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, 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 programs. 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 the norms of due procedure.

In attacking academic programs, 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”.

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Where is the Left today?

By Richard Bourke

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 program.

Columbia has admitted that parts of its curriculum fall into political activism. This acknowledgment 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 proselytize 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 endeavoring 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 criticized 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 publicize a party-political platform. In this sense, their goal was criticism, not policy formation.

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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 within a certain discipline, 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 pretense 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 rigors 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.

The American Right increasingly answers in the negative. In doing so, conservatives are staging their own version of the critical-theory doctrine deployed by progressives until recently to restrict speech.

The triumph of the Free Speech Movement appeared to accord students full rights to participate in the era’s public debate, which fit in with the broader dismantling of the in loco parentis paradigm, under which university administrators acted as parental authorities for students. Where the in loco parentis regime had consigned college students to a status of quasi-adulthood, the Berkeley protesters’ demands successfully redefined the campus as a space in which the full exercise of citizenship could occur; not coincidentally, the voting age was also lowered to 18 in many states during this period.

In more recent years, the campus Left became widely associated with an anti-free-speech stance, while the Right has often laid claim to the ideals of the 1964 Berkeley students. Hence in 2017, it was the Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous who attempted to hold a “free-speech week” on the Berkeley campus, after an earlier talk he attempted to give there was shut down amid violent opposition from progressive activists.

It might seem, therefore, that Trump’s crackdown has returned us to the pre-1964 status quo, with progressives once again defending speech rights on campus and conservatives trying to limit them. But this isn’t the full story. In reality, the approach taken by the Trump administration has far more in common with the progressive speech regime than its enthusiasts would have you think.

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Your awokening isn't special

By Geoff Shullenberger

The Left’s turn against free-speech maximalism is often traced to a text that appeared soon after the Berkeley protesters’ apparent triumph, under the byline of one of the protesters’ heroes, the philosopher and New Left guru Herbert Marcuse. I refer to the essay “Repressive Tolerance”, in which Marcuse expanded on the central argument of his hugely influential 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man: that the ostensible freedoms of advanced industrial society masked its fundamental unfreedom.

Revisiting the foundational 18th– and 19th-century struggles for freedom of speech, Marcuse argued that their aim was not simply to establish a neutral public sphere. Rather, “the tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan — intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo”. In other words, advocacy for unlimited freedom of speech was a tactic of opposition to dominant forces — a tactic that, according to Marcuse, had become obsolete. This is because unlike the ancien régime, the “repressive status quo” of advanced industrial society in fact benefits from a regime of “pure tolerance”.

This was because, as Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleagues Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had first argued decades earlier, the 20th-century culture industry had become a regime of propagandistic mass deception that manufactured consent for what they called the “totally administered society”. Accordingly, arguments for free expression and other liberal rights now amounted, as Marcuse put it, to accepting “the toleration of the systematic moronisation of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda”.

In contrast to authoritarian societies, “totalitarian democracy” bestows formal freedoms on its subjects, but these freedoms are negated by the overwhelming force of technological mass communication that tip the scales in favor of dominant social forces. By this account, demands for free speech like those made in Berkeley might ultimately serve to reinforce this broader unfreedom.

Marcuse’s paradoxical response to this impasse was to replace the value of “pure tolerance” of all views implicit in free-speech protections with what he called “liberating tolerance”, which, as he stated explicitly, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left”. He characterized this proposal as “utopian”, since “no authority, no government exists which would translate [it] into practice”.

However, there was a way in which the approach he proposed was eventually put into practice. By gaining power and leverage within consensus-making institutions, especially universities and the media, the Left managed to tip the scales of tolerance against the Right, somewhat as Marcuse had counseled. The shift from an ostensibly neutral public sphere to one in which certain views coded as reactionary were subject to aggressive “intolerance” seemed to follow his prescriptions. Hence, Marcuse’s text has sometimes been read as a sort of ur-manifesto of cancel culture; the Left’s centrist and conservative critics have tended to fight back by reasserting “pure tolerance”.

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In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack against southern Israel, however, conservatives dramatically shifted their criticisms of the progressive campus speech regime. From the Nineties battles over political correctness to the early 2020s wars over wokeness, their main concern was with universities’ censoriousness towards conservative-coded views. But their new focus is on the same institutions’ permissiveness towards extreme speech by Leftists — most notoriously, celebration of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians.

In other words, the criticism directed at universities shifted away from the “intolerant towards the Right” side of Marcuse’s equation, and toward the “tolerant towards the Left” side. Meanwhile, the Left correspondingly pivoted from demanding “intolerance towards the Right” — keeping Milo off-campus — to “tolerance towards the Left” — letting pro-Palestinian protesters protest, even if their speech may offend some.

However, this reversal of positions was possible in part because it’s not only the Right/Left polarity that came to determine the range of permissible speech on campus in the post-Sixties era. Indeed, the unofficial campus speech regime didn’t so much legitimize itself in Right/Left terms as in terms of victimhood and oppression. A programmatic statement of this rationale can be found in the pioneering critical race theorist Mari Matsuda’s article “Public Response to Racist Speech”, published in 1989. In Matsuda’s account, it is speech by members of or on behalf of “historically dominant groups” and against “subordinated communities” that should be subject to “intolerance”, while speech going in the opposite direction, even if hateful or violent, should be subject to “tolerance”.

Matsuda offered, in effect, an update on Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance”, processed through the classifications of civil-rights law. Instead of “the Left” being granted extra leeway, as Marcuse had demanded, it was members of oppressed groups who were to enjoy what Matsuda calls the “victim’s privilege”. In practice, this meant that when any speech generated controversy, the task was to identify oppressor and oppressed, then ensure that the latter is granted “the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from an experience of oppression”, whereas the former is subject to maximum intolerance.

This is how the attempts to shut down controversial speakers at the height of last decade’s Great Awokening were justified. For instance, in 2017, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued in The New York Times that efforts to prevent figures like Yiannopolous and Charles Murray from speaking on campus “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship”. Intolerance toward oppressors, that is, equals tolerance toward the oppressed.

Matsuda defined universities as a “special case” because college students are “at a vulnerable stage of psychological development”. Accordingly, “tolerance of racist speech in this setting is more harmful than generalized tolerance in the community-at-large”. Gesturing back at Berkeley and other Sixties protest, Matsuda reaffirmed support for the protesters’ speech rights, but not on grounds of “pure tolerance”. Rather, she appealed to the “power imbalance” between students and “university administrators, multinational corporations, the US military, and established governments”. In other words, insofar as students can be construed as victims, their speech must be protected — but once they can be construed as victimizers, they can no longer lay claim to that privilege.

The broader implication of the original Free Speech Movement’s demand was, again, that intramural speech be protected by the First Amendment in the same manner as extramural speech. The effect of this demand — like the other factors that eroded in loco parentis — was to merge the university with the broader space of rights-granted citizenship. But a further implication of this move, not necessarily evident to the student protesters when they made their demands, was to weaken the specificity of the university’s function within society: to form young adults.

It was perhaps an inevitable reaction to this drift and evacuation of institutional purpose that new forms of paternalism reemerged to substitute for in loco parentis, not least the differentiated speech regime outlined by Matsuda. This helped define a new moral, values-imparting mission for universities, which over decades became ever more explicitly oriented around social justice.

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Conservative and centrist critics of campus politics have documented the divisive and intellectually stultifying effects of this regime. Now that the Trump administration is attempting to force top-down change on the system, many who opposed it are celebrating.

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante. On the contrary, Matsuda’s basic idea that speech must be regulated on the basis of whether it causes harm to a “subordinated community” remains fully in force; it is simply that a different minority group is now asserted to be in need of special protection. In other words, Trump is merely adjusting the dials of the prior campus speech regime, applying greater tolerance here and greater intolerance there.

The real problem with this shift isn’t the apparent inconsistency with conservative opposition to cancel culture, but that the administration is leaving the deeper assumptions of the prior system for regulating speech intact. Universities need to be reformed, and reimagined, on a much more fundamental level. The post-in loco parentis integration of campuses into the broader realm of citizenship has failed to facilitate the responsible exercise of the citizenship. Rather, it has only succeeded at evacuating institutional purpose in favor of an incoherent mix of anything-goes consumerism and tendentious moralism.

Trump’s heavy-handed actions will succeed in suppressing some of the campus radicalism to which conservatives object. But they will leave intact the divisive and infantilizing speech regime.

The letter arrived a few days after Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and revoked his green card. Now, they are trying to deport him over his political speech. The same week, DHS searched two student dorm rooms and arrested another international student who was involved in the campus protests against the Gaza war for overstaying her visa. Going forward, the State Department will be deploying artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of tens of thousands of international students to search for pro-Palestinian sympathies.

The dragnet isn’t limited to the foreign-born. Under pressure from the White House, Columbia University is looking into an American student for writing an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel. On Friday, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the Columbia protests to determine whether they violated federal terrorism laws; 59 other universities are also under investigation.

These are the actions of a President who claims to be restoring free speech to America after four years of online censorship orchestrated by the Biden administration. “This is the most significant threat to free speech in modern United States history,” civil rights attorney Jenin Younes, who sued the Biden administration for censorship in the Supreme Court case of Missouri v. Biden, tells me. “There is almost no precedent for deporting people in the United States merely for voicing dissent from the government’s foreign policy.”

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By Aris Roussinos

For years, conservative politicians and “heterodox” writers (myself included) have complained incessantly about the threats to free speech posed by the social justice-oriented Left. About a decade ago, an authoritarian, schoolmarmish ideology took hold within Left-wing academic and activist circles. It then percolated into elite American institutions, including the media, the government, the nonprofit sector, and the human resources departments of major American corporations.

This ideology equated speech with violence. The thinking was that because spoken and written expressions of disfavor toward “marginalized communities” can lead to real-world discrimination and even physical attacks, such speech should be suppressed. Mobs of activists “de-platformed” speakers at public venues; universities enacted speech codes, created safe spaces and instituted trigger warnings; employers forced workers into training sessions on what to say and how to think.

Over time, this ideology began to shape government policy too. During the Covid pandemic, the federal government pressured social media platforms to suppress posts that questioned vaccine efficacy and criticized lockdowns. Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by not censoring the expression of views that the government disagreed with.

The Right baulked at this culture of censorship, as did some on the Left. The annihilation of “woke” ideology became the animating cause of the Republican Party, and may have won Trump the 2024 election. But all the while, a conservative strain of the exact same ideology was gestating on the Right, until October 7 unleashed it.

When the Gaza war erupted and militant student protests mushroomed on campuses all over the country, Republicans suddenly began to talk exactly like the social justice activists they so despised. In precisely the same way that Left-wing ideologues condemned every opinion that failed to conform to social justice dogma as “racism”, “misogyny”, or “transphobia”, the Right vilified not only the excesses of the pro-Palestinian movement, which were considerable, but declared just about any expression of opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as “antisemitism”. The very expression of those views, they insisted, put Jewish students in physical danger. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned Students for Justice in Palestine from the state’s public university campuses. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that promised to make campuses into “safe spaces” for Jewish students. House Speaker Mike Johnson stood alongside students from elite private universities who claimed to be victimised by the political beliefs of their classmates.

For 18 months, the pro-Palestinian narrative has been systematically demonized. And now, to Republicans and many Democrats, pro-Palestinian activism has become synonymous with antisemitism, promoting terrorism, and endorsing Hamas. This narrative is taking on the force of law. In an NPR interview last week, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Troy Edgar described Mahmoud Khalil’s participation in pro-Palestinian protests as ipso facto support for Hamas. He called Khalil’s advocacy “antisemitism activity” and compared it to terrorism.

This isn’t mere political rhetoric; it’s the legal basis for the administration’s case against Khalil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly declared that he was arrested for being “a supporter of Hamas” and for “ril[ing] up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities”.

Even if he had explicitly declared an allegiance to Hamas and a hatred of Jews, his views would still be protected by the Constitution. But no evidence has emerged that he holds either of these beliefs. Khalil has explicitly disavowed antisemitism in his movement, telling CNN that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other”.

Yet in the Right’s imagination, there is no distinction between supporting Palestinians and supporting Hamas. Just as, on the Left, concern for preserving women-only spaces can only indicate deep-seated transphobia, on the Right, criticizing Israel can only suggest a genocidal hatred of Jews. As such, to the movement’s critics, pro-Palestinian speech must be criminalized and suppressed, even at the cost of America’s commitment to free speech.

Trump’s stifling of free speech won’t end with Khalil. “The administration has indicated that its next strategy will be to go after US citizens for ostensibly engaging in terrorist activities,” Younes says. “Given that pro-Palestine activism is defined as terrorism, this is an absolutely horrifying prospect.”

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Nor are Trump’s brazen attacks on free expression limited to pro-Palestinian speech. In its mission to expunge “woke ideology” from the federal government and those entities funded by it, Trump and Elon Musk have directed the National Science Foundation to do keyword searches of disfavored terms (such as “women” or “diverse”) in its grant database to determine where to make cuts. Other agencies have scrubbed references to such terms from their websites, as have their contractors in the private nonprofit world. Trump’s de-wokification campaign has begun tracing the outlines of China’s censorship apparatus.

The will to silence the political opposition is neither a specifically Republican nor Democratic predilection. Rather, it’s the irresistible impulse of whoever happens to be in charge. Those with the power to censor their ideological opponents will tend to do so; this was true of Biden’s administration and it’s just as true of Trump’s. But as with everything Trump does, it’s dialed up to 11.

If the courts don’t stop him, Republicans should prepare for a future in which they reap what they sow, just as the Democrats are doing now. The Right won’t be in power forever. When their ideological adversaries next return to the White House, the full force of the state could be turned against anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxies, eclipsing what transpired even at the height of The Great Awokening. The scale of that suppression will make Biden’s Covid censorship subtle by comparison.

In their race to restrict each other’s right to free expression, both parties have contributed to this catastrophe. We’ll be fortunate if American democracy survives it.