Where Are the Red Lines?
It’s time for universities to take a stand on academic freedom.
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Recent headlines announcing that Columbia University had “yielded” in the face of pressure from the Trump administration augur a dangerous era for everyone in higher education. The news has already led to several scholars leaving the United States for Canada. With dozens more institutions in the immediate crosshairs of Title VI investigations, it is critical that leaders articulate clear red lines that would necessitate the rejection of federal funding. Such a rejection would obviously be a monumental and painful step, but if universities want to survive as institutions dedicated to the formation of knowledge, red lines are critical.
To understand the situation, one has to recognize just how dependent both private and public research universities have become on federal dollars. The private-public partnership in research dates back to the Cold War and has produced, by any metric, the best university system in the world. Universities conduct “sponsored research” on the basis of government programs (as well as, less commonly, private foundations and companies). Federal programs include medical research funded through the National Institutes of Health, research in both hard and social sciences funded by the National Science Foundation, and humanities research funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Though not at issue in the Columbia case, the Trump administration had already leaned on higher education through a reduction in the indirect cost rate. This is an implicit subsidy to universities in the form of a fee tacked onto the basic research costs, in recognition that the institutions have to pay for their infrastructure. One cannot easily conduct cancer research without also teaching basic biology, for example, or without expensive laboratory buildings. From the point of view of the individual researcher, the indirect costs rates are experienced as an unwelcome tax, but it is central to how universities fund themselves.
All this gives the administration a lot of leverage with which to demand changes in higher education. Columbia’s “surrender” will not be the end of the story, either for Columbia itself or for other institutions.
This is not to pile on to now-departed Columbia president Katrina Armstrong, who resigned after the decision but still faced grilling from Washington regulators. She gave the administration a political win, but it is not clear how substantive it was. It may be that many of the reforms accepted by Columbia were underway already, and some of them may well be justified. Perhaps disciplinary reform was already under way after the spring 2024 demonstrations. Another demand was to prohibit masks, except for medical or religious reasons. There is no reason to have unidentifiable mask wearers wandering university campuses: even if protestors fear doxxing, part of the requirement of civil disobedience is to accept the consequences of one’s actions. Pro-Palestine protesters should consider how they’d feel about masked Turning Point USA supporters or Proud Boys wandering the campus.
A closer call is the agreement to put the controversial Middle Eastern studies department under the supervision of a vice provost, which seemed to meet the Trump administration demand that the department be put into “receivership.” It is true that replacing departmental leadership with those from outside the department is a common tool. But we cannot know if this will entail a reduction in the academic freedom of the members of the department, and the Provost of Columbia has a record of commitment to free expression.
The red line for any research university has to be academic freedom, without which institutions can no longer function as universities. It has been under severe threat in recent years from both the right and the left, with many professors sanctioned for even modestly dissenting views. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reports that firings now surpass those in the McCarthy era.
Academic freedom demands the widest possible latitude for individual scholars to teach and research as they see fit, but it also has a collective component. This is the requirement that academic decisions be made by academics, and not by government. We cannot have a government committed to “patriotic education” telling us what paths of research are acceptable and what are not.
This principle helps to articulate exactly what the red lines ought to be. A requirement that a particular professor be fired as a condition of receiving federal funding would be a grave interference with internal operations and should be categorically off the table.
Another red line should be a demand to close a department. Given that the administration has already scoured federal research grants for words like “racism,” “women,” and “gender,” we can expect them to go after departments devoted to these topics. One might imagine that Black Studies will be first on the target list, given what we have seen in Florida and other states that have tried to eliminate discussions of race in America. Another easy target may be departments of Women’s Studies, which have waded into the Israel-Palestine issue. Whatever one thinks of this move (and I have been critical), state power should not be the mechanism of imposing discipline.
Many institutions of higher education are, unfortunately, already in a position of cutting departments for financial reasons, but these decisions must be made on an academic basis. Closing a department at the behest of the federal government would mean that our autonomous institutions are essentially subject to the same powers of reorganization as an executive agency.
If there is any lesson from the congressional testimony around the Palestine demonstrations in 2023 and 2024, it is that once politicians smell blood, they will keep coming. It was only when some witnesses such as New York Schools Chancellor David Banks pushed back that the hearings stopped. Drawing a line in the sand does not mean that there will be no negotiation under the Title VI process, but it does mean that it will be bounded. And it may take some institutions choosing to reject funding for the process to stop. The procedural issues can then be adjudicated, and there might be a First Amendment basis for challenging the government’s action.
To be sure, a cutoff in federal funds would be very painful and would fall on the least protected members of the university: untenured faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and staff. But to allow government ideology to shape university practices would turn our institutions of higher education, which are a major American success story, into an expositor of partisan ideology. We recoil from the Chinese policy that Xi Jinping thought must be taught at every university; we should do the same for the Art of the Deal.
Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Professor of International Law and Faculty Director of the Forum on Free Inquiry and Expression at the University of Chicago.
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