Yanking the Funds
This is not good: The Trump administration is going about federal civil rights investigations rather unusually, per The Washington Post, and appears to be making tip lists of students they seek to deport or otherwise punish.
Generally speaking, federal civil rights probes involve inquiries to the colleges in question as to what type of incidents they encountered, how many, and how they dealt with them. But attorneys with the Department of Education, which handles these civil rights investigations related to antisemitism on campus, have also been collecting the names and nationalities of students accused of harassing Jewish students and faculty or otherwise engaging in antisemitic conduct.
“My first thought was, ‘This is a witch hunt,'” one attorney told the Post.
The federal government does have an awful lot of leverage here. Columbia, under threat of losing $400 million in grants and other types of federal support, agreed last week “that it would overhaul its student disciplinary process, ban protesters from wearing masks, bar demonstrations from academic buildings, adopt a new definition of antisemitism and put its Middle Eastern studies program under the supervision of a vice provost who would have a say over curriculum and hiring,” per the Associated Press.
“Columbia is demonstrating appropriate cooperation with the Trump administration’s requirements, and we look forward to a lasting resolution,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a statement that talks about the conditions that must be met for canceled federal grants and contracts to be restored. But, in private, Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong is telling faculty that the school actually will not comply, that there will be “no change to masking”; “no change to our admissions procedures”; and that the Middle Eastern Studies department will not be put under the heightened scrutiny the Trump administration is demanding, per Maya Sulkin’s reporting at The Free Press. Meanwhile, the faculty are protesting. “What is happening to Columbia now is what the erosion of democracy looks like,” Virginia Page Fortna, a political science professor, told The New York Times. Per a Wall Street Journal account of a faculty meeting transcript, one professor said this was “the biggest crisis since the founding of the republic.” Well, OK then.
Why can’t everyone lose? If you’re a little tired of hearing about all the inner machinations of one fancy university, you’re not alone. But the Columbia example, unfortunately, matters a bit: It gives us a sense of how far the Trump administration might go to rain down retribution and raises thorny questions of whether it is justified in doing so.
The most libertarian answers, here, may not be politically realistic: Stop federal funding of colleges and universities. Don’t create detailed watchlists of students, ostensibly to more easily deport them for their First Amendment–protected protest activity. (Maybe also: Don’t do federal civil rights probes?)
But one of these things is worse than the others: Armstrong is being grievously foolish, and the spoiled paraglider-cheerleaders heretofore treated with kid gloves by the admin make me want to ralph, but it sure looks like the federal government is using the power of th
Article from Reason.com
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