Pragmatism or Abandonment of Principle?
It is a disgrace that universities are paying ransom to the Trump administration, even though I understand the rationale in terms of saving both jobs and long-running research programs that have important health implications for a great many families. It seems Harvard University, President Trump’s number one target for humiliation, will be next.
Once universities capitulate, is there any assurance that the Trump administration won’t be back with further demands, including more ransom money and more stipulations about the way universities admit students and govern themselves? How can universities rely on an agreement with an administration that invents its own facts and rules? Simply put, can any university professor or administrator be happy when world-class universities surrender their independence to an authoritarian regime?
Using Antisemitism as a Cudgel
As a Jew born in 1941, I know what antisemitism looks and feels like, and I know that it has not been absent at Cornell. The same kind of unspoken quotas that Asian students recently faced were very much part of the admission policies of all the Ivy League schools. But the Trump administration’s claim of rampant antisemitism is being used as an excuse for harassing elite universities such as Cornell and trying to bring them to their knees by withdrawing funding and threatening taxation of their endowments.
As long as policy and issue disagreements don’t involve suppressing the views of others or disrupting access to classes, activities or career fairs, universities must be sites where ideas are debated and various points of view can be expressed. This kind of dialogue not only falls under the umbrella of academic freedom but also is the lynchpin of democracy.
Authoritarian Presidency
President Trump has grabbed power in virtually every aspect of American life, ignoring or pushing to the margins both Congress and state legislatures, as well as the federal and state courts. Using the National Guard to replace police in Los Angeles, California and Washington, D.C. and threatening to do so in other cities where democratic mayors have been elected are examples of the imperial presidency which should frighten us all.
One goal of authoritarian governments is to control what happens in the universities, including who is admitted and what ideas are circulating, especially ideas about politics, history and culture. And make no mistake, this is an authoritarian government that rules by decree, often ignoring Congress and judges.
In 1962, while studying in Edinburgh during my junior year, I visited the Soviet Union with a group of British students and saw how students were monitored there. The students in Moscow dorms were convinced that the public address box on the wall, which was supposedly used for announcements, was in fact a listening device, and the students unscrewed it before talking politics with us visitors. In spring 1992, on the third anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, I was a short-time visitor at Peking University to give a lecture on literary theory and saw how the faculty was humiliated daily by being frivolously asked to show their credentials. From my time there, I know what a university looks like when it is ruled by government employees who go to lectures to report on “incorrect” thinking.
The explicit and implicit reason for the Trump administration’s monitoring of admissions is its claim that racial bias in favor of Black and Hispanic students is deleterious to the interests of white and Asian students. I have argued before that after admitting the truly exceptional applicants and rejecting those who cannot do the work in the field in which they wish to study, elite colleges should use a lottery.
This would address my sense from sitting in on admission selection meetings that many of the applicants are about the same in terms of grades, test scores, essay quality and recommendations. I felt that many admissions people convinced themselves of distinctions when there was little or no difference between students.
With affirmative action now declared illegal by the Supreme Court, the administration wants to monitor college admissions based on statistical data. Of course, in the past, before affirmative action was used to give more minorities a chance and to create a diverse class, affirmative action had been used to admit athletes, faculty and staff children, relatives of major donors and legacies, but it was not called that. I doubt that such admission priority will disappear either for athletes as long as we wish to be competitive in athletics or for major donors as long as we rely on them for funding costly projects.
Using only grades and test score data will benefit those — mostly white and well-off — who get help from private schools, elite public schools and professionals who are hired to take high school students through the admission process.
Israel: Right or Wrong?
Let us turn to the current inflammatory example of the need for academic freedom. President Trump’s deportation of foreign students who have expressed support for those living in Gaza or participated in peaceful protests is a violation of how free speech operates in a democracy.
I am a supporter of Israel and, as a Holocaust scholar, know about Israel’s brave history. I share Israel’s outrage at Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack. I grieve for the lives of those lost in the Hamas attack and the suffering hostages who are still alive, but I also grieve for the death of innocent children in Gaza. Thinking of attacks in Boulder, Colorado and Washington, D.C., I worry about the safety of Jews everywhere.
On Israel, as on all contentious issues, there must be room for dialogue. For my part, I reject Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current military policies in Gaza. It would be best for Israel if Netanyahu lost the support of the right-wing extremists in his cabinet, whom he desperately tries to please to keep his position as Prime Minister. Perhaps he might be succeeded by a new, more moderate government which would explore the possibility of a two-state solution.
Conclusion
We are living in fraught times. The nation in which I lived my life and taught has fundamentally changed. As President Trump continues to establish an autocracy, much of the media and legal establishment, as well as formerly respectable GOP members of Congress, have buckled under his intimidation. The latter are fearful of not only abusive verbal behavior on the part of President Trump and his MAGA supporters but also of physical attacks on themselves and family members.
Day after day, we read of new executive orders and the use of the National Guard to control domestic policy, as well as investigations into the work of Trump’s perceived enemies and pardons for the criminality of his supporters. What will stop him from sending the military to campuses if large-scale protests against his policies break out? We know from the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings that catastrophe awaits if he sends troops to campus.
Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University where he has been a faculty member for 58 years.
