War on Universities, Lawyers & Expertise

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 821
  • Views: 26K
  • Politics 
"The White House is offering these nine universities a Hobson’s choice: give up privileged access to the public funding that supports vital research or make the university into an arm of the federal government. Under financial and political pressure, university leadership, trustees, and regents may be tempted to sign and try to mitigate the damage later. We exhort them to see the truth beneath the administration’s pretext of encouraging ideological diversity and affordability. No institution that is committed to the free pursuit of knowledge should submit to the degradation of autonomy and academic freedom contained in it.”

www.acls.org

ACLS Statement Regarding White House “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”

ACLS stands firmly against this latest White House effort to divide faculties by giving special privileges to students in “hard science programs” and its demand that institutions abolish “units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
www.acls.org www.acls.org
 
From Jack M. Balkin’s Blog, “Balkinization.” The Art of Replacing the Law with the Deal


1.The compact demands that universities set about “transforming or abolishing institutional units” that “belittle” “conservative ideas.” I found it surprising that this was phrased as baldly as it was, with no fig leaf of parallel protection for liberal or progressive or any other kind of ideas—only “conservative ideas.” This provision is wrapped up with no trace of irony in a paragraph about promoting “academic freedom” and the word “belittle” is nestled next to the dark possibility that institutional units—that is, academic departments and schools—might “spark violence against conservative ideas.” I think we can all agree that that would be bad. Even to quote these words is to begin to descend into a hall-of-mirrors narrative of partisan grievance.
 
2.The compact demands that universities prohibit and punish “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.” This has two purposes, I think. First, it is about “Hamas.” But not the actual organization in the Middle East. As the recent district court decision by Judge Young in AAUP v Rubio explains in compelling and granular detail, the Trump administration has a distinctive pattern of falsely characterizing ordinary political speech of a pro-Palestinian kind as “support for Hamas.” This provision of the compact would ensure that if May Mailman and the DOJ deem pro-Palestinian activists “Hamas supporters” (a claim that Republican politicians, as well as the DOJ, make constantly), then a university allowing those activists to speak violates the compact. Second, it is about “antifa.” Notice that the sentence does not specify whether the “terrorist organizations” are international or domestic. President Trump recently “designated” “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization”—a proclamation whose abject lack of any legal effect was painfully obvious to lawyers. Well, this compact would give that designation a legal effect: universities would be required to suppress speech that the DOJ deems “support” for “antifa.” And of course, since “antifa” is more of an idea than an organization, universities will have to proceed under a cloud of uncertainty about exactly what May Mailman or some other DOJ lawyer will deem “support” for “antifa.”
 
3.The compact demands that universities adopt the government’s definition of “male,” “female,” “woman,” and “man.” This part is surrounded by other sentences about women’s locker rooms and sports, which is a political smokescreen that succeeded in convincing many journalists that those areas—the parts of anti-trans politics where the GOP and the Supreme Court majority feel they have the political upper hand—are the topic here. But read carefully: the scope of the imposed definition is unbounded. The DOJ could certainly “find” a university noncompliant because of health care provided in its hospital system to transgender patients, speech in the classroom by faculty members about transgender topics, failure to contradict or discipline student groups asserting a different view of gender, or much else.
 
4.The compact makes an extremely intrusive demand about faculty hiring: universities must obtain, to the DOJ’s satisfaction, “a broad spectrum of viewpoints” not only in the university as a whole, but “within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.” It does not take much imagination to understand that this means aggressive affirmative action for conservatives (and only for conservatives) in fields where the DOJ might view them as underrepresented, from African-American Studies and anthropology and art through the rest of the alphabet.

5.Universities must “screen out” foreign students on the basis of viewpoint, specifically screening out those “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.” This may prompt some gallows humor regarding the unusually tricky question of who America’s “allies” are these days (when the President himself demonstrates hostility to many of the countries one might have named over the past 75 years). However, there is obviously one specific ally in particular that this provision is about. This provision is an additional lever by which DOJ can demand crackdowns on speech “hostil[e]” to Israel. With respect to foreign students, this provision of the compact dramatically moves the goalposts for crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech. Instead of needing to claim that such speech is antisemitic (which is often a stretch, particularly given the large number of Jewish students among the pro-Palestinian speakers), once a university signs this compact, the DOJ could find it noncompliant for not punishing or insufficiently aggressively punishing speech that is merely “hostile to Israel.” (The compact also would require universities to engage in the viewpoint discrimination at an earlier stage, when admitting students in the first place, in addition to on campus.)
 
6.Universities must anonymously poll their students, faculty and staff each year about compliance with the compact. Given that most faculty, staff, and students at almost any university will vigorously oppose the entire compact, this might seem a bit odd. But I suspect that the point is to create the possibility of anonymous accusers among subgroups within the students, faculty, and staff. For instance: are conservative students telling the anonymous survey that the university is shirking its obligations under the compact? If so, the DOJ could issue a finding that the school out of compliance. Thus, the point here is to put university administrators in fear of not pleasing and obeying an anonymous but highly empowered favored subset of their students.
 
7.In a section labeled institutional “neutrality,” universities must put policies in place that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.” There is an ambiguous but real degree of wiggle room in the compact, allowing university employees to speak in a “personal capacity” about public matters. But the clear point of this provision is to muzzle the First Amendment rights of any university “representative,” blocking university leaders in particular from participating in any debate in the public sphere. That is part of a broader project of forcing universities to retreat from the public sphere.

8.Universities must agree to financial conditions that might appear on the surface to a credulous reader or reporter to improve college affordability, but in reality amount to defunding the work of the university, especially the humanities and social sciences. To see this, you have to situate the “compact” within the rest of the administration’s higher education policies. Tuition everywhere is high. To freeze tuition while reducing Pell grants, student loans, and loan repayment assistance, does not make college more affordable—quite the opposite—but it does deal a blow to universities’ finances. At the very wealthiest universities (>$2 million per student endowment), the extra requirement that the university make tuition free for “hard science” majors makes it particularly obvious that the goal here is to defund universities overall while depopulating the humanities and social sciences in favor of the natural sciences. (Luckily for the future of academic freedom, this requirement also makes it completely unworkable for the wealthiest universities to sign the compact.)
 
9.With regard to affirmative action, which the Supreme Court has outlawed, universities signing the compact must agree to hand over granular data to the federal government that would allow the DOJ to punish any university that appears to show any disparity in SAT/ACT scores between students on the basis of race. This opens the door to potentially crushing sanctions—the full set of them—for a university that engages in even the forms of purely class-based affirmative action that are legal under Supreme Court caselaw, but under threat from this government. The reason is that any time a college reaches out to find disadvantaged students with substantial potential but limited educational opportunities, that group of students will differ from the overall college population in two ways: they will have somewhat lower SAT/ACT scores and they will be somewhat more demographically diverse. (This doesn’t deserve a separate bullet point but the compact also aims to casually elevate the right-wing-activist driven Classical Learning Test (CLT) as an equal alternative to the SAT and ACT.)
 
10.Universities must agree to do a lot of other things that are in most cases already required by federal law. In addition to not engaging in affirmative action, for example, universities must be fair in their disciplinary procedures with respect to students’ race and sex. Such provisions requiring universities to do things law already requires are partly a ruse, aimed at producing the kind of journalistic coverage the rollout of this compact in fact got, which was that much of the document looked pretty anodyne and mainstream. But there is also a second, deeper purpose. By bringing these existing obligations inside “the deal,” the government attempts to gain new power to enforce these existing obligations through unilateral DOJ findings—by threatening the full suite of far-reaching sanctions outlined in the compact. Violating “the deal” is potentially a lot more consequential for a university than violating the law.
 
“…the set of schools the Trump administration in fact chose to approach this week—Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Penn, USC, Texas, Vanderbilt, and UVA. These clearly represent an effort to find the intersection on the Venn diagram between schools with a good amount of prestige and schools that might be softer targets, sometimes because their strong leaders have already been deposed as a result of right-wing activism and replaced with figures who are weaker, more beholden to conservative donors or politicians, or both.”

From the blog.
 
This is almost exactly what Viktor Orban did in Hungary to his nation's public and private universities. They're just following his plan perfectly. Again, the theory is that if you can eliminate liberalism in universities you can literally destroy liberalism in the nation and conservatives will win a final and total triumph over them. Conservatives are convinced that liberalism wouldn't exist if college students weren't "brainwashed" into believing such "nonsense", so if you can just take over universities and drive out liberals then you will destroy the basis of liberalism in America. It's that simple.
 
donbosco said:
6.Universities must anonymously poll their students, faculty and staff each year about compliance with the compact. Given that most faculty, staff, and students at almost any university will vigorously oppose the entire compact, this might seem a bit odd. But I suspect that the point is to create the possibility of anonymous accusers among subgroups within the students, faculty, and staff. For instance: are conservative students telling the anonymous survey that the university is shirking its obligations under the compact? If so, the DOJ could issue a finding that the school out of compliance. Thus, the point here is to put university administrators in fear of not pleasing and obeying an anonymous but highly empowered favored subset of their students.
Click to expand...
Didn’t Florida require something like this in the last few years (or was it Texas)?
 
If universities agree to this then we're looking at the end of independent universities and colleges in the USA. Instead they'll just become an arm of the federal government, to be micro-managed and dictated to much like public schools now are by their states and districts. And any university that agrees to this deal believing that it will just be temporary or "not that bad" and that they will be able to adjust and keep their independence is fooling themselves. Once you place Chris Rufo types in charge of your school then you'll quickly lose any control over your institution. Just see what happened to the New College in Florida. Or look at what the BOT and UNC's Chancellor are doing to UNC - and that's only a small taste of what's coming.
 
Any list of the top five factors that have allowed America to become a global powerhouse would have to include:

1. The two oceans that protect us to the east and west.
2. Our immense natural resources.
3. Our elite colleges and universities.

Undermining that last one in the name of ideology and fear of intellectual engagement is one of the stupidest things the federal government could possibly do for the future health of this nation.
 

How Colleges Stack Up Against Trump’s Sweeping ‘Compact’ Demands​

Schools asked to sign the funding-advantage proposal already meet some requirements, including a limit on international undergrad enrollment​


🎁 —> https://www.wsj.com/us-news/educati...5?st=4JW4x3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

“… Those signing the compact would agree to cap undergraduate international student enrollment at 15%, with no more than 5% from any one country. None of the universities being asked to sign on currently exceeds that 15% limit, according to federal data. The compact also asks universities to select foreign students “on the basis of demonstrably extraordinary talent, rather than on the basis of financial advantage to the university,” and to screen out those demonstrating hostility toward the U.S. …

IMG_0109.jpeg
 
nycfan said:

How Colleges Stack Up Against Trump’s Sweeping ‘Compact’ Demands​

Schools asked to sign the funding-advantage proposal already meet some requirements, including a limit on international undergrad enrollment​


🎁 —> https://www.wsj.com/us-news/educati...5?st=4JW4x3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

“… Those signing the compact would agree to cap undergraduate international student enrollment at 15%, with no more than 5% from any one country. None of the universities being asked to sign on currently exceeds that 15% limit, according to federal data. The compact also asks universities to select foreign students “on the basis of demonstrably extraordinary talent, rather than on the basis of financial advantage to the university,” and to screen out those demonstrating hostility toward the U.S. …

IMG_0109.jpeg
Click to expand...
IMG_0110.jpeg

——
Sounds like in many ways the Administration targeted Universities that could more easily meet (or already meet) many of the demands because it will be easier to get them to agree and then pressure others to go along, with the added advantage of being rigged toward claiming immediate “success” in their reform goals.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top