The Trump administration has declared war on American universities, threatening at least eight of them with drastic financial cuts if they do not meet its list of demands. These demands include requirements for more meritocratic admissions practices, the abolition of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies, and stronger action to counter campus antisemitism. Nearly all of the targeted universities are elite private schools, which suggests an element of class-based resentment against institutions seen as treacherous nests of radical progressive ideology.
The most recently and comprehensively targeted university is also the most prestigious. The Trump administration is threatening to strip Harvard of US$2 billion in funding and US$60 million in contracts if it does not comply with demands set forth in a letter sent to the university on 11 April. Those demands represent an astonishing level of intrusion by executive government into the academic and intellectual independence of universities and they must be vigorously contested. Universities have serious internal problems, including some of those identified by the Trump administration, but this authoritarian cure is likely to be worse than the disease.
The Quillette Editorial Board
Viewpoint Diversity
The most outrageous demand is for a contrived and enforced “viewpoint diversity.” The letter says:
By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate. The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025. Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests. Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity. If the review finds that the existing faculty in the relevant department or field are not capable of hiring for viewpoint diversity, or that the relevant teaching unit is not capable of admitting a critical mass of students with diverse viewpoints, hiring or admissions within that department, field, or teaching unit shall be transferred to the closest cognate department, field, or teaching unit that is capable of achieving viewpoint diversity. This audit shall be performed and the same steps taken to establish viewpoint diversity every year during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.
This kind of diversity has often been promoted by critics of the illiberal attitudes and policies concerning race, sex, gender often found in universities. But enforced viewpoint diversity is a confused and potentially sinister remedy.
For a start, it is based on a misunderstanding of intellectual and scholarly life. Diversity of viewpoints is not valuable for its own sake. In any serious intellectual inquiry a viewpoint must earn its right to be taken seriously, especially since an academic position confers influence, leadership, and responsibility. It is the quality of a viewpoint that matters. A geology department that welcomed creationism and promoted its representation in the university would be derelict in its duty. The same would go for an English department that recruited scholars to argue that Hamlet was written by Christopher Marlowe, or a history department that sought to appoint someone like David Irving to ensure a diversity of viewpoints about 20th-century European history.
The authority of academic disciplines does not rest on arbitrary diversity, it rests on a limitation—often a severe limitation relative to all the possibilities—on the range of views deemed worthy of serious consideration, study, and debate. A consensus emerges as to which opinions are legitimate and worthwhile and which are discredited and cranky, and that consensus is created and enforced by the practices of teaching, examination, publication, academic appointment and promotion.
It is sometimes reasonable to ask a discipline to justify its exclusions, and it is part of a university’s vocation to make room for such a discussion. But it is not reasonable to demand that disciplines abstain from the processes of training and legitimisation I have just described—processes that inevitably involve a degree of dogmatic instruction (think of how languages, mathematics, or science must be taught at lower undergraduate levels). That instruction provides rapid initiation into the basics of a discipline that students will need to master it. It confers the intellectual capacity to judge the fairness and accuracy of a discipline’s current orthodoxy.
It is equally unreasonable—absurd, in fact—to demand that a discipline actively promote people from outside the consensus and treat all their ideas as equally deserving of a respectful hearing. This is a recipe for intellectual anarchy. Of course, it is possible for a consensus to be mistaken, and/or to be dangerously authoritarian, even in those disciplines—the STEM fields—to which these remarks most straightforwardly apply. In the humanities and social sciences, consensus is inevitably more elastic and more contested, and what counts as progress and knowledge is less clear. But even my own discipline of philosophy—which positively encourages students to “question everything”—imposes limits on, for example, what qualifies as clear, relevant, informed, and intelligent discussion.
So, who gets to decide upon a disciplinary consensus? I’m afraid the only possible answer is those with sufficient mastery of the subject to judge the matter. This inevitably means that the guardians will be required to police themselves. That might sound outrageous, but what is the alternative? Would it be really an improvement to have the matter judged by university bureaucrats or academics with an undergraduate background in another discipline? Should chemists judge anthropologists? And surely such a task cannot be left to politicians or civil servants, who likely have no understanding of most academic disciplines and are at least as subject to ideological motives as any academic activist.
The government and its supporters may object that this is not the sort of viewpoint diversity they have in mind. They might say their concern is with political diversity, particularly where hot-button topics relating to race, sex, and gender are at issue (but then why does the Trump administration’s letter not say that?). But the letter explicitly forbids ideological enforcement of any kind: “Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests.” How is a department with a dearth of conservatives supposed to correct that political imbalance unless it imposes an “ideological litmus test” on job candidates to ensure that more conservatives are hired?
A litmus test designed to ensure departmental diversity may achieve different ends to a litmus test designed to ensure departmental uniformity, but it is still a litmus test that requires prejudicial discrimination. This is not the same as advertising a position for someone with expertise in conservative political philosophy and practice, because a liberal can have that expertise, just as a conservative may have corresponding expertise about liberalism. That universities cultivate this sort of capacity rather than retreating into partisanship is vital to the kind of institutions they should aspire to be.
The qualities sought in an academic candidate should be proficiency and accomplishment in scholarship and teaching, and a collegial, tolerant, and classically liberal attitude towards disagreement on matters where there is no consensus, including on political matters. Of course, when teaching contentious topics, a professor should accurately and fairly represent the contending positions, including those he strongly disagrees with. Here, there is a place for the representation of a (limited) diversity of opinions. But academic departments do not have to consist of equal numbers of faculty on each side of an issue in an attempt to balance political bias and influence (let alone, as the letter says, an equal numbers of students—a truly bizarre image of authoritarian social engineering).
Indeed, that engineering such a goal is counterproductive to nonpartisan teaching, since it carries the implication that teachers cannot be relied upon to teach controversial matters fairly. That is a very bad idea to encourage. The best teachers can be trusted to teach their subjects fairly, accurately, and civilly. That does not mean that a teacher can never express an opinion and must always observe strict neutrality. It is part of a student’s intellectual development to learn how to discuss heated matters frankly, but still rationally and fair-mindedly.
The Trump administration claims that the measures it is proposing will create a less ideologically hostile, punitive, and combative campus environment. That is a noble goal, but enforcing viewpoint diversity is more likely to further corrupt academic life. It will encourage bad faith, deception, and self-censorship when job applicants apply for a position reserved for someone with beliefs they do not hold. Conversely, positions that screen for particular political beliefs will attract activist zealots. The upshot may be more zealotry and polarisation as teachers no longer feel they need to present the other side of an issue fairly. That would be a catastrophic outcome.
Radical leftists and their MAGA opponents both misconstrue universities as arenas of political combat rather than as centres of study and learning. It may be hard to believe in our inflammatory cultural environment, but it is possible to respectfully disagree with others and treat them decently as colleagues and students. If most members of a university department share some controversial political opinion, that is not in itself grounds for interference by the university administration, let alone the federal government. Academics have the same right to speak on controversial issues as any other citizen. If you disagree with the dominant consensus on some political topic, respond with reasoned argument. That is the free-speech position, and universities should be models of such discussion. That the US government wants to enforce viewpoint diversity is strong evidence they do not really respect this.
Jeffrey Herf
DEI and Antisemitism
Other demands in the letter are justified to differing degrees, at least in principle. These include:
- The introduction of a merit-based student admissions’ policy rather than one distorted by criteria of race and sex.
- The abolition of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies: “The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name[.]”
- An audit of some (named) academic units in the university to root out their rank politicisation, especially in regard to Israel and antisemitism.
Regarding the latter two demands, I need to add some caveats already hinted at by my use of the words “in principle.”
First—and some Quillette readers may not like this view—not all DEI-like practices are bad. Policies that deliberately divide people by their unalterable characteristics are destructive and ought to be eliminated. But sometimes issues related to identity arise in workplaces and classrooms that do need addressing. For example, men and women need to be able to interact as equals and colleagues without fear of sexual harassment or the imposition of draconian rules that make male-female interaction awkward and uncomfortable for both sides. Alternatively, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions will sometimes arise, particularly in relation to contentious conflicts such as the war in Gaza.
Under such circumstances, it may be necessary to find a civil accommodation between antagonistic parties. Chloé Valdery’s Theory of Enchantment is a consultancy project partly premised on countering racial, sexual, and ideological demonisation. One may question how much good such consultancies actually achieve, but they do not trade in the toxic ideas characteristic of much DEI. And if the university, rightly or wrongly, decides that an initiative like Valdery’s is worth a try, I do not see that anyone else is better placed to make that call, let alone ministers or bureaucrats of the remote federal government. The government may say that it does not mean to target practices like these, but MAGA is so partisan and so determined to steamroll its ideological enemies that it is naïve to believe it can be trusted to discriminate between good and bad kinds of DEI.
Second, the Trump administration’s letter names ten Harvard programs and departments it alleges have “egregious records of Anti-Semitism or other bias.” The audit it demands will be conducted by an external body acceptable to the government, and the report it produces
shall include information as to individual faculty members who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7, and the University and federal government will cooperate to determine appropriate sanctions for those faculty members within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment.
I do not know if these serious charges against either Harvard departments or individual faculty are justified. But even if we grant their validity for the sake of argument, can we trust Trump’s administration to appoint an external body that will conduct a fair and impartial audit? And would such a body accurately and fairly draw a distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. If Donald Trump’s recent remarks charging Ukraine with starting the war with Russia are any guide to the fair-mindedness of his administration in general, we have good reasons for scepticism.
Is There an Alternative?
These objections to the Trump administration’s letter raise an important question: how can the issues the letter is intended to address be dealt with otherwise? Even if there were no feasible alternatives, I would counsel against allowing the government to use financial threats to bludgeon universities, except as a very last resort in the most dire cases. Holding recipients of public funds accountable for how those funds are spent naturally appeals to the average taxpayer. But this kind of accountability has its limits. Governments also fund the judiciary, the police, and public broadcasters, but most people acknowledge that these institutions’ dependency on the public purse has to coexist with a significant degree of independence, since they have to strive for political neutrality in a way that partisan government cannot.
If these institutions do violate political impartiality, it is better for an independent body, appointed by the legislature, to handle the matter subject to judicial review. A wildly errant judge who turns up drunk to his court can be dealt with by such a body, as is the practice in England and Wales with the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office. Likewise, complaints about police misconduct are usually investigated by a force’s internal professional standards branch, and those internal investigations report to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which can then conduct its own investigations in particularly serious cases. Even when an institution like the police experiences systemic problems, we should be wary of allowing executive government to interfere too directly.
Trump’s supporters are currently cheering his war on universities, but his administration’s actions are setting a precedent that may be emulated by subsequent administrations. A radical progressive administration may decide to use the same financial threats to strong-arm universities into abandoning viewpoint diversity, reinstating DEI, and letting corrupt academics run wild if they have the approved politics. If universities are to retain their independence so that they can live up to what is best in their history, they will need to be regulated by a stable independent authority rather than by the changing whims of passing executive governments.
But who or what can guarantee that such a body will be genuinely independent? Well, I don’t know that anything can guarantee independence, but there are some things we can do to help make independence more likely. If such a body is established by legislation, rather than by executive fiat, that legislation must pass both houses of the Congress, meaning it can be openly contested and reviewed. Hopefully, this will make the resulting body fairer and its powers limited. A parliamentary process may also help with the appointment of members to that body if that process is also subject to Congressional oversight; since both sides of the aisle must be satisfied, it is more likely the appointees will be nonpartisan.
The budget of such a body should also be subject to legislative approval. Even when the sitting president’s party controls both houses of Congress (as is currently the case), it cannot necessarily push through any legislation it wants. And when the non-presidential party controls one of the legislative houses, negotiation becomes unavoidable. With just a modicum of goodwill from both sides, support might be garnered from the non-governing party to agree on suitable legislation.
No doubt this back-of-the-envelope solution would encounter all manner of practical problems. But it would still be preferable to the current administration’s approach, which may not even work—at least, not in every case. Although smaller universities will be vulnerable to the government’s threats, Harvard has the capacity to fight back. It enjoys an endowment valued at an astonishing US$53.2 billion—the largest academic endowment in the world (the university was founded in 1636 with £400). It has already filed suit against the Trump administration. Even if its lawsuit fails, Harvard will probably recoup the loss of federal funding from private sources.
So, let’s emphasise instead the feasibility of the alternative. If we look across the Atlantic, we can see something like the above suggestion in practice. In 2023, the UK’s Conservative government appointed Cambridge University philosopher Arif Ahmed, an outspoken campaigner for free speech on Britain’s campuses, to the position of director for freedom of speech and academic freedom in the legislatively created Office for Students. Last month, the Office fined Sussex University £585,000 for “free speech and governance breaches” in university policies that it said could have a “chilling effect.”
One may quibble with the justice of the heavy penalty, but a university was held accountable for free-speech violations, and the matter was handled by an independent, legislatively enacted body headed by a man of integrity and extensive academic experience. This is a much better system of course-correction than quixotic executive action taken by politicians and their staffers who have very little understanding of universities. There is no reason such a body cannot also police breaches of the meritocracy principle, the obnoxious elements in DEI programs, racial hostility, and failure to protect students and faculty from serious student misconduct.
Jeffrey S. Flier
The True Solution
I must admit, however, that this solution to the problem of university corruption is not ideal and I only suggest it with great reluctance. As a former academic, I instinctively recoil from the idea of external bodies pushing their noses into university governance, let alone my classroom, though I recognise there are cases when this is a regrettable necessity. Not that long ago, self-governance was collegial. Back then, a university was a community of scholars—originally, quite literally a religious and semi-monastic community—that regulated its own life in accord with a shared ideal of intellectual and moral life. The members of that community met in their own councils to decide the rules of their own association, enact discipline when needed, and so on. There was little in the way of a separate caste of professional administrators.
Today, universities have become giant businesses with bloated bureaucracies. An academic life is seen less as a vocation dedicated to truth and the life of the mind, but as a career in which personal status and prestige are the primary goals. Undergraduate education no longer provides a general education aimed at creating men and women with well-rounded minds or a life-long love for some of the finest products of the human mind. It is a filter for identifying promising talent for highly specialised and even insular postgraduate research. Undergraduate syllabi focus on contemporary material issues and sometimes encourage contempt for the past. Especially at top universities like Harvard, senior professors do little or no undergraduate teaching, a lowly task that is now passed to PhD students.
In short, the modern university has lost its way. Though individual departments may retain their disciplinary consensus, the university as a whole has lost any consensus around the ideals of learning, scholarship, and mentoring that define the highest conception of its practice. Instead, there is a herd of competitive egos pursuing individual success. And in that environment, people are vulnerable to fads, nostrums, and other bad incentives.
Universities are being corrupted by two trends. The first of these treats education as a service industry to the wider economy. Universities are constantly hunting for public or private funding (which will inevitably come with strings attached) and modelling undergraduate education on the philistine template of skill-instruction for a job. In my own country, Australia, one only has to observe the nauseating student recruitment advertisements—which read as if they are selling soap powder or chocolate bars—to see how shameless this tendency has become.
The second corruption uses classes to indoctrinate students with political ideologies and recruit them into activism. The Trump administration sees only the second of these corruptions (and remains blind to its own version of this problem). The biggest problem with its authoritarianism—which will only grow as it encounters resistance—is that it precludes, or at least greatly inhibits, the deepest and most lasting solution to these problems. That solution can only come from within the university itself.
If I have a physical ailment, medicine or surgery administered by an external authority—the doctor—may remedy my complaint. But if I have a malady of the mind and spirit, the only true and lasting solution is an internal one. If I have lost my way, I must find it again. Despite the harshness of my words here, I do not believe universities are hopelessly lost. There remain many dedicated professors working in the academy.
Despite all the pressures—to publish or perish, to lower standards, to teach utilitarian topics, to conform to ideological agendas around race and sex—these professors still value their inheritance and their students enough to pass the torch of learning to the next generation. Before taking his job at the Office of Students, Arif Ahmed and his Cambridge colleague, theologian James Orr, succeeded in fighting cancel culture to secure visits to the university by Jordan Peterson and gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce.
Ultimately, the real answer to these problems is the recovery of a true sense of a university’s best nature—a culture of civility that is not beholden to either economics or politics. The traditional civility of a university existed not because an external authority imposed it, but because professors, raised in this tradition, artfully exercised it in the choice of topics and texts, their subtle moderation of classroom debate, and the example they set. This in turn set a moderate standard for the more robust discussions outside the classroom.
But all this was made possible by a shared understanding of the university’s vocation which has now been largely lost. In his 2019 report to the Australian government about free speech in the nation’s universities, former High Court Chief Justice Robert French wisely observed:
A culture powerfully predisposed to the exercise of freedom of speech and academic freedom is ultimately a more effective protection than the most tightly drawn rule. A culture not so predisposed will undermine the most emphatic statement of principles.
A university is required to provide sanctuary from the pressures of the outside world—sanctuary in which the life of the mind can be cultivated and transmitted at a relatively safe distance from the looming threats of specious rhetoric, intimidation, and violence, which menace the stability and liberty of human societies. The threats the US government is making against its nation’s universities are simply more instances of that very menace.
Keep reading
Trump Versus Harvard
A Cartoonish View of History
Have We Forgotten Weimar?
When Good Academics Do Bad Things
