Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Jonathan Friedman: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Friedman: I think the president of Harvard called it an effort to control the “intellectual conditions” of the university. And that seems exactly right. I don’t think anyone has seen the federal government in this country try to exert this control over a private institution of any kind: demanding that they want to say how different bodies in the institution should play a role in governing it; that there are certain student clubs that wouldn’t be allowed; that there are certain academic schools that need to have an external audit done of their faculty, what they teach, what they think, what they research, what they say. Even compared to what was demanded of Columbia, what was demanded of Harvard was really a whole other level. And I think it reflects a ratcheting up [of] this moment that we’re in now. Once people start giving into these demands, the demands increase.
Friedman: Well, it’ll be interesting to see what the university does in response. Will they dig in their endowments? Will they band together with other institutions? Or will they challenge these efforts to defund these projects? A lot of the time, there are grants—scientific grants, research grants—[and] other kinds of funding from the federal government to universities where it’s not clear that the Trump administration can on a whim decide to pull away and defund them. Really, there’s good reason for that. It’s not supposed to be set up such that one individual elected president can impose their own ideological will on every institution in the country.
Sargent: It really does. And Trump raged about this on Truth Social, I think, recognizing that this is a problem for him. He said this, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’... Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” John, this is a guy who has absolutely zero conception of the public interest in any sense at all. Can you talk about what this threat to revoke tax-exempt status means? How real is it?
Sargent: You also had Representative Elise Stefanik, who’s emerged as a of little McCarthyite windup toy that’s marching in the direction of universities and threatening all kinds of things, [going] on a power trip here as well. She said it’s time to defund Harvard. I’m trying to get a sense of what this really indicates is coming. Is the Republican Party—and Donald Trump—going to actually try to defund many universities across the board, selectively ones that don’t bend to their will? Is that going to happen or not? Could it happen?
So could it come to pass that some politicians now are going to try and go harder at defunding these institutions or trying to threaten them? It’s not so clear that that is their ultimate goal. Part of what they’re trying to do is intimidate these institutions; I think they’re trying to threaten them. You see that even in some of the language with Harvard, where what they’re talking about are “administrators who are more focused on activism than on teaching.” It’s not so clear what any of that means, but I think that’s a key theme that is emerging as well with the administration now, which is all the old words can be repurposed anew. It wasn’t so long ago, you can wind back the clock and see the first Donald Trump as president passing an executive order mandating that universities support free speech on campus. And you know what he was threatening then? They would lose their research funding if they didn’t. That was trotted out in the second half of the first Trump presidency, it’s not surprising that it has come back. In many ways, I think that president was more interested in free speech, and this one has no interest in it whatsoever.
Friedman: Well, there are different indications of public support for universities. I think there’s a lot of instances where members of public may not understand exactly everything that a university does—or perhaps they have a caricature of what they think, [for example], Harvard is. Any single one university is so many things at once. Nobody can tell you what’s happening at Harvard today or Yale or Princeton or Columbia because a million things are happening at these institutions at any one minute. They are not reducible to whatever is the latest cancellation on campus or professor who was or just felt censored. Nonetheless, there has been a character of these institutions being built and reinforced for many years from certain right-wing media, and that plays a role in how people think of them.
I also think that sometimes people will have an idea about universities or colleges, and they’re talking about something out there in the abstract. But when you ask them about their own alma mater, their college sports—where they support it, or whatever it is—they probably have really fond memories and don’t want to see that blown up. What exactly happens to March Madness and college football when the colleges no longer exist to do all that? So I don’t think that actually most Americans are interested in dismantling all of that.
Sargent: It’s really interesting that you describe it as something that has a real presence in red America, too. That’s what I’m taking from what you’re saying. To hear these guys talk about this, you’d think that universities don’t really function as an engine of meritocracy for red America. It seems to me that Democrats should be getting out there on saying that a little bit more forcefully, don’t you think, John?
That’s why the American university has attracted some of the top talent in the world for the past 50 years. That’s why it is the envy of so many countries. It’s because we’ve had strong traditions of investment and of spurring creativity and research. That freedom—the freedom to ask difficult questions and to push our understanding in new directions—has been critical to the development of scientific cures of a range of diseases. Do we really want to just throw that all away, jeopardize it? It just seems really shortsighted.
Friedman: I mentioned earlier this effort to take a new approach and play hardball, but it is quite destructive. It’s a wrecking ball to international relations, as you mentioned, and other facets of what people have traditionally seen in the world as some of the greatest contributions of the U.S. I think we also have to understand that this has its parallels in other countries that elected strong arm authoritarian leaders. It’s not a surprise that if you roll back the clock a little bit, you’ll see that Orbán in Hungary also tried to take away all the power of universities. They were also targeted in Brazil. In China and Russia, there are similar laws on the books about what you can teach in terms of education to young people and how it has to be “patriotic.” Those look a lot more like some of the executive orders that have been signed this year than they do with anything done previously concerning both K-12 schools and higher education. Those are the models that are being emulated here.
Friedman: Well, there certainly has been anxiety, nervousness on the part of many institutions to take a step like Harvard has just done. And it is a game changer. It does say to every other institution that is feeling like they have little choice but to capitulate that perhaps there is something greater that they have to stand for. And I think that’s what Harvard has done now. It is unquestionable: If Harvard had given into these demands, you would have to ask yourself if it was still a university. The amount of federal oversight and meddling that was being proposed here was totally unlike anything that has been done for another institution related to discrimination or civil rights or anything like that before.
Sargent: It sure is. It’s heartening to see. We need a lot more of it though, I think. Jonathan Friedman, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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