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      The Trump administration pushed out a university president – its latest bid to close the American mind | Robert Reich

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      Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia’s president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion.UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump’s lackeys claim the university didn’t go far enough in rooting out DEI.This is the first time the Trump regime has pushed for the resignation of a university official. It’s unlikely to be the last.On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University had violated federal civil rights law over the treatment of Jewish students on campus.On Tuesday, the regime released $175m in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, after the school agreed to bar transgender athletes from women’s teams and delete the swimmer Lia Thomas’s records.Let’s be clear: DEI, antisemitism and transgender athletes are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They’re excuses to give the Trump regime power over America’s colleges and universities.Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power?They’re following Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s playbook for creating an “illiberal democracy” – an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this:First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check.Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check.Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check in process.Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check.Then go after the universities.Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by the congresswoman Elise Stefanik (Harvard 2006) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired.It’s good politics, because many of the 60% of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally.But behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism.JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Orbán’s method for ending “leftwing domination” of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS’s Face the Nation on 19 May 2024:
      Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They’re not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.
      I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done [but] I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.
      His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”
      Yet what, exactly, constitutes a “conservative idea?” That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency?The claim that higher education must be more open to such “conservative ideas” is dangerous drivel.So what’s the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime’s attack on education?Not incidentally, that attack extends to grade school. Trump’s education department announced on Tuesday it’s withholding $6.8bn in funding for schools, and Trump has promised to dismantle the department.Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.That’s why enslavers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. Fascists burn books. Tyrants close universities.In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Stanford University will cut $140m from its budget, citing ‘federal policy changes’

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      Stanford University will cut $140m from its budget in the coming academic year, citing “consequences from federal policy changes” including “reductions in federal research support and an increase in the endowment tax”. The news came in a letter Jon Levin, the university president, and Jenny Martinez, the provost, sent to faculty and staff last week.The budget cuts will likely necessitate staff layoffs, deepening the impact of a staff hiring freeze the university announced in February. The university will continue hiring faculty, “although the pace may be somewhat slowed”, Levin and Martinez wrote. The cuts exclude the School of Medicine, which will make its own budget reductions.“We believe deeply in the value of universities, in federal support for basic research, and in the endowment model that underpins financial aid and graduate fellowships. We will continue to advocate for these things,” Levin and Martinez said. “At the same time, we need to be realistic about the current landscape and its consequences.”Stanford has been hit particularly hard by federal changes to research grants and a proposed endowment tax.The university has lost millions of dollars in federal grants this year, according to databases tracking cuts to National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grants maintained by Noam Ross of rOpenSci and Scott Delaney of the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health.The university would also keenly feel the impact of an endowment tax such as that proposed by Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” The House of Representatives has passed a version of the president’s budget which would levy a 21% tax on schools like Stanford, up from 1.4%. The Senate is currently debating a version of the bill which would set the endowment tax at 8%. According to the student newspaper the Stanford Daily, a 21% endowment tax would cost the university approximately $750m annually.At $37.6bn in August 2024, Stanford has the third-largest endowment of any university in the United States, after only Harvard and Yale. During the 2024-2025 academic year, the university disbursed $1.8bn of that endowment to support financial aid and academic programs. In preparation for coming federal cuts, Levin and Martinez said the university would increase its endowment disbursement by 2.9%.That increased disbursement is intended to support financial aid and doctoral student funding, Levin and Martinez said, as well as continued research. To lessen the impact of budget cuts, the university said it would limit capital and facilities expenditures to the most critical ones or those with external funding.Stanford has faced growing federal scrutiny this year apart from its finances. In March, the justice department announced it would investigate whether Stanford, alongside three other California universities, was complying with the supreme court’s ban on affirmative action. More

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      Trump sent ‘explicit’ threat to cut funds from University of Virginia, senator says

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      The University of Virginia (UVA) received “explicit” notification from the Trump administration that the school would endure cuts to university jobs, research funding and student aid as well as visas if the institution’s president, Jim Ryan, did not resign, according to a US senator.During an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mark Warner, a Democratic senator for Virginia, defended Ryan – who had championed diversity policies that the president opposes – and predicted that Donald Trump will similarly target other universities.Warner said he understood that the former UVA president was told that if he “tried to fight back, hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”.“There was indication that they received the letter that if he didn’t resign on a day last week, by 5 o’clock, all these cuts would take place,” Warner added. He also said he believes this to be the “most outrageous action” that the Trump administration has taken on education since it retook office in January.Ryan resigned from his position as UVA president on Friday. He was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, the New York Times reported on the same day.“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in his resignation message to the university community. He expressed an unwillingness to risk the employment of other staff, as well as cuts to funding and financial aid for students.Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service. He had served as the university’s president since 2018.Warner criticized the administration for what he said was its overreach in education. He said federal education and justice department officials “should get their nose out of [the] University of Virginia”.“They are doing damage to our flagship university,” he remarked. “And if they can do it here, they’ll do it elsewhere.”He referred to Trump’s ongoing battles with Harvard, the US’s oldest university, including the president’s signing a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas and continued threats to cut funding over its DEI policies.“They all want to make them like Harvard,” Warner said. “End of the day, this is going to hurt our universities, chase away that world-class talent.“And, frankly, if we don’t have some level of academic freedom, then what kind of country are we?” More

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      University of Virginia president resigns under pressure from White House over DEI programs

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      The president of the University of Virginia (UVA) has resigned from his position after coming under pressure from the Trump administration over diversity efforts.James Ryan was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing three people briefed on the matter.Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service.“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in a message to the university reviewed by the Guardian.He added: “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.“This was an excruciatingly difficult decision, and I am heartbroken to be leaving this way.”The apparent campaign against a prominent public sector university in the US follows Donald Trump’s agenda since returning to the White House to cancel programs and policies aimed at greater diversity, equity and inclusion in government, workplaces, and various establishments and organizations across American society.In parallel, the US president set about attacking and taking funds from elite private sector universities, with Harvard at the forefront, in an assault on the academic and research independence of higher education more broadly.The New York Times first reported late on Thursday that the justice department had demanded that Ryan step down as part of an agreement to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices, as Trump further erodes the government agency’s distance from the White House by enlisting its investigative powers as part of his political agenda.Ryan said in a letter, briefed to the Times by a source, that he was going to step down next year but “given the circumstances and today’s conversations” he had decided “with deep sadness” to resign now.The justice department had reportedly told UVA that the government thought it was prioritizing race-based factors during its admissions process and other aspects of student life in a way that constitutes “widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution”.Ryan’s removal is another example of the Trump administration using “thuggery instead of rational discourse,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents university presidents, told the Associated Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,” Mitchell said. “It’s clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.”In a joint statement, Virginia’s Democratic senators said it was outrageous that the Trump administration would demand Ryan’s resignation over “‘culture war’ traps.” “This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future,” Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine said.UVA is located in Charlottesville, and found itself in the global headlines early on in the first Trump administration when, in August 2017, hundreds of far-right demonstrators wielding torches and shouting racist slogans marched on to the historic campus ahead of a so-called Unite the Right rally in the small city, crowding towards a smaller group of counterprotesters.The subsequent rally, to try to prevent the removal of Confederate statues from a park, was massive and became very violent as neo-Nazi groups gathered and attacked counterprotesters, then later a white supremacist drove a car into such a group and killed a woman.Trump sparked uproar by blaming both sides for the violence, on the one hand and, on the other, saying: “You had people that were very fine people on both sides.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      California violated Title IX by allowing trans athletes on girls’ teams, Trump administration says

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      The Trump administration has found that the California department of education and the state’s high school sports federation violated civil rights law by allowing transgender girls to compete on girls sports teams.The federal education department announced the finding Wednesday and proposed a resolution that would require California to bar transgender women from women’s sports and strip transgender athletes of records, titles and awards. It’s the latest escalation in the Republican administration’s effort to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports teams nationwide.If California rejects the proposal, the education department could move to terminate the state’s federal education funding.“The Trump administration will relentlessly enforce Title IX protections for women and girls, and our findings today make clear that California has failed to adhere to its obligations under federal law,” Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said. “The state must swiftly come into compliance with Title IX or face the consequences that follow.Title IX is a 1972 law forbidding sex discrimination in education.California education and sports officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.Federal officials opened an investigation into the California Interscholastic Federation in February after the organization said it would abide by a state law allowing athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity. That followed an executive order signed by Donald Trump that was intended to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls and women’s sports.In April, McMahon’s department opened an investigation into the California department of education over the same issue.Both investigations concluded that state policies violated Title IX. The administration has been invoking the law in its campaign against transgender athletes, launching scores of investigations into schools, colleges and states. It’s a reversal from the Joe Biden administration, which attempted to expand Title IX to provide protections for transgender students. A federal judge struck down the expansion before Trump took office in January.The administration’s proposed resolution would require California to notify schools that transgender athletes should be barred from girls athletic teams and that all schools must “adopt biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’”. The state would also have to notify schools that any conflicting interpretation of state law would be considered a violation of Title IX.Athletes who lost awards, titles or records to transgender athletes would have their honors restored under the proposal, and the state would be required to send personal apology letters to those athletes.A similar resolution was offered to Maine’s education agency in a separate clash with the administration over transgender athletes. Maine rejected the proposal in April, prompting a justice department lawsuit seeking to terminate the state’s federal education funding.Under federal guidelines, California’s education office and the sports federation have 10 days to come into compliance or risk enforcement action.The federation separately tested a pilot policy at a state track meet in May, allowing one extra competitor in three events featuring high school junior AB Hernandez, who is trans. The organization announced the change after Trump took to social medial to criticize Hernandez’s participation. The justice department said it would investigate Hernandez’s district and the state to determine if Title IX was being violated. More

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      ‘No way to invest in a career here’: US academics flee overseas to avoid Trump crackdown

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      View image in fullscreenEric Schuster was over the moon when he landed a lab assistant position in a coral reef biology lab at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO). The 23-year-old had recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nanoengineering from the University of California, San Diego, into a fiercely competitive job market. He felt like he’d struck gold.But the relentless cuts to scientific research and attacks on higher education by the Trump administration have turned what felt like a promising academic future into unstable ground.“There are several labs, both at our institution and around the US, that have essentially just sent everyone home because they have no money,” Schuster said, expressing concern not just for oceanography but for all fields of scientific research. The multi-pronged attacks have “been seriously detrimental to just about everyone”, he said.Though Schuster is grateful for his position, he is in a constant state of worry about whether it will still exist tomorrow. UCSD, which SIO is a part of, told the Guardian that the Trump administration has ended or frozen roughly $90m in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Nearly 200 other grants are facing delays. SIO researchers have noted that the “vast majority” of their funding comes from the government.Schuster has decided he’s not going to stick around to see if he will lose his job.View image in fullscreenHe’ll be starting his graduate studies this fall in France with a European University Networks (EUN) program, a transnational alliance of higher education institutions. He plans to stay outside of the US after to continue his career.“It’s a grab bag that anyone you’re talking to has had decreased funding, or lost almost all of their funding, or is having trouble continuing their funding,” he says.“That, along with the pretty pervasive and growing anti-science establishment narrative … have been strong motivators to look elsewhere,” Schuster said.Schuster is one of many budding academics reflecting what could become a significant American brain drain, sending the brightest minds in the country to flee the US and take their scholarly endeavors elsewhere. Historically, the US has attracted top talent from around the world, but the moves by the Trump administration may have reversed these conditions in record time.Research institutions are feeling the strain from funding cuts from some of the biggest grant-making bodies in the world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds about 25% of federally backed basic research at US universities, but Trump’s proposed budget would cut over $5bn, or 57%, from its budget, chopping it from roughly $9bn down to $3.9bn. The US National Institutes of Health would lose about 40% of its budget compared to last year.But those cuts aren’t the only cause for anxiety. Nerves throughout the scholarly community are also on edge given what is widely perceived as a historic attack on academic freedom through administration assaults against universities such Columbia and Harvard University under the guise of rooting out antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Dozens more universities are waiting for their turn.‘The situation is just too volatile’A recent Nature survey revealed that approximately 75% of US-based scientists are contemplating relocation, with early-career researchers and PhD students particularly inclined toward opportunities in Canada, Europe and Australia.Valerio Francioni is one of them. A 32-year-old Italian citizen who moved to the US after getting his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, Francioni is now a postdoctoral research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying neuroscience.International students have faced nonstop chaos in the past few months, from visa suspensions to the attempted deportations of several students who expressed support for Palestinians. Last month, the Trump administration ordered US embassies worldwide to immediately stop scheduling visa interviews for foreign students as it prepares to implement comprehensive “social media screenings” for all international applicants.View image in fullscreen“As an international, there’s just no way that you can invest safely into a career here right now, there’s just no way to plan ahead. The situation is just too volatile to feel that you’re making a safe investment by being here,” Francioni said.A recent report from the Economist suggests that international students (and some domestic) are losing interest in American PhD programs. Searches for US PhD programs on the website FindAPhD fell 40% year on year in April, while interest from students in Europe has fallen by 50%. Data from another website, Studyportals, shows a decrease in interest for domestic PhDs among Americans, and a rise in interest for international programs compared to the previous year.Though his own visa has not been affected yet, Francioni plans to leave the US once his run at MIT is finished. He had wanted to stay in Boston – it’s a great place for people in the neurotech field, he says, and his American partner is there. But his calculus has changed in the past few months.Kristina, originally from Sweden, is grappling with the same questions. A mathematics professor at a university in the north-east US, Kristina requested that only her first name be used and her institution not be named over concerns of retaliation by the Trump administration.“Right now, I think that everyone who’s not a citizen feels that we cannot express our opinions,” Kristina said.She’s been in the US for 25 years, but does not have US citizenship. She is now debating whether to stay or leave. To her, the question is a moral one, whether to leave for safety or stay to “fight for a more democratic future”.View image in fullscreenEmmanuel Guerisoli, a French and Italian academic with a PhD in sociology and history, moved to the US in 2010 to pursue a masters in sociology. He is now finishing a postdoc at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School.Guerisoli is concerned about being targeted by Ice because of discussions he has led in class on the war in Gaza. He was offered a tenure-track position at a different institution, he said, but it was quickly rescinded, which he was told was due to the Trump administration’s funding cuts.He gave up on applying to academic jobs in the US and decided to move to Argentina this summer, where the dread of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents knocking down his door will not follow him every day.“It’s not just that you’re being questioned on your political beliefs, but any type of critical or academic engagement on certain topics that go beyond the realm of just politics are being targeted,” he said.“Even if the state department renews my visa, I would be concerned about teaching courses the way I have done it in the past,” he said.Filling the voidScholars at Risk, which assists academics facing political pressure, saw this coming.“The recent policies have created a tremendous amount of anxiety,” Robert Quinn, the group’s executive director, said. He worries the loss will have ripple effects far beyond campus.“When a big economic contributor gets disrupted, that’s going to begin to affect everybody relatively quickly in those communities,” Quinn said. “Beyond that is the effect on public health. If we look at the cutting of the research pipeline, that means fundamentally cutting off access to services and medicines and treatments that affect every American who happens to get sick.”Quinn says that Scholars at Risk is working on ways to support US academics exploring foreign opportunities.Several other countries are jumping in to fill the void, and have already begun courting American academics.The European Union has pledged €500m (around $556m) over the next two years to become a prime destination for displaced scientists. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, announced $113m for a national program to bring in American researchers, and Aix-Marseille University separately announced Safe Place for Science, a three-year, $16.8m program to attract 15 American scientists working in climate, health and astrophysics.A university spokesperson previously told the Guardian that more than 60 applications have been received, 30 of them coming within the first 24 hours.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Denmark is fast-tracking 200 positions for American researchers. In a widely shared Instagram post, the head of the Danish chamber of commerce directly invited American scientists to consider Denmark, “a place where facts still matter”.Sweden’s education minister held a roundtable of university leaders to strategize on attracting frustrated US talent, and publicly called for American scientists to relocate.Canadian institutions are following a similar path. The University Health Network in Toronto and associated foundations are investing CA$30m ($21.5m) to bring in 100 early-career scientists from the US and beyond. Meanwhile, the University of British Columbia reopened graduate applications in April specifically to accommodate interested US students.Carter Freshour, a 22-year-old US citizen, had just begun his masters program in business at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona when Trump took office.As soon as the attacks on higher education began, he dropped out of the program out of fear of the direction the country is heading. He is now in the process of moving to Madrid, where he will finish his business degree, and then plans to move to Portugal.“I don’t want to live in a country that does not abide by the laws that they have set in stone,” Freshour said. “It has deeply troubled me, the direction that the United States is going.” More

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      The mainstream media has enabled Trump’s war on universities | Jason Stanley

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      US universities are facing the Trump regime’s fury. The justification given by the regime is that universities are run by leftist ideologues, who have indoctrinated students to adopt supposedly leftist ideological orientations, as well as hostility to Israel, anti-whiteness and trans inclusivity. Donald Trump and his allies believe the election gave them the mandate to crush America’s system of higher education. But what may be less clear is that it is the mainstream media’s obsession with leftists on campus that has led to the current moment.The US mainstream media has waged a decade-long propaganda campaign against American universities, culminating in the systematic misrepresentation of last year’s campus anti-war protests. This campaign has been the normalizing force behind the Trump administration’s attack on universities, as well as a primary cause of his multiple electoral successes. Unless the media recognizes the central role it has played, we cannot expect the attack to relent.It is easy to pinpoint the time that US confidence in higher education started to drastically plummet – the year was 2015. For those of us who have followed this attack throughout the last decade, there is no surprise about this date. It was the year that a spate of political attacks against universities started to emerge, resurrecting the 1980s and 90s conservative panic about “political correctness on campus”, except this time in mainstream media outlets.In 2016, the media scholar Moira Weigel, in an article in the Guardian entitled “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy”, laid out in detail how this attack, suddenly legitimized by mainstream media outlets, led to Trump’s 2016 victory. Weigel singles out an enormously influential piece in the Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The coddling of the American mind”. In it, Haidt and Lukianoff decried the supposed trend of shielding students from “words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort”. Haidt and Lukianoff’s goal was to suggest that younger generations were “coddled” and protected from emotional harm by college campuses, beginning a trend of infantilizing college students.From 2015 on, much of the mainstream media went on a crusade to vilify universities for political correctness. The Trump regime’s vicious targeting of US universities was justified and normalized by a decade of panicked op-eds about leftists on campus in the New York Times, which included laying the basis for the administration’s cynical attack on DEI (to understand the staggering number of concern-trolling op-eds about leftists on campus the New York Times has published over the last decade, consider this article in Slate, by Ben Mathis-Lilly, about this exact topic; it was published in 2018.)There have always been excesses of what was called “political correctness” and now is called “wokeness”. During times of moral panic, excesses are held up as paradigms. One might single out attempts to de-platform speakers as one such excess. To judge by the mainstream media, there have been a wave of such attempts. The organization that counts them, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), has recorded 1,740 attempts to de-platform speakers at colleges and universities over the last two decades or so. That sounds like a lot. However, the methodology for counting a “de-platforming attempt” includes petitions calling for the speaker’s invitation to be canceled or withdrawn – so if a dozen people sign a petition to revoke a speaker’s invitation, it counts as an “de-platforming attempt”, even when (as is often the case) nothing comes of it. Even in the case of successful de-platforming attempts, a speaker whose talk is postponed or who is reinvited counts as a case, as is when a venue has to be switched from one on-campus auditorium to another (say, for safety concerns). This methodology blatantly inflates the prevalence of problematic cancellations of speakers (given that de-platforming attempts count towards evaluating a university’s position on Fire’s influential “Campus Free Speech Rankings”, this methodology also distorts public conversation about the topic). Fire unquestionably does good things. But its very existence depends on fanning the flames of moral panic about universities.More generally, in many cases of university actions that can legitimately be regarded as problematic, the fault was not “political correctness” or “wokeness”, but a corporate and legalistic environment at universities that requires the investigation of every complaint, no matter how overblown. We college professors are fairly uniformly opposed to this culture. But it is hardly the fault of leftists.Finally, no one should mistake an epidemic of faculty members performatively quitting their jobs with an epidemic of firings. When a university fires an academic for their speech, that is a crisis. When a faculty member chooses to resign rather than face student opprobrium, that is just life.It may surprise the reader to learn that during the last decade, the main “chill” at universities has not been “leftists on campus”. It has instead been a relentless attack on college professors and students by rightwing outlets. In 2016, Turning Point USA introduced its “Professor Watchlist”, targeting supposedly radical professors on campus. Campus Reform is an outlet devoted to reporting on liberal professors for their speech – for example, by student reports, social media usage or academic publications. For around a decade, Rod Dreher used his position as a senior editor at the American Conservative to target leftist academics, often to devastating effect. And Canary Mission has steadily and for many years targeted professors for their advocacy for the Palestinian cause. These are hardly the only, or even the most powerful, outlets involved in this long assault (I have not even mentioned Fox News). University professors are terrified of being targeted by these organizations.Major mainstream media outlets have consistently failed to report on the rightwing media assault on college professors over the last two decades. This exacerbated the effects of these attacks. In 2016, when Dreher targeted me in several posts for an offhand comment I made on a private Facebook post, I was inundated by hate mail and phone calls to my office. This was my first experience with such an attack; it deeply destabilized me. In the meantime, my colleagues assured me that Dreher was simply a worried liberal with the sorts of concerns about free speech on campus they had been reading about in the liberal media they consumed (Dreher has since moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he is a fellow at the Danube Institute, a thinktank funded by Viktor Orbán autocratic government).Finally, last year, the media committed its worst error yet, for months erasing the participation of sizable numbers of Jewish students in the protests on college campuses in support of divesting from US military support for Israel, including as movement leaders. In truth, there is a generational conflict about Israel among American Jews. As many American Jews under 40 believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as believe this claim to be antisemitic (about one-third). The media’s complete erasure of the large group of American Jews, especially younger American Jews, critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, has allowed the Trump regime to conduct its dismantling of the US higher education system under the pretext of fighting antisemitism.None of this is to deny the obvious fact that college professors skew heavily Democratic. In some disciplines, there are clear reasons for this. Sociology has few Republican voters, because rightwing ideology since the 1980s has generally rejected its metaphysical presuppositions – such as the existence and importance of societies. Women and gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, and African American studies are disciplines whose very existence is directly and regularly attacked by Republican politicians. But the fact is that the partisan tilt of universities has basically nothing to do with these departments.A study of my university by a conservative campus group found that out of 23 professors in the chemistry department whose political affiliation could be identified, 19 were Democrats and one was a Republican. Astronomy, Earth and planetary sciences, economics, molecular biophysics and biochemistry were all departments with zero professors with Republican affiliations. According to this study, biology and biomedical sciences at Yale had 229 professors with Democratic party affiliations, and eight with Republican party affiliations. None of these are areas in which it makes sense to speak of political bias. As the “asymmetric polarization” of the Republican party has accelerated over the last decade, is it any wonder that there are fewer and fewer professors who vote for Trump’s Republican party? Why would academics vote for a party that is now bent on dismantling the US system of higher education?Unfortunately, instead of debunking the media-driven moral panic about leftists on campus, universities have largely accepted the premises of the drivers of this panic – that there is a problem on campus exemplified by the fact that few professors support Trump (“intellectual diversity”), and that protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza (with large representations of Jewish students) were antisemitic. Even universities that are challenging the Trump regime’s assault seem to accept its nonsensical premises that college students have been overly protected from controversial speech, and, simultaneously, that Jewish students must be shielded to the maximum extent of the law from criticism of Israel’s actions.In the meantime, the media has elevated some of the very academics most responsible for the moral panic, such as Steven Pinker, who has described universities as having a “suffocating leftwing monoculture”, into spokespersons for universities, and continues to trumpet the propaganda that led to this moment. For example, the New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, who has long promoted the moral panic about “wokeness” that fuels the Maga movement, still simply pre-supposes that “ideological conformity and past failures to restrain antisemitism” are “vulnerabilities” of the current US higher education system.According to the agents of the moral panic, the blame for Trump’s all-out assault on the American system of higher education falls squarely on supposed “leftists on campus” whose actions supposedly undermined trust in these institutions. But the fault, instead, lies squarely with those responsible for driving this moral panic. The mainstream media has delivered the Republicans a win in a multidecade long propaganda war against academia, one that began with William F Buckley in the 1950s. Within the university, powerful actors are superficially standing against the Trump regime’s attack, while implementing its agenda themselves (giving the lie to the absurd pre-supposition that universities are run by gender studies departments).The “war on woke” is the calling card of the global fascist right. Orbán’s attack on Central European University for “gender ideology” began his destruction of Hungarian democracy. Putin justified his full-scale invasion of Ukraine by appealing to the supposed dangers Ukraine’s liberal democracy poses for traditional gender roles. Americans should hold mainstream media’s Trump enablers responsible for Trump and his actions, and not let them pretend otherwise. As we witness the entire research apparatus of the US being taken down in the name of attacking DEI, trans rights and antisemitism, the mainstream media must halt its absurd fantasy that leftists control universities, and focus instead on the problem it has spent the last decade enabling – namely, fascism.

      Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Trump signs proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard

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      Donald Trump signed a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard University, the White House said on Wednesday.The order would suspend for an initial six months the entry into the US of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard. Trump declared that it would jeopardize national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students.The proclamation is the US president’s latest attempt to choke the Ivy League school from an international pipeline that accounts for a quarter of the student body, and a further escalation in the White House’s fight with the institution.“I have determined that the entry of the class of foreign nationals described above is detrimental to the interests of the United States because, in my judgment, Harvard’s conduct has rendered it an unsuitable destination for foreign students and researchers,” Trump wrote in the order.Trump’s proclamation also directs the US state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.Harvard in a statement called Trump’s proclamation “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”“Harvard will continue to protect its international students.”Trump singled out Harvard’s connections with China as reason for cutting off the university from foreign students. The proclamation said Harvard was linked to research that “could advance China’s military modernisation”.The statement also said Harvard was considered the top “party school” for Chinese Communist party bureaucrats and noted that the daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, attended in the early 2010s.In the early 2000s, Harvard ran a “China Leaders in Development” programme in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing for Chinese government officials.“I don’t think this is going to benefit US universities at all,” said a Chinese undergraduate student with an offer to study at Harvard on a master’s degree starting next term who asked that his name be withheld. “It’s causing normal people, us students, a lot of anxiety.”The Trump administration has been engaged in a tense standoff with Harvard, the US’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status, prompting a series of legal challenges.Harvard argues the administration is retaliating against it for refusing to accede to its demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on 22 May announced her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.Her action was almost immediately temporarily blocked by a Boston court. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the department changed course and said it would instead challenge Harvard’s certification through a lengthier administrative process.Trump’s order on Wednesday invokes a different legal authority than the earlier move by the Department of Homeland Security. The legal justification for the ban, Trump said, are sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “which authorize the President to suspend entry of any class of aliens whose entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”.Trump officials have repeatedly raised the stakes and sought new fronts to pressure Harvard, cutting more than $2.6bn in research grants and moving to end all federal contracts with the university. The latest threat has targeted Harvard’s roughly 7,000 international students, who account for half the enrolment at some Harvard graduate schools.“President Trump wants our institutions to have foreign students, but believes that the foreign students should be people that can love our country,” the White House said in a fact sheet about the proclamation.Wednesday’s two-page directive said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries” including China.As well as the spat with Harvard, the White House has pledged to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students across the country, especially those with links to the CCP or in “critical fields”. More