Dear Colleague,
I understand that you wish me to participate in your protests against the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with American universities. I will do so on one condition: that you openly acknowledge (a) that you were completely comfortable with the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of “Dear Colleague” letters — e.g. — to strongarm universities into supporting their and your preferred political outcomes, and (b) that a chief purpose of your current protests is to ensure that people with my social, religious, and aesthetic views remain unemployable in your universities.
Sincerely,
Your Colleague
I’ve gotten some grumpy emails about this admittedly grumpy post, so perhaps I should explain myself further.
During the Obama years, and continuing with somewhat less fervor during the Biden administration, the Department of Education wrote a series of “Dear Colleague” letters that demanded first administrative and then academically substantive obedience to a series of progressive positions on a wide range of issues. The trend began in 2011 with a letter ordering universities to create systems to prevent and punish sexual violence — but the specific mandates of that system, as Jill Lepore has noted, forbade anything like due process for the accused in any such cases. (You can see how this system worked, and in some cases still works, here and in later reports from FIRE.) When Harvard Law School protested the mandates and sought a more fair-minded approach to assessing accusations of sexual violence, the DoE went after the school and enforced compliance. Despite the complexity and variability of the circumstances in which accusations of sexual violence occur, no alternative model for dealing with such cases was permitted.
That letter involved administration and governance. Later letters, such as the one linked to above, effectively mandated the creation of DEI bureaucracies in every university that receives government funding and led to the farcical demands that every candidate for every faculty position show how their work in music theory or biochemistry promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion — and, if they were white or white-adjacent, confess their own complicity in racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. (As someone once said, in Stalin’s Soviet Union you only had to sign your confession of guilt; in American academia you have to write it too.) Prospective faculty members, and in many cases existing faculty members, were obliged to proclaim their practical, not just verbal, allegiance not just to DEI but to a very specific interpretation of what DEI means; and these obligations were an obvious assault on academic freedom. As FIRE — an organization recently doing yeoman work to protect universities from the new assaults on academic freedom from the Trump administration, about which more later — has concisely put it, “Vague or ideologically motivated DEI statement policies can too easily function as litmus tests for adherence to prevailing ideological views on DEI, penalize faculty for holding dissenting opinions on matters of public concern, and ‘cast a pall of orthodoxy’ over the campus.”
And of course casting a pall of orthodoxy over campus is precisely what many academic progressives want. That’s why, as Lepore says in the interview cited above, when she decided some years after the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter to explain why she thought that Harvard Law was right and the DoE wrong, she significantly delayed its publication.
I was pretty afraid, but I had written the piece to be published. Then a number of people informed me that it would destroy my life. I could have insisted. It’s hard to even recall the ferocity of that time. It probably would have destroyed my life in some significant ways. But looking back, it would have been the right thing to do.
Indeed, she says, even after that particular controversy has been sorted out, the incessant ideological police-work of her fellow faculty members makes Harvard a “miserable” place to be even now.
All that is the background to my chief point: A great many of the academics protesting most loudly against the Trump administration’s demands upon universities — its threats that noncompliance with its preferences will lead to a withholding of federal funding — either were silent when Democratic administrations made the same kinds of demands, accompanied by the same kinds of threats, or enthusiastically endorsed such action and condemned colleagues who didn’t share their enthusiasm. I know or have read the writings of a significant number of academics who would think it their moral duty to “destroy the life” of anyone who dissented from their preferred practices.
Now, if professors and administrators have this highly particular vision of what the American University should be and pursue it with vigor, I understand. It is certainly not true that “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time,” as some staffer tweeted for Joe Biden a few years ago; but racism remains pervasive in American life, an open wound that in recent years seems to have grown worse, and efforts to combat it are commendable. But racism is not the only wound our body politic suffers, or the only culture-wide problem that needs to be addressed, and perfectly reasonable and compassionate people do not think it the greatest problem we face or the only one worthy of being acknowledged in our hiring practices and institutional structures. Nor are any of the pet progressive causes objectively more significant than those the academic left neglects. Still, I understand the urgency felt by the antiracists.
However: many such people now present themselves as defenders of academic freedom and the sovereign right of universities to set their own course. They are nothing of the kind, and have proven themselves to be nothing of the kind. They want their version of progressivism to be hegemonic not only in their own universities but in all American universities, and are eager to pursue that hegemony by any means necessary. Ideological policing is the name of their game — which means both including whom they want to include and excluding those who refuse to conform — and academic freedom is not one of their core values, indeed is not something they even believe in. They just now want to be free from the kinds of governmental pressures that they have been glad to impose on others.
As Ross Douthat said in a recent column,
Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.
To borrow a term from law, in light of this history the progressive ideological police have no standing to complain about governmental interference in academic life.
So why, then, do I say that if they simply owned up to this obvious truth I would participate in their protests? Because, as Douthat wrote in the same column, “Progressivism has absolutely weaponized the law against its opponents, but it’s still more constitutionally destabilizing when the president himself is screaming on social media about the need to prosecute his enemies.” So I will indeed join in their protests against this presidential strong-arming — but not under the self-congratulatory covering fiction that any of these progressive protestors would ever stand up for my academic freedom, or that of anyone who dissents from their preferred policies.
