The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 16 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Harvard University has decided that enough is enough. In a striking announcement, Harvard declared that it will not capitulate to Donald Trump’s bullying and openly refused Trump’s command that it bend to his will in numerous ways. Naturally, this infuriated Trump. He erupted on Truth Social like a petty little tin-pot dictator, raging that Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status. If there’s some way out of this disastrous mess we’re in right now, it partly involves major institutions refusing to buckle to Trump—which could, if we’re lucky, result in more institutions following suit and a real united front of resistance coming together. So what are the prospects for that happening? Today we’re discussing all of this with one of the smartest commentators out there on free speech issues: Jonathan Friedman, the managing director of the Free Expression Program at PEN America. John, thanks for coming on.
Jonathan Friedman: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Let’s start with what Trump initially demanded of Harvard. This included things like reporting foreign students for alleged violations, bringing in an outside party to ensure supposed diversity of viewpoints, and reducing the power of students and faculty over the university in various ways. Harvard said, No, we’re not doing it. John, what exactly is the Trump administration demanding here?
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.
Sargent: And Donald Trump knows this as well as anyone does, and that’s why he responded by immediately freezing $2 billion in federal funds to Harvard. Clearly, Trump wants to make an example of Harvard, to warn other universities not to get any similar ideas about being independent. I think what this might mean is that Trump and his allies know it’s dangerous for them if institutions start bucking their bullying. That could spread and become contagious. Can you talk about this? What exactly will the impact of Trump freezing $2 billion be on Harvard?
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.
That is what is going on right now, and it’s impacting not just universities but increasingly a range of institutions, cultural centers like the Kennedy Center. Are we really going to become a country where Trump, as president, is also—I don’t know—the president of Columbia, president of Harvard, and chair of the Kennedy Center? What other titles will emerge? I think it’s very important that Harvard has stood up to it, but it really does reflect this moment.
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?
Friedman: I don’t think anybody can say with certainty what is real and what is farce anymore with what’s going on with the federal government. Every day presents new scenarios which were really not contemplated before in terms of checks and balances, the different sources of power between the judiciary and the executive branch. So it remains to be seen what exactly is going to come next. Certainly, the Trump administration has made clear that they want to introduce a new playbook, that they want to play the same hardball and bullying against other countries around the world as they do with universities in the United States like Harvard. And of course, they want to go after Harvard, Princeton, Columbia—some of the best universities in the country, and, really, some of the best universities in the world. That’s what is so especially dangerous in this moment: what is being put in jeopardy in terms of the research and science engines of these institutions ranges way beyond whatever the concerns that are being used to justify them by the government at this point.
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?
Friedman: It seems, unfortunately, like anything feels possible in this moment. I have a hard time believing that the American public wants its universities rolled up and shuttered. These institutions are tremendous engines of economic contribution in their communities. There are parts of the U.S. where the biggest employer in the state, or one of them, is a university or a university system. Many of these large universities are not just teaching undergraduates and offering graduate degrees; they’re medical hospitals. They have a huge footprint. They really operate much more like small cities than private institutions.
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.
Sargent: I want to pick up on what you said about public opinion and what the public wants. I read in The New York Times that this is a fight that Trump and Stephen Miller want to have. I want to call bullshit on this. Reporters need to stop being so damn credulous about Trumpworld’s claims that this issue or that issue is a sure winner for them. They say that all the time about everything. The presumption here seems to be, and I want to get at this, that majorities of Americans agree that universities are cesspools of “wokeness” and terrorism sympathizers or whatever. Now, you’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at public opinion on these matters. I know it’s complicated. What’s the complex reality here, really?
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.
At the same time, it is true that college education is expensive for a lot of people. But I think what we seem to forget in many of these conversations is that higher education is an enormous field. We’re talking about something like 5,000 institutions of higher learning in the U.S.—community colleges, liberal arts colleges, [and] research universities are just one portion of that enormous sector. And in many communities, these institutions are stepping stones for a lot of people to get a better life, to be able to be credentialed for a professional career. Some of the time there is liberal arts training, critical thinking, but that’s not every academic degree. And what’s most worthwhile reflecting on is: What do people tend to do during recessions? They tend to go back to school, get more graduate degrees, and then use those to get better paying jobs afterward. So I don’t think that most people are interested in dismantling American higher education in the way that the Trump administration has claimed.
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.
Sure, there may be issues in higher education. Yes, there is reason for reform. I have myself spent many years thinking and reflecting on how campuses can do a better job with educating young people about freedom of speech and facilitating opportunities for dialogue. But I think in our history, the way you try to improve higher education is by sitting down with leaders in the sector, understanding the issues, thinking about how legislators can work together on solutions. Everything we’ve seen in the past few years has been much more focused on trying to censor institutions, take away their powers, and now, as we’ve seen at Harvard, dictate the intellectual conditions in which they operate. Then you’re not going to have a university anymore.
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?
Friedman: Well, I don’t want to get too political in this moment, but absolutely it’s true. Some of the places that are going to be hardest hit by all of this are the University of Alabama, the University of Mississippi, the University of Kentucky. Those exist as powerful and important institutions in those states, and I don’t think they want to see defunding happen either. In fact, a lot of really important research happens in universities all over the country. Our land-grant institutions, institutions that are involved in particular in international development—things like helping with agriculture and farming around the world is tested out in labs in universities that are not based in New York City or California. There is an enormous amount of activity here that is being threatened that is not just economic in nature; it contributes to the search for knowledge and to the improvement not just of Americans’ lives but of people all around the world.
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.
Sargent: It actually seems like they’re deliberately attacking one of the underpinnings of American greatness. If you look at the way they’re going after the health care system, public health, research and development, USAID which was a major driver of soft power in the world, it just seems like [they’re happening] in a systematic way. Also, let me add this, they’re also going after our international alliances. In every way, they’re attacking the underpinnings of what make this country successful. And this, think, is a big part of it, don’t you?
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.
Sargent: Absolutely. John, to close this out, I think what we’ve got here is a collective action problem in which each individual institution feels that it is taking on great risk if it goes out there and confronts Trump. I think Trump and Stephen Miller are heavily counting on this. But that’s why things like this are so important, right? When Harvard does something like this, other universities start thinking a lot more seriously about doing the same. What are the prospects long-term here for a really serious collective institutional response to this stuff? And could it bear fruit? Could it work?
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.
Now the question is going to be: What can emerge? How can other universities stand with Harvard? How can other kinds of institutions in society look to Harvard as an example? It’s not just by any means about universities at this point, and [there’s] the need for collective action, of standing together and saying, We’re not going to let the democracy that has been built up in this country for so long simply crumble. I think this is an important notch in that direction.
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.
Friedman: Thanks, Greg. Always a pleasure.
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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