If the University of Virginia
agrees to the terms dictated by a memo sent last Wednesday by Secretary of
Education Linda McMahon, then this essay you are reading could cost the
university all of its federal support—research funds, financial aid,
everything.
“Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as
necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to
transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish,
belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” states the
“Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that McMahon sent to Vanderbilt
University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University
of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the
University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the
University of Virginia.
I am purposefully “belittling” a
“conservative idea.” Or maybe I am not. I’m not really sure what the legal
threshold of “belittling” is, and while I have a pretty good idea which ideas
should be considered “conservative” (I studied American conservatism in
graduate school with one of the premier historians of the subject), I am pretty
sure McMahon does not.
So let’s run this “belittlement”
experiment: The policies and goals of the “compact” McMahon proposed to nine
university presidents is silly. It’s written by a team of people who have no
idea how higher education is run or funded. It’s a petty effort at federal,
centralized control of a collection of private and state-run
institutions.
Okay. So that’s belittlement,
almost certainly. But is the idea of tight federal control of private and state
institutions “conservative?” Not by most notions of American conservatism,
which have traditionally deferred to private actors and toward a model of
federalism that vests more authority in state and local governance than in the
national bureaucracy.
It’s important to note that this
intervention into higher education is unlike the previous mob-like extortion
moves on Columbia, Harvard, the University of California, and (again) my own University
of Virginia. In those, the Trump administration told these universities they
had to make specific changes in how they do their work or who runs the
university under the threat of losing substantial research funding—regardless
of the public value of that research.
This “compact” is more like an
invitation to borrow money from the mob, with substantial control and future
penalties assured. If any university agrees to this proposal, it will be under
federal control and subject to some unpredictable, arbitrary, extreme
penalties.
But let’s assume that
“conservatism” now means “things President Donald Trump and his Cabinet want to
do.” Then imagine that the University of Virginia, my employer, signed on to
this statement, as McMahon has requested.
If I am considered a representative
of the Department of Media Studies, or as head of the Center for Media and
Citizenship, then either or both of those must be eliminated for facilitating
my public statements belittling a “conservative idea.”
If, as the text of the compact
reads, the Department of Justice—without
any clear due process or standards—determines that the university “willfully or negligently violated this
agreement” by retaining my academic department or center, it “shall lose access
to the benefits of this agreement for a period of no less than 1 year.” Those
“benefits” include some vague promise of more federal support. The letter and
text of the “compact” do not list or outline specifically what such benefits
might be.
If the Justice Department determines that signatory universities fail to
live up to the compact by, for example, t
