The Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the Department of Education and to DEI programs at universities across the country. And, in typical Trumpian style, the President has escalated and retaliated against schools that refuse to comply with his administration’s orders. Harvard recently decided to fight back, garnering praise from prominent figures like Barack Obama: “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom.”
Opposition to the Trump administration hinges on the newly rediscovered virtue of academic freedom – something that had long been lost under microaggression warnings and inclusion training. Now, apparently, academic freedom is back in vogue because the federal government is attaching strings to its funding. “Hands Off Our University” has become the slogan of recalcitrant university officials, outraged faculty, and student protestors.
Harvard has become a rallying point for other universities that don’t want to kowtow to the Trump administration’s demands. Harvard’s President, Alan Garber, has said:
As of writing, the administration has frozen roughly $2.2 billion of federal funding and has begun investigating whether it can revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
Administrators are right to chant, “hand off my university!” We should want the federal government’s hands off universities. We can start by removing its tentacles from student loan financing. No more FAFSAs. No more Pell grants. This, by the way, would save taxpayers nearly $30 billion annually.
Then, we can remove government research grants, whether for the arts and humanities or for science and medicine. The $40 billion to $50 billion of federal tax dollars spent annually at research universities could be used to pay down national debt (or at least to reduce the deficit).
In 2018, colleges and universities received roughly $150 billion in federal money through a variety of programs. That’s a lot of government “hands” on the higher education system. If universities want those hands off, they should refuse the money.
But suppose that is a bridge too far. Afterall, we don’t want to return to the dark ages before the 20th century when almost no general scientific research was done until national governments started funding it at universities…
Perhaps universities could set up organizational firewalls between the university and its various government research arms. Or they could spin off the med schools and research centers entirely. Afterall, the goal is to get the government’s hands off of the universities. This would do that.
And before anyone says this is impractical, impossible, or purely hypothetical, we should note that several successful colleges do not accept federal money of any kind: Hillsdale College, Grove City College, Christendom College, Patrick Henry College, Wyoming Catholic College, Thomas Aquinas College, and New Saint Andrews.
When universities no longer accept federal funds, they will be free to run (or not run) their sports and dorms however they wish. No more “Dear Colleague” letters scolding or not so subtly threatening schools that don’t take the right political or social stances.
Of course, this is decidedly not what President Garber and other university administrators have in mind. They very much want to keep all their federal funding (and get more if they can). They just don’t want conditions for how they operate with that money. One could be forgiven for thinking this sounds more like a large-scale grift than a robust defense of academic freedom.
Remember, he who pays the piper calls the tune. If these universities don’t want to face political pressure and government oversight, they need to stop taking government money. And until they put their money where their mouth is, academic freedom will remain a fig leaf for massive institutions (full of extremely well-paid administrators and faculty) that have been taking American taxpayers to the cleaners for decades.