Our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., warned in 1951 that Yale was “working toward her own destruction, i.e., to the day when some future Yale president, fedora in hand, will knock at the door of some politician with palm outstretched. This day, of course, means the end of Yale as a private institution.” Fortunately, Buckley noted, Yale’s then-outgoing president “has unequivocally ruled against accepting government money. The consequences of this he regards as disastrous.”
The day when the nation’s great universities went with palms outstretched to Washington has long since come and gone. Now, comes the foreseen disaster. The piper must be paid.
In leveraging their receipt of federal research and aid funding to impose terms on the universities, the Trump administration is not writing on a blank slate, but is instead indulging in the Trumpian habit of making loud and explicit what was previously done with more subtlety. The Solomon Amendment long made the modest demand that federally funded universities allow military recruiters on campus, but we have gone much further down the road since the Supreme Court upheld that single condition in 2006. The Obama and Biden administrations were relentless in using federal law to influence or outright dictate how universities were managed. In 2011, the Obama administration discovered, in Title IX, a mandate for universities to police both sexual assault and sexual harassment (including potentially “unwanted” speech) according to federal standards that deprived students of due process. That standard was used to suppress the speech of faculty, such as Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis, who in a Kafkaesque turn was the subject of a legal complaint by students under Title IX for writing an op-ed column criticizing the Obama view of Title IX. The Obama rules were later even weaponized in a lawsuit against Hillsdale College, which takes no federal funds. When Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, repealed the Obama standard, the ACLU sued her to try to preserve the lever.
In 2016, the Obama administration again used Title IX to insist that colleges adopt transgender ideology and punish students and faculty who dissented from it. In 2021, the Biden administration went further, and sought to prevent even state colleges from following state laws that protected women’s sports from men. In 2022, it demanded that colleges police “hostile environment” speech even if the conduct in question occurs “outside [a school’s] education program or activity.” In 2023, it released a Title IX rule specifically focused on foisting transgender athletes into women’s sports.
Voices of dissent or protest from the faculty and administrators were few and far between. Rather than question the federal executive who held the purse strings, the colleges fell meekly into line.
Trump’s counteroffensive started with Columbia. Given how Columbia allowed lawless antisemitism to run riot on its campus, we applauded the result, but warned that the Trump tactics were ominous. “The next case,” we said, “will demand a more rigorous process precisely because easy cases make bad laws.” Less than a month later, as Trump turns the screws on Harvard, the next case is here. Like Columbia, Harvard has much to answer for, and unlike Columbia, Harvard is the nation’s wealthiest university, and can afford to battle Trump in court. Harvard president Alan Garber promised to fight, declaring that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” We wish the universities had discovered this principle earlier.
As happened with Columbia and with Trump’s war on the big law firms, the Trump administration’s demands are extensive, mixing and matching topics such as demanding that Harvard end race and other preferences in admissions and hiring; “reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism”; institute “viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring”; eliminate “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programs; reform disciplines rife with antisemitism; and overhaul university governance, student discipline, whistleblower protections, and transparency.
Most of these are fine goals, and some (such as finally terminating the university’s efforts to evade a Supreme Court–ordered end to its use of race discrimination in admissions) ought to be uncontroversial. We have cheered the end of DEI in places such as the University of Michigan; more state legislatures and more governing bodies of private universities should follow suit rather than engaging (as some still are) in stealth efforts to keep the racket going under new names. The administration is also right to invoke the federal government’s legitimate interest in preventing hostile foreign states and terrorist groups from infiltrating students into the American educational system, with the sorts of results that we saw at Columbia.
But the overall impact of these demands would be pervasive federal monitoring of how the university is governed. The federal government simply should not have this power. We have no illusion that Trump will be deterred by fear of how the coercive power of the federal executive might be leveraged by a future Democratic administration to further progressive ideology and stifle speech; we have already seen that done, it will be done again, and Trump’s team wants their own turn whacking the piñata. But Congress and the courts should awaken to the menace of the federal camel’s nose in the private university tent — and so, for that matter, should the colleges.
Progressives eager to preserve the same powers when they return to the White House will doubtless seek to curb Trump’s authority in this area by attacking his motives, procedures, and factual predicates rather than by going to the root of the issue. But that root, as Buckley observed, is the money itself. It will always come with strings attached, whether or not someone is pulling them as unapologetically as Donald Trump.