Mar.21

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

We Don't Need No Education: Antisemitism Was Just a Red Herring

In case you are wondering: Yes, that headline is indeed a reference to the movie Clue.

We've been trying to get to this for over a week, and now we've just got to bite the bullet and get 'er done, because events are moving fast. The Trump administration is working to upend the entire educational system, with an emphasis on higher education. Here's a rundown of the biggest storylines:

• De-Funding: Although Donald Trump is not terribly bright, he's got some very sharp and very conservative people working for him who are quite good at identifying the weak spots in the system. And if the goal is to stick it to universities, especially prominent ones, the weak spot is federal funding. He has a lot of power to turn off the money spigot (at least while he commands a federal apparatus that is more than willing to disregard the law). And so, that is what he's begun doing.
  
  Most notably, last week Trump said that he would cancel $400 million in grants and contracts that have already been approved and signed with Columbia University. The nominal reason Trump is giving is that he feels Columbia did not do enough to squelch antisemitism on campus during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year.
  
  And while Columbia is the first university to take incoming fire, it won't be the last. Another 60 universities have been warned that they are being investigated for not doing enough about antisemitism, while 45 more are under the microscope because of diversity-related programs, at least seven schools are the subject of discrimination probes because of their use of affirmative action, while Penn, several schools in Maine, and possibly other institutions are in trouble because they allowed trans women to compete in women's sports. Yesterday, in fact, the administration yanked $175 million in funding from Penn "over its policies forcing women to compete with men in sports."
  
  In some cases, the attacks on universities are indirect, and yet just as damaging. For example, the virtual elimination of USAID has cost Johns Hopkins $800 million in existing contracts. Poof. They are suddenly gone. The Bloomberg School of Public Health is now being forced to lay off almost 2,000 employees in 44 countries, including about 250 in the U.S., the largest job cut in university history. Johns Hopkins employs 150,000 people worldwide and is the largest employer in Maryland.
  
  The university ran programs all over the world to care for mothers and infants, provide clean drinking water, and offer life-saving care in many countries. It also ran 80 different research institutes focusing on maternal health, Alzheimer's disease, and gun violence. In a flash, all of that is gone.
  
  
• We Surrender...: None of this yanking of funds is legal; there is a procedure for cutting off federal grants, and it requires a fair bit of due process, not to mention some actual malfeasance. The legal term here is "breach of contract." Once a university has signed a contract to do certain work, the university is obligated to do the work and the government is obligated to pay for it. The president has no authority to cancel any contracts just because he wants to. It is not for him to decide how much action to combat antisemitism is enough, nor to dictate other university policies. And again, he has no legal authority to cancel existing contracts, most of which have nothing to do with the protests.
  
  The executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Donna Lieberman, called the move an unconstitutional government effort "to coerce colleges and universities into censoring student speech and advocacy that isn't MAGA-approved, like criticizing Israel or supporting Palestinian rights."
  
  The problem here, not unlike the one faced by Paul, Weiss (see above) is that even if the law is on the universities' side, it takes a long time and a lot of money to fight a lawsuit against the federal government, and that's before you consider the risk of ending up before a Trumpy judge. Further, every person in academia knows that money that is budgeted for, say, FY 2024-25, and is not spent in FY 2024-25, tends to disappear into the ether, forever. In other words, a university could spend multiple years and tens of millions of dollars to win a lawsuit, only to lose out on hundreds of millions in funding while the suit is underway. That would be a rather Pyrrhic victory.
  
  This being the case, it's not surprising (even if it's disappointing) that Columbia capitulated yesterday, in utterly humiliating fashion. Given until the end of business yesterday to make a decision, the university's leadership agreed, among other things, to: (1) complete disciplinary proceedings against some of the protesters; (2) formalize a definition for antisemitism; (3) overhaul its admissions policies; (4) place its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies departments under "academic receivership;" (5) grant the university police more power to "control" protesters and (6) forbid people from wearing masks on campus unless they wear an ID badge with their name on it.
  
  
• ...But We Don't: While Columbia has effected a complete and unconditional surrender, not all universities are following suit. Last month, the utterly lawless Ed Martin, who is Acting U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, and who expects to get the job permanently, decided to do some freelancing. So, he sent an absolutely bananas letter to William M. Treanor, Dean of the Georgetown Law School. Here's the key portion:

  It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote DEI. This is unacceptable. I have begun an inquiry into this and would welcome your response to the following questions:
  
  First, have you eliminated all DEI from your school and its curriculum?
  
  Second, if DEl is found in your courses or teaching in anyway [sic], will you move swiftly to remove it?
  
  At this time, you should know that no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered.

  Presumably, it goes without saying that dictating university curriculum is not Martin's job, any more than it's Treanor's job to tell Martin what cases to prosecute. It would also appear that Martin missed the day in law school where they taught the First Amendment, as he's violating both the university's and potential applicants' rights to free speech with his threats. Remember, this is the U.S. Attorney of the most powerful prosecutor's office in the country. And he's using his position for political purposes to threaten and intimidate universities. He should be disbarred or subject to disciplinary action and, in fact, Senate Democrats have called for that very result.
  
  Meanwhile, Treanor, who has been dean for 15 years and is regarded as one of the country's most influential educators, did not mince words in his response. He reminded Martin that the federal government cannot dictate a university's curriculum and that his threats violate the Jesuit school's first amendment rights of religious freedom. He also wondered if Martin, a practicing Catholic, really meant to threaten a "Catholic and Jesuit institution" whose religious mission is to encourage discourse among "people of different faiths, cultures and beliefs."
  
  It's worth reading the entire letter. Note that Treanor does not mention any specifics about Georgetown's curriculum or what may or may not constitute "DEI." Instead, he tells Martin that the federal government has no business telling its faculty what they can or cannot teach and that future employment cannot be withheld based on those demands. Oh, and did he mention that Georgetown is a storied institution in the "Jesuit and Catholic tradition"? Uh-oh, "DEI" meets religious freedom—you can practically hear Justices Samuel Alito's and Clarence Thomas' heads exploding. Treanor closed with a demand of his own: "We look forward to your confirming that any Georgetown-affiliated candidates for employment with your office will receive full and fair consideration." The implication here is that Georgetown Law might just know a lawyer or two, and might just file a suit or two if Martin decides to ignore the Constitution.
  
  One can only hope that other universities and financial institutions (looking at you Citibank) will take notice as to how to stand up to would-be authoritarians. That said, when hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line... well, the Columbia approach is probably going to be more common than the Georgetown approach. Sigh.
  
  
• Deportations: Another pressure point, beyond the federal funds, is foreign-born students and faculty. They tend not to have the resources to resist the federal government, whether that means money to hire lawyers, or maybe family to support them. The ones targeted by the Trump administration tend to be brown-skinned, and endowed with Spanish or Arabic names, which allows the White House to slur them as terrorists, gang members, invaders, etc. And some of them actually are in violation of the law, particularly if they are undocumented. We already had an item this week about Mahmoud Khalil, a grad student at Columbia who is currently being detained by ICE, and Rasha Alawieh, a professor at Brown who has already been deported. Since then, the administration has gone after Badar Khan Suri, a researcher at Georgetown, Ranjani Srinivasan, a doctoral student at Columbia, and Leqaa Kordia, an undergrad at Columbia. This list is probably not comprehensive; the administration is working hard to "disappear" people, and folks who don't have a lawyer or family might struggle to make it known that they have been arrested.
  
  (Z), incidentally, can give a little bit of firsthand information here. A couple of California universities have already had some ICE activity, and the faculty and staff at the rest are being trained as to how to proceed should ICE show up in their classrooms or at their offices. In particular, at UCLA, which had protests almost as high-profile as those at Columbia, it's seen as inevitable that the Trump administration is coming, probably sooner rather than later. And both campuses at which (Z) teaches have had instances of people not affiliated with the school prowling around and taking photos of students and of professors' offices. If you load up the blog one day and learn that (Z) was unable to complete that day's work by virtue of being in jail, it will almost certainly because he punched an ICE agent who illegally entered his classroom. Or, possibly, a snitch.
  
  
• The Department of Education: Conservatives have long hated the Department of Education, which was created on Oct. 17, 1979, when Jimmy Carter signed the act that Congress passed to establish it. They didn't like the idea that the federal government had the power to tell red states that they couldn't discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and had to make some accommodations for students with disabilities. It also meant that "segregation academies" and teaching only "creation theory" rather than evolution, might get some federal blowback. All in all, better to let (conservative) parents run the schools. Yesterday, Donald Trump signed an XO ordering Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take "all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States." This is after the DoEd already laid off half its workers. To formally abolish the Department, Congress must pass a law saying so. Very few Republicans in Congress want to go on the record opposing education, so de facto making it impossible for the Department to function will have to do.
  
  Some of the programs, such as Pell Grants, are probably too popular to kill, so they might be moved to other departments. It will be up to McMahon to figure out which programs are worth salvaging and find them a new home. And there is danger of a real backlash here. Most voters don't have a clue what the DoEd does. In 2026, Democrats could run on "Republicans want to abolish the public schools and replace them with private and religious schools." That is probably actually true, but slightly misleading, since abolishing the Department of Education doesn't do that. Still, voter ignorance could help the Democrats if they want to run with this.

Again, a lot of this, especially the attacks on universities, is being sold as combating antisemitism. And when we hear or read that, we're reminded of an old line from the actor Gary Cooper: "It's so phony. Nobody believes it." Cooper was actually talking about the John Wayne movie Rio Bravo, but it also holds here. Trump's administration is too full of people who are Nazi-curious, or just straight Nazi, for anyone to believe that the President cares about antisemitism. Further, the campus crackdown does little to foster an environment where people can think carefully and critically about these sorts of complex issues. This piece, written by Joel Swanson, a professor of Jewish Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and headlined "What Are We Allowed to Say? How Trump's Department of Education has made it harder for me to teach Jewish Studies" is instructive on that point.

To the extent that Trump's campus crusade has anything to do with Judaism, it's about Israel. And specifically, it's about persuading evangelicals that the administration is fighting hard for Israel, and fighting hard against Israel's alleged terrorist enemies.

That said, the Israel element is a fringe benefit for Trump. Looming much larger is the opportunity to lash out at the educational system in general. As Politico's Irie Sentner points out, quite rightly, Republicans have hated universities for years. It's not a secret that the red team feels that way; J.D. Vance has said numerous times that "universities are the enemy" (apparently forgetting that he is himself the holder of two degrees).

These days, noncollege voters, especially noncollege white men, are one of the core constituencies of the GOP. And those voters particularly loathe both universities and those who are university educated. In some cases, it's from a sense of inferiority. In others, it's resentment about opportunities that [voter X] never got. In some cases, there are other dynamics in play. It does not help that university faculty and administration skew pretty liberal, in general (although the extent has been overstated, and their ability to impose that on their students has been WAY overstated). It also does not help that when a student enrolls at university, they are exposed to a lot of different worldviews and a lot of different cultures. This tends to change a person, and not usually in a MAGA direction. Also, universities teach reason and use of evidence, which is pretty much the polar opposite of "faith." And so, universities are perceived by those on the right as anti-religion. This despite the fact that there are plenty of people who are able to reconcile faith with reason, and to find a place for both in their lives.

In short, despite the administration's claims to the contrary, this is not "Fighting Antisemitism v1.0," it's really "Culture Wars, v.4553.96." And Trump is more than happy to lean into this particular crusade. He views students and professors as the enemy because they are not poorly educated and aren't inclined to bow down and worship him. Aspiring autocrats all try to destroy or silence all other power centers in their countries. This includes the legislative branch of the government, the media, law firms, universities, and the courts. So far, Trump is working hard on the first four. The courts may be tougher, but the rubber won't hit the road until the Supreme Court gets a case he really, really cares about and he announces in advance what decision he expects and what he will do if he doesn't get it.

If Trump is able to seriously damage the nation's top universities, Chinese President Xi Jinping will be thrilled. If colleges aren't educating the best students and doing groundbreaking research, it would be much easier for China to surpass the U.S. in numerous fields. If Xi is smart, he could award Trump the Medal of the Republic, the highest honor for service to China, and Trump would surely gratefully accept it. (Z & V & L)