The class was called, rather plainly, “Moderns II,” and when I enrolled in it, I had no idea that it would change my life. I was a visiting student at University College London. While I had read some of the assigned authors (W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf), I had never read them in quite that way—as propositions about how to see (or not see) the world. The professor was a bit intimidating; he had a way of developing his thoughts as he spoke, his sentences moving in seemingly different directions until he landed—with a flourish—on an insight that, after the meandering that had come before, was both unexpected and somehow brilliantly inevitable. And he challenged us to think the same way. We had been reading The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s 1937 plea for a kind of socialism that would take the concerns of the working class seriously, and the professor must have noticed that something was bothering me.  

“Yes?” he said, suddenly appearing before me.  

“I don’t think Orwell enjoys being with poor people,” I stammered, thinking of the author’s many appalled references to the workers’ bad teeth, realizing, too, that what I had just said went against the grain of our class discussions so far, in which everyone had been warmly appreciative of Orwell’s efforts at empathy. 

“More!” the professor demanded, pointing at me. In hindsight, my critique of Orwell wasn’t particularly perceptive or even accurate, but that didn’t matter. For now, at least in my academic life, the floodgates were open: I had found a way to make the texts we were reading my own. I had discovered the pleasures of being opinionated. 

That class happened over 30 years ago, but I still think about it today. Much of the climate of American college education today seems geared to drive such opinionatedness not only out of our classrooms but the academy in general. The mind-bending assault of the Trumpists on colleges, the lethal mix of fake outrage and financial coercion that the president’s minions bring to campus, will set back American higher education by decades. It will also, as Brian Soucek in The Opinionated University acknowledges, make it unforgivably dull. What started as a laughable right-wing caricature of higher education—denouncing universities as Marxist training camps, with Stalinist professors brainwashing students into accepting the wicked gospel of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)—has now taken hold of the minds of many university administrators. Their alternative vision has “workforce-ready” students praising capitalism while joining hands with their “thought partners,” an army of compliant AI bots. The motto of higher education, if Trump and his helpers have their way, will no longer be “Sapere aude” (dare to know) but “Skill up.” Leaving aside the fact that being able to state one’s opinions clearly and coherently is an important life-skill, too, the laudable emphasis on getting students ready for life now masks a more sinister ideological impulse: to remake our universities in the outdated, nativist image of an older, mostly white America, purged of the dissidents and immigrants we don’t want.  

The Opinionated University is, as it ought to be, an unabashedly opinionated book. Soucek is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Davis who was trained as a philosopher. It shows: At its core, his book is a logically compelling dismantling of what has become the mantra of American educational leaders—institutional neutrality, a doctrine that essentially means that, when in doubt, a university should voice no opinion at all. As Soucek explains, that was the central recommendation of the so-called Kalven Report, issued in 1967 in response to student protests against the Vietnam War, by a University of Chicago committee chaired by the law scholar Harry Kalven Jr. In December 2023, when three flustered presidents of elite universities couldn’t tell a congressional committee whether they would penalize students on their campuses for alleged antisemitic hate speech (a “context-dependent decision,” they said), the popularity of the Kalven guidelines soared. If only those presidents had practiced institutional neutrality!  

The intent of the Kalven report was, of course, to preserve free speech against rash decisions made by university leaders. Yet, as Soucek now tells us, institutional neutrality creates more problems than it solves. He has fun labeling the adherents of institutional neutrality “Kalvenists,” a pun that hints at some deeper commonalities. The 16th-century Calvinists believed in predestination—that, in other words, God had, without letting you know, already decided whether to send you to Heaven or Hell, and that there was nothing you could do to change that. But Calvinists relaxed their grim doctrine by also allowing that there might be some signs even in your earthly life where you were headed—if your business succeeded, for example. Soucek shows that modern-day academic “Kalvenists” likewise get themselves entangled in exemptions. Even as they advise university leaders to stay out of politics, they also concede that there are situations where saying nothing is not wise—when, for example, a university’s core mission is under threat. And here’s the rub: Since there are, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 2,600 four-year colleges in the United States, many with their own slightly different missions, the list of exceptions is potentially endless.  

Soucek’s antidote to the moral porousness of Kalvenism follows from that insight—an embrace of pedagogical pluralism. His book envisions, in cleverly nuanced detail, an admittedly idealistic landscape of higher education in which each institution would, after internal discussion and without interference from above, speak up whenever its mission demands it. For a university with a large medical school, for example, it would make sense to weigh in on discussions about reproductive rights, while another school with strong international ties might champion protections for its international students. 

The archenemy of Soucek’s “opinionated university” is conformity. When I decided to become a professor, I didn’t realize how much paperwork would attach itself to my career, the way barnacles latch on to an aging boat: faculty reports, compliance certificates, lists of learning outcomes, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and effort allocations. (Making such documents digital has only increased their number.) In his first chapter, Soucek turns to one such document that gets conservatives’ blood boiling—the notorious diversity statement, an essay outlining a faculty member’s commitment to creating an inclusive environment, which used to be a staple of the academic application process before DEI became the acronym from hell. Soucek admits that such required assertions of pedagogical bona fides may become insincere—who wouldn’t want to teach a class that lifts all students, regardless of their background? But what if we decided to reimagine diversity statements as opportunities to express not abstract beliefs but as concrete plans for meaningful action? As Soucek points out, critics of such declarations don’t object to statements of a candidate’s teaching philosophy. Why not ask an applicant, then, how their work as a whole (including their research) would enrich, in its own unique and non-conformist way, the overall vision of the university they are hoping to join? 

Ironically, the most effective tools for enforcing educational conformity, also known as teaching evaluations, generally get a free pass. Treated as reliable data by university administrators, they are often skewed. As Soucek makes clear, evaluations tend to reward those who pander and grade-inflate. And they routinely yield lower ratings for women of color. Where “non-experts”—to wit, our students—sit in judgment on our teaching, charismatic slickness often wins out over disciplinary aptitude. (Soucek doesn’t mention the frequently abysmally low participation rate in an exercise many students view as a waste of time.) Anecdotally, this critique seems right to me. While I belong to a demographic that statistically fares well in evaluations, I am always surprised by how many of my students’ responses pertain to things other than class content: “Instructor looks rumpled,” one student commented on what I would describe as the result of having little time between classes. “Instructor is ok,” observed another student, before criticizing my high-energy classroom delivery: “But he should lay off the coffee.” 

If instructors, to improve their ratings, are tempted to ingratiate themselves with their students, some universities cozy up to the fine folks at U.S. News & World Report for better rankings as well. Soucek favors those colleges that don’t forget their mission and are not afraid to say “No! in thunder” (to use Herman Melville’s feisty phrase) when silence would harm their faculty and students. My colleagues at Indiana University were hoping for such support when an assistant professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, was castigated by Indiana’s own attorney general after performing an abortion on a very young rape victim. Instead, Indiana University’s president only volunteered that Bernard was a “well-respected doctor.” 

As university leaders like to remind us, academic freedom has its limits. My own university’s administration became obsessed with the phrase “expressive activity,” a term that strikes me as both unintentionally humorous and somewhat demeaning, as if stating one’s opinion were something akin to coloring pictures or going for a morning run. That Indiana University’s administrators didn’t view their faculty’s expressive activities as all that harmless became clear when they banished them from campus grounds between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (a restriction later blocked by the courts). But even Soucek believes that some frameworks should exist. Academic departments, for example, should issue public statements only about subjects in which they can claim some disciplinary expertise. And when a colleague’s research takes a turn that conflicts with a university’s stated mission, said university should leave the reprimands to that colleague’s academic peers.  

In a chapter on “institutional counterspeech,” occasions where a university feels compelled to criticize its own actions, Soucek grants that colleges often face hard choices. In a moving aside, he recalls how excluded he felt back in 2018 when UC Davis held a campuswide blood drive, complete with prizes, in which he, as a gay man, could not participate. (The FDA has since amended its guidelines.) Recognizing the importance of blood drives, Soucek appreciated a statement from his chancellor, who expressed his profound regret over the unnecessary and discriminatory federal restrictions. In a similar vein, a university leader might choose to condemn the views of an invited campus speaker as hurtful to some members of the campus community, while still allowing the event to proceed for the sake of academic freedom. In 2017, Lauren Robel, the provost of Indiana University Bloomington, declined to disinvite Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, a widely debunked 1994 book that attempted to correlate race and intelligence. “Our academic community,” Robel insisted, “depends, distinctively, on more than mere tolerance. It depends on engagement with ideas, perhaps especially with ideas we believe are wrong or flawed.” At the same time, as you debate ideas you dislike, you should always feel protected, as Soucek makes clear in his final chapter on “Regulating Campus Speech.” 

But that last example also makes me wonder how much of The Opinionated University rests on an assumption that we can no longer take for granted—that American universities, and specifically their leaders, always have the best interests of their students and faculty in mind. One of the most noxious effects of the ongoing MAGA makeover of American universities has been the extent to which politicians have deputized college administrators, inciting them, for example, to prosecute and punish those whose teaching falls short of the required “viewpoint diversity”—in translation: whose classes make conservative students uncomfortable. To which I would respond: No one, whether you are right or left or middle-of-the-road or nothing at all, whether you are faculty or a student, should ever feel overly comfortable in college. Or, as Soucek puts it: “The point of education, and of rational argument more generally, is to change what people think.” (Note that the mind that is being changed here could also be the professor’s … Has happened to me plenty of times!) Here’s hoping that generations hence will still be able to feel the rush of excitement I experienced decades ago when my professor stood before me, sensing I had an idea different from everyone else’s: “Yes?”  

The post The Kalven Trap appeared first on Washington Monthly.

No U.S. president has ever laid siege to America’s colleges and universities as has Donald Trump in the first ten months of his second term. The success of his efforts to bend higher education to his will, however, is mixed. On the one hand, thanks to a submissive Republican Congress, he’s managed to cut billions in previously appropriated federal research dollars to universities. On the other, his attempts to force colleges to adopt conservative priorities in hiring and curricula have so far mostly failed. While a few institutions, like Columbia University, initially bowed to political pressure, the vast majority have resisted—bolstered by court rulings that his retributive funding cuts unconstitutionally violated the First Amendment, separation of powers, and various federal statutes. Still, Trump has three-plus more years in office to experiment with ways to dominate higher ed and it’s not clear how long universities can continue to resist. 

If Trump’s actions have no precedent​ at​ the federal level, they do at the state​. Over the course of two terms as Florida governor, Ron DeSantis has taken on that state’s public higher education system in ways that presaged Trump’s moves. Looking at the results of DeSantis’ experiment might provide clues to where Trump’s is headed. 

As Chris Mullin wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, DeSantis exploited Florida’s unusually centralized system of higher-education governance to insert political control directly into the classroom—stacking boards, replacing presidents, and rewriting curricula. His boldest gamble has been a complete takeover and ideological makeover of ​​New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college on Sarasota Bay known for its experimental pedagogy and progressive-left campus culture. Charging poor performance and ideological bias, DeSantis announced plans in early 2023 to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South”—a reference to the small, selective, conservative-leaning Michigan college that eschews government funds and focuses on teaching the classics. The governor appointed six new conservative trustees to New College, including activist Christopher Rufo, ​who then ​fired its President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran ​at more than double Okker’s salary​. Within months, the new board abolished the gender​ studies program, dismissed faculty and administrators, created athletic teams, and secured tens of millions in state funding.

Two years later, the picture looks grim. New College’s four-year graduation rate has plummeted from 58.3 to 47.4 percent. The school’s U.S. News & World Report college ranking has fallen by nearly 60 spots, from 76th among national liberal-arts colleges in 2022 to 135th this year. Faculty and staff have fled, and students have followed them out the door. “It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor told Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts.” Spending​ at the college​, meanwhile, has exploded. ​In Tallahassee, there is now open talk of either privatizing New College or shutting it down completely. 

DeSantis’s justification for the takeover was that New College was an educational disaster—a failed experiment in left-wing academic culture. Though the school ​had its problems (it struggled​​, for instance,​​ to reach its enrollment goals, as do many small, less-selective colleges around the country) and ​was indeed ​​left leaning, it was far from a disaster. In fact, by most objective measures, it was a model of what a small public liberal-arts institution could achieve. As Aalia Thomas reported in the Washington Monthly in 2023, New College consistently ranked near the top of the magazine’s l​ist of l​iberal​ ​arts ​colleges ​​for upward mobility, research, and service. ​​Its graduates earned PhDs at rates higher than many of the nation’s most prestigious private liberal arts colleges. Its curriculum mixed ​​postcolonial theory with Aristotle and Voltaire. The college charged about $7,000 a year for low-to-medium-income students—a bargain compared to most similar liberal arts colleges. It enrolled a high share of Pell​ ​​Grant recipients and produced civically engaged graduates—​​92.6 percent of its students were registered to vote in 2020. Far from failing, New College embodied many of the qualities conservatives say they prize in public higher education: affordability, rigor, civic virtue, and upward mobility. 

​​The governor’s appointees arrived convinced they were rescuing a failing school. ​​They replaced New College’s narrative-evaluation system with traditional grades. They bragged about making the college more “selective” (instead, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school grade point average decreased from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024)​.​ They recruited athletes and ​​self-described “normal” students to reshape the culture, ​​many of whom quickly transferred out. ​The campus began to change in telling ways: the reopened campus café, operated by a vendor tied to Corcoran, now serves coffee in cups printed with Bible verses, and the college has commissioned a statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to stand on campus in honor of “free speech​.​​​” ​All this change has been financed by ​​an ​​eye-watering ​​boost​​ in ​​spending​​. The college’s budget has grown from​​ ​$53,232,164​​​​ ​​​​the year before the overhaul ​​​​to​​​​ ​​​​$93,043,119​​​​ ​​​​today​​​​—a​​​​ 75 percent​​​​ increase​​​​.​​​​ ​

​​​​​​​​Even DeSantis allies are turning on the project. “There can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are,” said Eric Silagy, a​​ DeSantis-appointed​​ member of the state Board of Governors. Nathan Allen, ​​who served as ​​​​vice president of strategy​​ for New College ​​during the conservative takeover but has since resigned​​, ​suggested where the blame for those numbers should be placed​: “​​New College is not a House or Senate project … It’s a Ron DeSantis project.”​​ ​​​Corcoran himself has said, ​​if New College doesn’t produce something different, “then we should be closed down.”  

“There is certainly room for improvement at New College,” the Washington Monthly reported in 2023. “But there is a lot more room to make the college worse, and plenty of reason to think that’s what the DeSantis administration will accomplish.”  

Those words proved prophetic and might well apply to Trump’s national crusade to remake universities. Just as DeSantis’s Florida experiment has collapsed under its own contradictions, so might Trump’s. Politics can seize a campus, but it can’t run one. 

The post Where Might Trump’s Attacks on Universities Lead? Just Look at Florida appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If there is one commonality in our national war over the university, it is an obsession with the feelings of undergraduates. While advocates for free speech insist that a campus climate of fear makes students too anxious to express themselves, advocates for minority students (a shifting coalition that now includes opponents of anti-Semitism) say that without more robust restrictions on speech, some students will suffer psychological distress.

All parties, though, are asking a version of the same question: Do students feel safe? From racists? From woke moralists? From anti-Semites? 

As someone aligned with the free speech camp, I’m concerned that my “team” has too readily followed the lead of DEI advocates in their preoccupation with the feelings of undergraduates, a tendency that has only increased since the events of October 7. We should shift our gaze away from what students are feeling to what their professors are actually doing inside the classroom. Once we know more about the true quality of college teaching, we can construct rankings for students and parents who genuinely care about liberal education.

The partisans of psychological equipoise have engineered countless surveys to gauge the emotional state of our students. Campus climate surveys are the rage. 

Some are created—usually by those with DEI sympathies—to assess the anxieties of minority students. Since 2018, for example, the HEDS (Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium) Campus Climate Survey has been administered to some 320,000 faculty, students, and staff at more than 400 colleges and universities. It is frequently used to assess the efficacy of diversity and inclusion efforts. While universities tend not to release the full results of these surveys to the general public, they generally find that most of their students feel welcome on campus, though those from minority backgrounds are often less positive in their assessments. At my home institution, Claremont McKenna, my sense is that these surveys have tempered the claims of campus advocates who say the campus climate is terrible, even as they show meaningful differences between groups. 

Partly because these DEI-oriented university administrators have been reluctant to fold concerns about self-censorship into their inquiries, free speech advocates have eagerly built their own campus climate surveys. The king of them all is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual College Free Speech Rankings, an important effort to measure students’ comfort expressing ideas on campus. Last year FIRE surveyed more than 58,000 students at 254 universities and colleges. 

The students are asked a battery of questions. Some query students’ views on free speech and how often they self-censor, but many are primarily interested in their emotions. For example, FIRE asks: “How comfortable would you feel doing the following on your campus?” Then students are given a series of five follow-up questions, such as whether they would feel comfortable “disagreeing with a professor” or “expressing your views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion.” Students are also asked how often they feel anxious, stressed, depressed, or lonely. 

From such questions and other metrics, FIRE then gives every university and college a “free speech score.” Some institutions, like the University of Chicago, perform relatively well; others, like Harvard and Columbia, perform terribly. In 2024, these venerable places received a 0 on a scale of 100.

No doubt speech climates are too chilly in many universities and colleges, and FIRE should be commended for documenting this problem and making it too difficult to deny. But even so, FIRE’s annual rankings rest too easily on a questionable premise: that the best college is one where all students say they are never uncomfortable expressing themselves. To achieve a truly outstanding FIRE score, campuses need to become almost entirely free of social anxiety.

But this is unreasonable. Emotional discomfort, after all, is normal and inevitable, especially in a fragmented nation. And while it is sometimes a sign that there is something wrong with the campus speech climate, it can also be a sign that professors are taking risks by teaching difficult subjects and raising ideas that cause some intellectual friction and provoke discomfort. 

Perhaps that’s why universities that focus on technical subjects like engineering and science often score well on FIRE surveys. After all, fields like fluid mechanics don’t typically generate ideological debates or multiple interpretive frameworks. Two of the best universities for free speech, according to FIRE, are Michigan Technological University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, ranked second and fifth, respectively. But you shouldn’t go to either place if you’re looking for much political or philosophical discussion.

Similarly, sectarian universities and colleges often provide instruction within a relatively unified worldview and attract students already aligned with that perspective, a fact that may mute their students’ social anxiety around speech. Liberty University, a fundamentalist institution and one of the few Christian ones that still teach young Earth creationism, received a raw free speech score that was considerably higher than Harvard’s. But who thinks Liberty is better than Harvard at providing a liberal education? (This may be why FIRE didn’t rank these sectarian institutions alongside the other universities and colleges. Instead, they were quarantined in a separate listing.) 

As these examples suggest, there is a serious problem with rankings that place so much emphasis on students’ feelings: They tell us almost nothing about the extent to which different viewpoints on contentious issues are taught and discussed in college classrooms. And they don’t tell us how professors are responding to anxious students.

We shouldn’t infer that many issues don’t get discussed in a serious way merely because students express discomfort at speaking up in their classrooms. Anyone who has taught contentious issues these days, as I have, knows that great discussions can take place even when some students are deeply uncomfortable. Indeed, discomfort, as I’ve emphasized, is as much a symptom of a good education as it is an impediment to one. What matters is the extent to which classroom conversations are so crippled by that discomfort that they can’t explore topics deeply and honestly. Classrooms can be educational and marked by anxiety and self-censorship at times. And they can be closed in a relaxed, comfortable climate.

That doesn’t mean that the pervasive anxiety around some topics doesn’t matter; of course it does. And it makes our work more difficult. But just as ships can traverse rough waters, so too can liberal education succeed in a sea of anxiety.

A deeper problem than the campus climate, I suspect, is the curriculum itself, particularly in humanistic fields outside of economics and political science. I fear that the courses in many such disciplines are closing, particularly around the topics that most divide us.

That’s why, in collaboration with some colleagues at the Claremont Colleges, I tapped a database with millions of college syllabi to assess the extent to which issues like racial inequality, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught in ways that expose students to broad scholarly disagreements over those issues. 

Our findings are concerning. For example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is often assigned to college undergraduates—as it should be, given its scholarly and political influence. However, her most prominent and serious academic critics—none of whom, I might add, consider themselves to be conservatives—are rarely assigned alongside it. These include James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and my colleague Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, published by Harvard University Press and selected as an “Editors’ Choice” by The New York Times. Our results show that, since their publication, Forman’s and Fortner’s groundbreaking books have been assigned roughly 3.5 percent and 1.5 percent of the time, respectively, alongside The New Jim Crow. What is missing, it seems, is a whole spectrum of non-radical perspectives. And that, we suspect, encourages an essentially Manichaean mind-set in students, one that oversimplifies the problems they will one day inherit. 

I was sensitized to this problem when I taught a course on race and inequality in 2018. To my surprise, none of my students at the Claremont Colleges—many of whom had taken multiple courses on race—had been exposed to Black authors more conservative than Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates, both of whom were familiar to them. That meant that they had never heard of the greatest Black social scientists of the twentieth century, including William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson, among others. Wilson, for example, was president of the American Sociological Association and a National Medal of Science laureate. Patterson holds a chaired professorship in sociology at Harvard and won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association. These are towering figures in academia. Certainly, Coates is a gifted writer and Davis is by some lights an interesting polemicist. But great social scientists, like Wilson and Patterson, will do far more to help students think in serious ways about inequality. 

The same problem can be found in the teaching of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Among the most popular authors is Rashid Khalidi, the recently retired Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia. Writing as a Palestinian American, Khalidi is a scholar-activist who insists that Jewish claims to Israel rest on an “epic myth.” While students should read Khalidi, his work is rarely paired with voices that are sympathetic to Israel and complicate the story he tells. Instead, his writing is commonly assigned alongside authors who reinforce and amplify his criticisms of Israel, including fellow travelers James Gelvin, Illan Pappe, and Charles Smith.

Of course, there is almost certainly wide curricular variation across institutions. But absent any systematic account of which places really expose students to varied perspectives on the most pressing social and political challenges, it’s hard to know how particular colleges and universities stack up.

This is all to say that we need better college rankings, ones that don’t lean so heavily on campus climate surveys. We need rankings that care less about the feelings of individual students and far more about the extent to which classrooms discuss and consider varied scholarly perspectives on contentious issues, like race, gender, social policy, Israel, and inequality. This seems especially true if we care about how colleges—as institutions—are responding to a generation that is plagued by social anxiety and how well they are preparing their students for citizenship in a fractured nation. 

In other words: We should care more about what professors are doing, and less about what students are feeling. So here are some questions FIRE should be asking students: How often do your professors in the social sciences and humanities assign authors who represent a diverse range of perspectives on contentious political topics like race, gender, inequality, and the like? Do your professors include a range of perspectives on their syllabi? How often do your professors play devil’s advocate when their students refuse to do so? Such questions can be assessed, at least indirectly, by asking students to share their classroom experiences rather than their own emotions. 

While the psychological comfort of our students certainly matters, it’s not the most important indicator of a good liberal education—and, indeed, sometimes psychological discomfort, even, at times, to the point of self-censorship, is its price.

The post Campus Climate Rankings Miss the Point appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ Americans made social advancements in the decades since World War II, the overt violence of Jim Crow gave way to more hidden structural violence and malign governmental neglect of marginalized communities. If private organizations or foundations wanted to advance social justice, then so be it, but conservatives in government would not help them. 

However, that is no longer true with MAGA and the second Donald Trump administration. The president and his allies are using government coercion to enforce culture-war bigotry even upon private enterprises. The rhetoric coming from federal agencies and spokespeople echoes 19^th-century white supremacist propaganda. 

We’ve become so numb to these displays of government power in service of bigotry that they often escape our attention—especially when there is overwhelming interest in the president’s ties to a notorious child sex abuser and his outlandish accusations against Barack Obama. However, we should still reflect on the lesser but equally alarming abuse of power. 

It is astonishing, for instance, that an American president is threatening to use his power to scuttle a stadium deal with a private National Football League franchise if it does not revert to a long-rejected moniker. Back in 2022, the Washington Redskins changed their name, after considerable pressure, eventually calling themselves the Washington Commanders. Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians did, similarly, renaming themselves the Cleveland Guardians. There was little objection to this at the time. The only people who would still be upset about it are those inhabiting the ugliest corners of the political spectrum. But this rump faction controls the White House’s attention, with the president of the United States claiming that there is a “big clamoring” for reverting the names when there is no such outcry. Besides, owning the libs is as much a motivation as any. 

Even if there was a majoritarian desire for sports teams to restore their racially and ethnically insensitive names, it is wildly inappropriate for the government to threaten legal contracts and stadium deals, especially if the government is in the hands of a party that once championed the Tenth Amendment. If a progressive government forced an anti-racist name change, conservatives would say it was Stalinism. 

On a more consequential note, advances in artificial intelligence may be our era’s most significant development for the economy, America’s position on the global stage, and the future of humanity itself. But instead of figuring out the best course to protect jobs and copyrights, prevent Chinese dominance, and responsibly advance a potential technological bonanza, the Trump administration is hobbling the tech sector with demands that AI align itself with bigoted ideological shackles. Trump’s latest Executive Order demands that AI companies working with the federal government treat obvious realities like unconscious bias as part of a “harmful ideology” that must be excised. Not only is this anti-scientific and morally wrong, but it also hampers AI development itself. As Elon Musk is learning in his attempts to manipulate his own company, xAI’s Grok, when you tell a Large Language Model (LLM) to ignore data-based realities, it begins to break down the system, and the AI itself goes haywire. Such destructive interference from a progressive government would never be tolerated.  

The Trump administration’s abuse and coercion of universities and media companies has settled into an alarming pattern. MAGA ideologues have used funding threats to try to strongarm universities like Harvard and Columbia into betraying core principles of academic freedom under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The irony abounds since Trump is using the Education Department as the tip of the spear as he tries to make academia bend the knee just as he’s dismantling the 46-year-old department. It has used the threat of FCC interference with mergers and other business interests to extort major media companies into settling lawsuits they would otherwise have easily won, in what many would say effectively constitute protection racket payments to the government. Stephen Colbert will be canceled; the Paramount merger is approved with a promise from Skydance, its senior partner, that DEI will be scuttled at the new company.  

Meanwhile, the Republican government’s actions and communications have been dripping with racist contempt. Beyond the horrors being perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there are other, smaller, shocking abuses. The White House just rescinded a $20 million grant to provide clean water to central California farming communities where pesticides have so contaminated the groundwater that residents cannot safely drink it. But because those residents are majority Hispanic, the Trump administration clawed back the money, labeling it a “wasteful DEI program.” On the same day, the Department of Homeland Security was approvingly sending tweets featuring 19^th-century images of Manifest Destiny that have long been used in school textbooks as exemplars of white supremacist ideology.  

Trump and his Republican allies are trafficking in the ugliest forms of old-school racism and modern authoritarianism and delighting in it. They are using government power not only to promote bigotry, but to intimidate private institutions into doing the same. When they lose power (as eventually they will), there must be a reckoning for this barbarism. 

The post Forcing Culture War Bigotry on Private Enterprise  appeared first on Washington Monthly.