“The political world is playing a very different game, and it’s a game that almost always damages our work in universities.”
Jonathan Haidt, Chronicle of Higher Education
One year ago, almost to the day, President Trump declared that the campus free speech crisis was ‘overblown.’ Since then, the trends have actually moved in an even more positive direction: we’re seeing fewerdisinvitations, shout-downs and blow ups on campuses nationwide.
Nonetheless, Trump just announced his intent to issue an executive order that would make federal research funding contingent on whether or not a given college adequately protects free speech.
Again, given that Trump himself believes that there is no crisis, and given that the trends over the last year have been positive regardless, it is important to see this maneuver for what it is: an attempt to give red meat to a Republican base that increasingly views higher education as a culture war issue.
I want to be clear: this perception is not entirely unfair. Universities, especially elite schools, have grown increasingly ideologically homogenous over the past few decades. The causes are numerous, and only some of them are plausibly within the control of faculty or administrators. However, this growing divide does have important implications for the life prospects of those who find themselves excluded. It has important implications for colleges and universities too: people tend to disinvest from institutions if they do not feel like they have a voice, a place, or a stake in them. Hence the growing calls from the right to defund institutions of higher learning – and especially social research (fields which tend to be far less ideologically diverse than the academy overall).
Trump’s plan, however, is a betrayal of conservative values and interests. Let’s start with values:
Conservatives have long appreciated that many social problems are complex and fluid – that the success of government initiatives is typically dependent upon local knowledge and local buy-in. Absent these, well-intentioned efforts tend to fail, and often cause great harm in the process. As a consequence, conservatives consistently assert that one-size-fits-all and top-down approaches to social problems are unlikely to yield the intended results.
This same logic holds with regards to increasing ideological perspectives in higher ed.
One cannot legislate an institutional culture that encourages viewpoint diversity – let alone an environment where diversity is effectively leveraged to improve research or teaching. This must be willingly and willfully enacted by faculty, students, administrators in their day-to-day interactions. Agents must be convinced (and perhaps incentivized), not compelled, in order to learn and grow from diverse perspectives.
The proposed executive order is counterproductive towards this end. To have a highly polarizing political leader announce a ham-fisted initiative like this, at an overtly partisan event (CPAC), no less – this will only lend further credence narratives that viewpoint diversity and open inquiry primarily serve the privileged, or that they are mere shibboleths for those on the right to push their political agenda and ideology on campus.
Under these circumstances, more free expression will probably just amount to deeper distrust, increased vitriol, and more partisan conflict. Faculty, staff and students on the left would resent any increased impositions, and grow less likely to engage with the perspectives of conservatives with charity and in good faith. They would instead grow more likely to impute bad motives or pathologies to people on the right than they already are.
Put another way, universities can enforce rules that enhance conservatives’ abilities to speak on campus — but others may grow far less willing to listen than they already were as a result of this tactic. In the end, conservatives could find themselves facing an even more hostile university climate. And there is little the White House, or Republican lawmakers, could plausibly do about that.
And of course, regardless of what happens in 2020, Republicans will not retain control of the White House forever. And it is highly plausible that Trump’s tactic here would be turned against conservatives in a subsequent Democratic administration.
Consider: many religious schools receive federal funding. Liberty University, for instance, gets nearly half a billion dollars per year. Yet Liberty University has also faced widespread criticism for its lack of viewpoint diversity, and at times, its outright censorship of those who contradict university president Jerry Falwell Jr.
People on the left have long sought to have the government divest from these schools, due to their non-secular orientation, and in particular, their promoting and enforcing traditional views on gender and sexuality. These schools have been able to maintain federal funding up to now because the Obama and Trump administrations have elected to grant them Title IX exemptions.
However, a future Democratic administration, building on Trump’s precedent, could easily insist that continued Title IX exemptions be contingent on an environment of free speech: the government will allow religious schools to officially hold traditional positions and still receive Title IV funding, but only if they allow rigorous debate on ‘culture war’ issues, and freely permit demonstrations of dissent on campus, in student newspapers, from invited speakers, etc. The White House could then cut off Title IV funds to a school like Liberty University if they denied liberals a platform, etc. And as National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood put it, a school that refused, or was denied, Title IV funds would likely face bankruptcy “within a year or two.”
This is the likely outcome of Trump’s proposed executive order (assuming it survives the inevitable legal challenge): more Washington bureaucrats making increasingly politicized decisions about higher ed funding. Conservatives, of all people, should understand how poorly that’s likely to turn out.
3/21/2019 Update
President Trump has now signed his executive order into law, making federal research funding contingent on universities protecting free speech. Unfortunately, the order provided no further clarity on how universities will be judged as to whether or not they are adequately protecting free speech, nor who will be making that determination. We’ll see how it plays out in practice. I strongly suspect it will fail in achieving its desired end and could even make things worse.