Columbia’s compromise with Trump It is turning away from political activism

Before his election victory last year, Donald Trump’s plans for education were striking in their vagueness. Rather than publishing detailed policies, he promised to make universities “patriotic” and “sane” after years of liberal excess. Since his return to the White House, however, the President’s ideas on higher education have become vividly clear.

To date, these have largely taken the form of threats. Over the past few months, Trump has issued “potential enforcement actions” against 60 universities. In practice, this has often involved targeted financial action against specific institutions. On 7 March, for instance, the White House said it was poised to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University, more recently echoed by similar warnings against Harvard.

Trump’s goals are as stark as his tactics: change how universities approach education and deal with student protests against the Middle East. And, so far, this strategy seems to be working. Two weeks after Trump’s threat, Columbia announced it would both combat campus activism and review some of its programmes. By the end of last month, the head of the University resigned under pressure from disgruntled faculty members. Across the country, meanwhile, higher education has been seized by panic, unsure whether to cave in like Columbia or fight back through the courts. A letter signed by 80 professors in Harvard University’s Law School has accused the White House of violating due procedure.

In attacking academic programmes, the President’s supporters have concentrated their ire on particular schools of thought — critical race theory, gender studies, postcolonial theory. It is fair to say that the government’s grasp of these disciplines is tenuous. It is also ironic that Trump argues for academic neutrality while seeking to ban unwelcome opinions. Yet it is just as extraordinary that a renowned university has accepted that some of its teaching was ideologically skewed. As Columbia said in its response to Trump’s criticism, it would henceforth ensure its courses were “comprehensive and balanced”.

The administration’s intimidatory policies have been widely seen as contravening the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Among other things, this enshrines the right of establishments to shape their own communities, and protects the exercise of free expression within them.

In part, the First Amendment was intended to protect the autonomy of religious establishments: their right to self-govern and preach their own creed. But there is a difference between a church and a university. Though the former is tied to a specific dogma, the latter espouses no particular doctrine. More specifically, universities preach the doctrine of free inquiry, by collecting diverse perspectives and setting them in dialogue. Columbia has admitted that it fell short in this regard.

Notwithstanding Trump’s high-handed methods employed to extort concessions from universities, there are reasons to applaud Columbia’s compromise. Even if the government’s actions were unconstitutional, we should surely encourage self-reflection on the part of universities, which historically have not been prone to critical self-examination. Columbia’s response to the strictures against it is a major move in this direction. It is expected that Harvard will also try to bridge differences with the government.

It is notable, certainly, that Columbia has promised to ensure “intellectual diversity across our course offerings and scholarship”. For all the recent talk, on both sides of the Atlantic, of extending diversity in universities, intellectual pluralism has tangibly decreased. In the humanities and social sciences, particularly, ideological conformity has soared. Debate has been suffocated, toleration stifled, and belief in impartiality declined. Good-faith disagreement is often spurned as an act of hostility — and subject to angry censure for the same reason.

Certain ideological assumptions are close to unquestionable in academic settings. Debatable theories about the role of patriarchy, for instance, or the operation of white privilege, enjoy the status of received wisdom. In some fields, the ideal of knowledge has been replaced by the presumed authority of a personal “standpoint”. Of course, it is right that the status of truth is contentious, especially in academic learning. But to reduce knowledge to mere opinion, and objectivity to partisanship, is to convert the university into a community of faith.

When dominant ideas in universities collide with views common among the electorate, the academy risks falling into disrepute. Universities need to command respect if they are to serve their purpose. That purpose has never been uniform: one goal of universities is to advance vocational training, but another is to extend the frontiers of knowledge. In this second role, academic pursuit has sought to deepen comprehension of the natural and moral worlds.

Most people accept that insights gleaned from the physical and human sciences have enriched society at large. Breakthroughs in physics and biology — like discoveries in history and anthropology — have extended our grasp of the universe we inhabit. Our understanding of politics has plausibly improved too, for instance around research into the functioning of constitutions and the economy. But enhancing understanding of the forces at work in modern society is very different from serving a specific political programme.

Columbia has admitted that parts of its curriculum fall into political activism. This acknowledgement raises complicated issues. There is surely no problem with teachers and students being politically active as citizens of a democratic state. Yet, equally clearly, as members of a university, faculty are not expected to proselytise for a cause, and students must not be tested on their ideological commitments. When it comes to learning, overt tendentiousness should be consciously avoided. No scholar seeks to explain the Peloponnesian War exclusively from the perspective of the Spartans, or the Wars of Religion from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church alone.

Though universities inevitably shape the culture of broader society, they do not do so by endeavouring to control the political process. Just as we have learned to differentiate between church and state, as well as between the various branches of state in a constitutional regime, so too should we distinguish between academia and government.

In the Western tradition, churches historically assumed responsibility for norms of conduct and articles of faith. In medieval Europe, ecclesiastical authority outstripped the power of the state. But from the 15th century, this preeminence began to be reversed. In the wake of the Reformation, meanwhile, truths of religion were criticised by philosophy and science. By the late 18th century, universities had begun to adopt this critical function. As such, they were charged with examining rival doctrines, rather than professing a determinate faith. In the same spirit, they were meant to weigh the consequences of different value systems, not publicise a party-political platform. In this sense, their goal was criticism, not policy formation.

However, the object of “criticism” is easily misunderstood. In the mid-19th century, the word referred to discerning the actual state of things. That involved ascertaining the objective balance of forces in society at large, irrespective of one’s personal preferences. Now, though, “critical” in effect means “partisan” — as illustrated by its use in critical “studies” of all kinds. This stance invests scholarship with an ideological mission, contravening the ideal of a liberal education.

For many working in universities today, that ideal is little more than wishful thinking. Or, worse, it is a hypocritical pretence masking the subjection of knowledge to power. This cynicism is as widespread in the United Kingdom as it is among critical theorists in US elite schools. After all, British universities have largely followed the American model with slavish devotion.

The weakness of cynicism is its lack of subtlety. If a commitment to open discussion, disinterested sifting of evidence, and the rigours of public reasoning are all a sham — then criticism can only mean self-serving arrogance. Against this recipe for despair, Columbia is proposing to uphold “a robust and intellectually diverse academic environment”. Its stand has been taken under duress, but the underlying principles acquit the university of mere capitulation.