“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” – First Amendment, United States Constitution
The original U.S. Congress proposed the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments of the United States Constitution) on September 25, 1789, and the states collectively ratified on December 15, 1791. But throughout the history of the country, given place and time, these rights and protections have never truly been applied and enforced evenly.
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People have often taken to the streets and to the courts to extend their Constitutional rights into areas where they had been restricted or entirely withheld. One of these spaces included the nation’s institutions of higher education.
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Prior to the early 1960s, campus administrators and their boards of overseers suppressed college and university students’ rights guaranteed in the First Amendment. For example, they did not extend the rights of students to bring political leaflets on campus and or to set up and staff informational tables for political organizations.
Police officers arrested Jack Weinberg, a mathematics graduate student on October 1, 1964, at the University of California at Berkeley for setting up a table without a permit in front of Sproul Hall where he promoted the non-violent civil rights organization, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
When officers attempted to drive Weinberg away in a squad car, hundreds of students surrounded the vehicle and entrapped it for 36 hours. The demonstration ignited what would come to be called the “Free Speech Movement,” which demanded the right of free speech and academic freedom on campus.
Soon, the movement spread to other campuses, sparking a wave of student activism connecting with then-current civil/human rights organizations and actions, while also influencing the anti-war movement already on the doorstep. The movement employed tactics of civil disobedience — including large-scale rallies, sit-ins, and blockades — to confront what they considered violations of their civil and human rights as students.
The movement handed down the legacy of students and faculty alike to engage in the freer flow of ideas through inquiry and debate, and opened wider the degree of students’ freedom of speech.
Picking up the spark from the college and university Free Speech Movement, three young people won students’ rights of free speech, association, and redress of grievances in the lower grades.
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark freedom of speech case for students on February 24, 1969. The case involved two Des Moines, Iowa high school students — John Tinker, 15, and Christopher Eckhardt, 16 — and John’s 13-year-old sister, Mary Beth Tinker, a Des Moines junior high school student.
John, Christopher, and Mary Beth wore black armbands in violation of school policy to show their opposition to U.S. involvement in its war in Vietnam. School officials sent them home. Parents of the students petitioned the U.S. District Court to issue an injunction prohibiting school officials from disciplining the students, though the court dismissed the complaint on grounds that the school district had the right to take its actions to prevent breaches of school discipline (aka. “decorum”).
The students and their parents ultimately appealed their case to the Supreme Court. Speaking for the 7 to 2 majority in the case, Justice Abe Fortas wrote: “. . . In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views.”
This case would have implications for numerous cases that followed.
The bully at the pulpit
President Theodore Roosevelt knew that his office provided him with the special opportunity to speak out and be heard by the majority of people on issues that concerned him. He coined the term “bully pulpit,” which he defined as the profound platform accorded to him by his office to promote his agenda.
He used “bully” as an adjective meaning “superb” or “wonderful,” which was its common usage at the time. Many of Roosevelt’s successors saw their extraordinary platform, their “bully pulpit,” in similar fashion: to advance their concerns in attempting to convince the public, the Congress, and the courts.
Donald J. Trump, on the other hand, has taken the contemporary language of “bully” quite literally, using his platform to get his way through intimidation, threat, fear, and embezzlement.
Like the schoolyard bully who confronts the weaker students with the “option” of “either hand over your lunch money to me every day or I smash your ugly face to a pulp,” President Trump has used threats of extortion against members of the international community including some of our longest and most reliable allies. He has also used threats against his political enemies as well as some former political supporters, the courts, government workers, law firms, and non-governmental institutions such as schools: K-12 through upper-level graduate colleges and universities.
Some of these institutions have already crumbled beneath his threats. Trump has gone after law firms that have taken cases with which Trump disagrees. To these firms, he has threatened to suspend active security clearances and terminate their federal contracts.
The Paul Weiss law firm, for example, in response to Trump’s executive order targeting it, offered to terminate its diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) policies while “committing to merit-based hiring, promotion, and retention,” and “dedicating the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services during [Trump’s] term in office… [to advocate for] fairness in the justice system, and combating anti-Semitism, and other similar initiatives.”
In other words, Trump demanded that the law firm defend clients that Trump thinks worthy of legal representation — namely, those who support his political policies.
Attacks on higher education: The case of Columbia University
Now the bully in the Oval Office has threatened officials in higher education with the option of either having him take away their federal funding (their lunch money) or he will symbolically bash their ugly faces. Unfortunately, some officials have chosen a bashed face — sacrificing campus self-governance, academic freedom, and campus freedom of speech, assembly, and redress of grievances — over losing much-needed research and operating grants.
Several campuses — including Princeton, the University of California system, Harvard, Duke, and Stanford — have announced hiring freezes following the Trump administration’s research spending cuts to these universities.
Johns Hopkins University alone lost over $800 million resulting in laying off more than 2,000 employees due to the Trump administration’s draconian cuts from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Trump has threatened to investigate other campuses for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that swept campuses nationwide last spring. This came on the heels of the administration’s revoking visas and directing universities to “monitor” and “report” the activities of international students and staff.
This chilling effect has already resulted in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian refugee and Columbia University graduate student whose green card was revoked over his involvement in on-campus demonstrations, though he was not charged with a crime.
After this, two foreign-born academics with visas to work at Georgetown and Brown Universities have been detained or deported over homeland security concerns. Another Columbia student and Fulbright scholar left the country after she was warned of potential deportation in Trump’s crackdown on international students.
The administration has specifically directed its attacks on Columbia University by cancelling $400 million in federal grants and contracts for its alleged failure to end antisemitism on campus.
Is it mere coincidence that Trump personally came up with the sum of $400 million to hold from Columbia University since that was the exact amount that Columbia University refused to pay Donald Trump for his land that the university was considering buying to expand its campus decades ago?
“Donald Trump was demanding $400 million from Columbia University,” wrote the New York Times. “When he did not get his way, he stormed out of a meeting with university trustees and later publicly castigated the university president as ‘a dummy’ and ‘a total moron.’ … That drama dates back 25 years.”
Rather than lose needed funding, the university made several recent concessions to the Trump administration, losing some rights of free speech, assembly, redress of grievances, and academic freedom. The concessions included:
- Hire 36 additional police officers with “arrest powers” to intervene in campus student protests
- Commit that students must present their student IDs to be allowed to attend campus protests
- Develop clear and precise policies on how these protests will be policed
- Ensure that no protesters will be able to cover their faces
- No protesters will be allowed into academic buildings
- Increased penalties in student disciplinary procedures
- Creating new anti-discrimination policies
- And one of the most controversial, a Senior Vice Provost will now oversee Middle East Studies, the Center for Palestine Studies, South Asian Studies, and Africana Studies programs.
By singling out his allegation of antisemitism on the Columbia campus and other campuses throughout the nation, Trump uses his fraudulent and (frankly) hypocritical concerns for the safety of Jewish students as justification for his draconian assaults on higher education. Trump is using Jewish students as his political pawns in his attempts to ban free speech and academic freedom.
Trump is using Jewish students as his political pawns in his attempts to ban free speech and academic freedom.
Yes, antisemitism exists and is even rampant on many college and university campuses. I experienced this myself while serving as an associate professor at a large Research I university in the midwestern until I felt I could no longer remain.
Let me be clear: All forms of prejudice, discrimination, and oppression continue on many campuses and within other social, religious, business, and governmental institutions. They must be challenged and eliminated.
But by highlighting only the safety of Jewish students, Trump is following the Machiavellian playbook of “divide and conquer,” which actually places Jewish students at greater risk for antisemitic attacks including violence. And as I have written elsewhere, Trump has committed antisemitic actions in words and behaviors in so many instances that I lost count.
These assaults on higher education jeopardize not only our nation’s economic and technological development and our reputation as a leader of higher learning worldwide, but they seriously challenge our values of democracy and traditions of free speech and academic freedom.
And Trump’s assaults aren’t limited to higher education. With his student props looking on, he signed what many Constitutional scholars see as an illegal executive order dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. This agency is charged with administering federal funds for students with disabilities, upholding school health mandates — including vaccinations and free meals programs for students from low-income households — and distributing Pell Grants for undergraduate students.
When colleges and universities are targeted for promoting First Amendment rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition for redress of grievances, no students (including Jewish students) are protected. Higher education must remain a place where free speech and academic freedom must be upheld.
In his book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder lists as his number 1 lesson: “Do not obey in advance.”
He writes, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Part of the administration’s master plan — and I use the term “master” quite deliberately — is to silence dissent of any form against its expressed agenda of weakening the nation’s Constitution and its democratic principles with its autocratic and oligarchic agenda.
Rather than submitting to the administration’s pressure in denying campuses’ First Amendment rights (plus their academic freedoms), the great Benjamin Franklin’s words can provide some guidance in his grave advice, “We must, indeed, all hang together or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
How (& why) colleges and universities can stand up to Trump
Rather than bend the knee to kiss the gaudy gold ring of the would-be king, campus administrators, and their oversight boards might consider forming alliances and coalitions between institutions, even where their overriding philosophical and pedagogical strategies are divergent.
Institutes of higher learning should initiate regional college and university coordinating committees composed of faculty, administrators, and students to serve as an informational clearinghouse for the concerns and actions on regional campuses.
These regional committees could choose some members to serve as delegates to a national committee. One of the tasks of this committee could be creating and distributing a unified statement of solidarity and commitment to preserving the rights and responsibilities of every campus in promoting academic freedom, free speech, assembly, nonviolent redress of grievances, and the protection of every campus community member’s full civil and human rights.
To mitigate against the financial extortion on full display from the Trump administration regarding research and operational grants and student government loans, at least in the short term, the richer universities might think about creating a communal fund by which they donate or lend portions of their endowments to empower less wealthy campuses to stand up to the administration’s funding bans.
Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) — a former U.S. representative (1940–1949) and U.S. senator (1949–1973) — delivered her “Declaration of Conscience” speech on June 1, 1950, on the floor of the Senate to denounce what she saw coming from some Congressional members as “a forum of hate and character assassination.”
Though she did not mention Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-MN) by name, she called for a renewal of “the right to independent thought” and a return to the valued principles of her political party, the Republican party, as “the champion of unity and prudence.”
While she did not singlehandedly defeat the rising authoritarian movement — which was based on fear and scapegoating of the “other” — by speaking up, she helped ultimately stem the rising tide toward authoritarianism.
We again have been thrown into a McCarthy era. This time, it’s referred to as the “Trump MAGA era,” and once again, it has placed the nation in a severe, existential Constitutional crisis.
Educational institutions have the potential to excite our minds into a world of learning we could never imagine. They can expose us to knowledge that can develop our understanding and empathy for people, communities, and concepts outside our lives.
Schools can challenge us to think outside the box of the prevailing status quo. In this way, they can continually expand our critical thinking skills, especially when combined in dialogue with others, to analyze our small piece of the world and envision how we can improve it individually and in coalition.
The challenge to enhance and expand critical thinking and critical consciousness generally stands as a chief reason why people in positions of power have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are, standing in the way of pedagogic strategies that uphold the true intent and meaning of “education.”
A democratic republic like the U.S., as in any other form of governmental system, demands an informed and committed public to maintain at least a basic standard to which our leaders are held. Even within some of the most tyrannical regimes throughout history, resistance movements have come to the fore to work on behalf of the people over autocratic, oligarchical, and kleptocratic assaults.
Individuals and groups have found ways to become involved according to their circumstances and their particular interests and strengths.
Now again is such a time.
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