This term students and faculty are doing what they always do, namely teaching and learning, with the difference that many faculty and some students are uncomfortably aware that these are exceptional times where our democracy is giving way to an authoritarian government that seeks to control higher education at so-called “elite” schools. In a narrow sense, morale seems good, but this is in part due to most students and some faculty putting their heads in the sand. Unfortunately, such behavior offers tacit compliance to the Trump administration’s goals for universities.
When I get a considerable number of offline notes praising my courage in expressing my opinions, as I did for the guest column I wrote at the beginning of this term, I know we are living in a time when intimidation is rife and fear is endemic. Neither the University’s statement on antisemitism nor the AAUP protest letter addresses the paramount issue on campus, namely the effort by the Trump administration to monitor Cornell and other major universities’ hiring, curricula and admission policies as part of a larger plan to radically redefine the office of the American presidency and the executive branch in terms that are unrecognizable when set against previous interpretations of the Constitution.
Whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism often has little to do with the continuing aggressive takeover of American universities by a cynical administration serving its own interests as part of the larger program of transforming our democracy in which citizens’ rights are protected to an authoritarian government where the current president weaponizes every possible tool to suppress dissent.
Universities are abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, rethinking admission policies now that affirmative action has been declared illegal by the Supreme Court, admitting fewer foreign students, inviting conservative and even far-right speakers and defending themselves against an antisemitism that barely existed.
No matter what else we are doing, we need to be fully aware every day of President Donald Trump’s war on universities which often wears the mask of concern for antisemitism but is really an attempt to muffle academic freedom and free speech, control university admissions and ignore the interests of minorities, substitute magical thinking for science and insist on hiring those with a conservative ideology even in STEM fields which are inherently non-political.
In some sense, arguing about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism — of course, the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no — is a far less effective path of resistance than protesting the Trump administration’s attempt to dictate how universities are run within the larger context of a frontal attack on democracy. That attack includes sending the National Guard into cities that do not need or want them, as well as weaponizing the Justice Department to harass and indict those perceived as government enemies.
Trump’s explicit threats and intimidation hover over Cornell as a daily presence. Statements about antisemitism and the ensuing discussions also provide a screen for university administrations because they seem to be addressing Trump’s concerns. I do not think Trump and his allies care a wit about how Jews are treated on campus, but I do know that continually defending our treatment of Jewish students — which is, of course, important but not now a major issue at Cornell — deflects us from what should be our main focus.
In fact, both universities and the Trump administration know that this supposed dialogue about antisemitism is a charade that ignores the real cutting-edge issue: Whether we capitulate to the administration’s desires or lose in the neighborhood of $250 million in research funds. We should consider the consequences of the administration’s frontal attack on what universities do and how we do it. That insidious and invidious attack not only occupies the senior administration and Board of Trustees at Cornell and other universities, but should also be our focus as professors and students.
For the most part, notwithstanding the significant October 18 No Kings protests, faculty and students have become relatively quiescent when we should be debating the choices we face and the consequences of capitulating to what we know are malicious and divisive demands.
Before deciding on and committing to their course of action, Cornell and other universities seem to be waiting for Harvard to decide between negotiation and resistance or a combination of the two. As a recent New York Times news story described the stakes of the Trump attack:
The White House has used a whole-of-government approach — including investigations and funding cuts — as a cudgel to try to compel Harvard and other elite colleges to adopt more conservative values, including stricter definitions of gender, deeper government access to student admissions data and more rigorous codes for student conduct. . . .
I have been watching “Babylon Berlin,” a fascinating streaming series over four seasons with a fifth promised, about how the Weimar years in Germany gradually gave way to the Nazi regime. Notwithstanding the Versailles treaty, industrialists and military figures secretly rearm, and supine judges arbitrarily send to jail those who exposed this underground activity. Elected officials are intimidated into silence.
I see frightening parallels to what is happening today in the second Trump administration in terms of undermining the pluralistic world of democracy with authoritarian measures and harassing the news media’s efforts to expose the truth. Do Trump and his allies wish to sow chaos by sending a weaponized National Guard into cities, possibly as a prelude to canceling elections or at least controlling who votes?
I wonder how we can move forward to save our universities as well as our democracy from a demagogue. As in the past, when the country’s welfare was at stake, serious peaceful protests on the order of what drove the Civil Rights movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement are needed. Yet if we were to have large-scale campus protests against the Trump administration’s university policies and continuing threats to democracy, what we need to fear most is the possibility of Trump’s sending National Guard troops to “control” campus protests. I have little doubt that such a course is possible and could lead to catastrophe on the order of the killings of four students at Kent State on May 4, 1970.
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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.
