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The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: Columbia University’s decision Friday to bend to the Trump Administration’s governance demands has shocked the academy far and wide, and it is an unprecedented sanction. But perhaps it will also shock our academic elites into recognizing that they have courted this political backlash by too often abandoning their central mission of free inquiry.
Troy Closson, Alan Blinder and Katherine Rosman
New York Times
Excerpt: Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.
Columbia University’s concession on Friday to a roster of government demands as it sought to restore about $400 million in federal funding is being widely viewed as a watershed in Washington’s relationships with the nation’s colleges. By design, the consequences will be felt immediately on Columbia’s campus, where, for example, some security personnel will soon have arrest powers and an academic department that had drawn conservative scrutiny is expected to face stringent oversight. But they also stand to shape colleges far from Manhattan.
FIRE
Excerpt: The federal government abandoned its existing process to brow-beat Columbia — and Columbia folded.
Higher education reform shouldn’t resemble a shakedown. Colleges and universities shouldn’t be bullied into accepting speech-restrictive demands because the government dangles a $400 million check over an institution’s head. Any changes made as a result of this flawed process are inherently suspect.
Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: A $10,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services is allowing a tribal college in northern Michigan to continue offering library services during a building renovation. The IMLS, which is the largest federal funding source for U.S. museums and libraries, also awarded a historically Black university in Virginia $52,000 to digitize an archival collection about the women’s college it absorbed in 1932. And an academic researcher in Florida is counting on a $150,000 grant to help school librarians better support students who are autistic.
But as of last week, those and hundreds of other federally funded programs at museums and libraries—many housed at cash-strapped colleges and universities—are in jeopardy.
Keith E. Whittington
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Yesterday the Trump administration launched yet another massive financial blow at a university because it has done some things the administration does not like. This time the University of Pennsylvania's medical research is being decimated because the administration disagrees with the Penn athletic department's transgender policies.
Eugene Volokh, Michael C. Dorf, David Cole, and 15 other scholars
The New York Review
Excerpt: We write as constitutional scholars—some liberal and some conservative—who seek to defend academic freedom and the First Amendment in the wake of the federal government’s recent treatment of Columbia University.
The First Amendment protects speech many of us find wrongheaded or deeply offensive, including anti-Israel advocacy and even antisemitic advocacy. The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing such viewpoints. This is especially so for universities, which should be committed to respecting free speech.
