselves it’s only through the ability to practice freedom as students. That’s what I argued in this book called The Student: A Short History, that as students, we practice freedom, and as teachers, we help students practice freedom. If the government is going to lay a heavy hand on us, that’s not a practice of freedom at all. It becomes a practice of obedience, and that would be a very sad day for the United States.

Cristian Farias:

Michael Roth, he’s the president of Wesleyan University. It was a pleasure having you on the show.

Michael Roth:

Thank you very much for having me.

Cristian Farias:

What a time to be in higher ed. For the sake of the nation and future generations, let’s keep working and fighting hard for its survival. And that’s it for The Bully’s Pulpit this week. Next week, all about another Trump shakedown, that of law firms that represent people and causes he doesn’t like. See you soon.

The Bully’s Pulpit is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. I’m your host, Cristian Farias. This episode was written by me and co-produced by Ann-Marie Awad, Matt Pyken, and Candace White. Our associate producer for this episode is Kushal Dev, fact-checking by Sohwa Lee, Nick Phillips, and Lindsey Vickers. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeKing. Candace White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid Da Silva. Thanks to Genevieve Lakier and Michael Roth who joined us for this episode. The Bully’s Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website knightcolumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K, and follow us on social media.