Dem
47
GOP
53
It took a long time, but a group of Harvard Law School professors have finally sued Donald Trump. If there is a group of lawyers more conscious of their legal rights than the Harvard Law School faculty, we don't know where that group might be (maybe Disney?). Trump has claimed he is investigating pulling $9 billion in funds from Harvard because, well, he is president and they are not. He has no basis in law for that and they know it. So the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard chapter of the AAUP have sued Trump in the federal district court in Massachusetts in an attempt to get the court to order him to cease threatening them. Their counsel, law professor Andrew Crespo, said Trump's threats were just a pretext to chill universities from engaging in speech that is protected by the First Amendment and from engaging in teaching and research that he doesn't like. It would appear that some university-level organizations have more spine than all the big law firms combined.
There is one thing the elite universities could do to protect higher education from a big bully, but they currently don't have the nerve to do it. Harvard has an endowment of $52 billion. Yale has $41 billion. Stanford has $38 billion, Princeton has $34 billion, and MIT has $25 billion. The next five private schools have $82 billion combined. Some public schools have large endowments, too, like the University of Texas at $47 billion, but their legal situation is ambiguous.
The private universities could each donate, say, 2% of their endowment to a fund to protect higher education. That would create a fund with $5 billion in it, just from the top 10 schools. The next 10 schools could up that to $7 billion. Then when a university was threatened, it could borrow what it needed to keep the lights on from the fund and sue Trump. They would ultimately win since what Trump is doing is illegal. Then they could sue for damages later. The almost certain result is that the courts would rule that Trump cannot single-handedly breach contracts—and certainly not without due process with hearings and evidence that the universities had violated their research contracts—which they have not. Trump's alleged excuse is that they have not combated antisemitism enough, but even if that were true, it would not be grounds to break existing research contracts for trying to cure cancer, study climate change, and a lot of other things.
But each university—like each law firm (see above)—is entirely focused on what is best for itself rather than looking at the big picture of what is best for their "industry." Maybe they need to add to their legal team a couple of professors of history whose specialty is the union movement, to point out that there is strength in numbers. (V)