Houses Divided
Five years ago, amidst the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, three hundred of my Princeton colleagues signed a remarkable letter, addressed to the university’s top officials. It decried the university administration’s “indifference to the effects of racism on this campus,” and “the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations.” It demanded that Princeton hire more faculty of color, “immediately and exponentially,” while granting faculty of color course relief and salary supplements. It called for the implementation of “administration- and faculty-wide training that is specifically anti-racist in emphasis” and the establishment of a core distribution requirement for undergraduates “focused on the history and legacy of racism in the country and on the campus.” And, among other items, it asked the administration to “constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.”
Five years later, the charge has again been made that “Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation.” But this time it comes not from progressive faculty, but in an essay by the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who has probably done more than any other individual to shape the Trump administration’s assault on elite U.S. universities. According to Rufo, the discrimination taking place at Princeton is being practiced against white men and violates the Civil Rights Act.
There is a lot that the juxtaposition of these two documents suggests, but in this short essay I will restrict myself to two points, and a few thoughts about what they imply for this moment in American politics. First, the exercise illustrates the huge disparity in political influence today between the progressive left and the populist right. The “Princeton Letter” drew enormous publicity when it came out and has frequently been cited as evidence of the strength of “wokeness” at American universities. But five years on, most of its demands remain dead letters. Course relief, anti-racist training, a new distribution requirement, a committee empowered to investigate and discipline racism in faculty publications? None of these things came to pass. Now, there was never much chance that they would. The most radical demands—especially the committee empowered to discipline allegedly racist professors—only had the support of a small minority of the faculty, to say nothing of the university leadership. And universities, in any case, are not democracies. But the signatories did not do all that much to press the issues, either, after the peak of the 2020 protests had passed. Campus activism is often episodic and performative, and so it largely turned out to be in this case. The letter did spur new efforts to hire faculty and post-docs from underrepresented groups, and more attention to the working conditions of those scholars, which was to the good. But a woke revolution it wasn’t.
In contrast, Christopher Rufo and his fellow right-wing populists have already had a very large and destructive effect on Princeton and other elite universities—with more to come for the university world in general. As of this writing, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding that normally would have flowed to Princetonhave been frozen, because of complaints by Rufo and others about discrimination and antisemitism. The sharp increase in the endowment tax in Trump’s recently signed tax bill—which the Republicans pushed for nakedly ideological reasons—will cost my university well over $100 million per year. The Trump administration has greatly slowed the issuing of student visas to international students and threatened to ban them from certain campuses altogether. As a result of these moves, jobs will be eliminated, research careers will be slowed or even destroyed, budgets will be cut. As one of the wealthiest universities in the world, Princeton can survive these blows—much better than its Ivy neighbor in New York, Columbia, which is facing a financial catastrophe if federal funding doesn’t resume (there are some hints today that it might). But the blows are serious, and a harbinger of what awaits American academia as a whole. Trump has asked Congress for deep cuts in the federal research budgets overall, and these will affect every research university in the country, not just the Ivy League.
The juxtaposition of the documents also helps explain why Trump’s assault on the elite universities has met with so little pushback on the ground. One might expect that with so much at stake, university activists would lead the way in organizing protests, sit-ins, marches on Washington, letter-writing campaigns to mobilize alumni and public officials, and so forth. Very little of this has happened. One reason is the banal one that in Humanities departments and dorm rooms (unlike in science laboratories) the danger still seems abstract and remote. But another reason is the harsh attitude so many progressive activists hold towards institutions they consider tainted by a long history of systemic racism. If you see yourself less as part of an institution than as part of the resistance to it, you are probably not going to take many steps to defend it, even against Donald Trump.
The campus conflicts over the war in Gaza, which have served the Trump administration as such a useful pretext for its actions, have of course only exacerbated this situation. Protests which began against Israel quickly turned against the universities themselves, as protestors demanded they divest from companies that do business with the Zionist state. Soon, the protestors were accusing the universities of complicity in genocide. At Princeton, when campus police arrested a number of students for trying to occupy a building, many of the signers of the 2020 letter demanded that the university drop all charges against them, and what had started as protests against the appalling violence in Gaza soon came to focus on the rather less world-shaking issue of university disciplinary practices. Again, the protestors cast their own institutions as the enemy.
The sad ironies here are numerous. The less support that universities receive in their efforts to repel the Trump administration’s assaults, the more likely they will have to accept draconian conditions to preserve their research funding, including an end to all DEI policies, new restrictions on campus speech and protest, the placing of “woke” departments under receivership, and the forced hiring of conservatives in the name of “viewpoint diversity.” Severe budget cuts mean no further hiring of underrepresented minorities—because no further hiring of anyone. And a federal administration that is far, far more harmful to the cause of social justice than these liberal institutions will be further strengthened.
The problems here reflect the problems of the American left in general. Activists who protested “Genocide Joe” Biden, and who consider the mainstream Democratic Party in thrall to neoliberals, have very little desire to stand with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries against Trump. Flushed with enthusiasm over Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral Democratic primary, they think they can forge a populist progressive coalition that can win elections without compromising their positions—including on Israel/Palestine. Whether they can do so outside of New York City is very much an open question. But meanwhile, the stolid and uninspiring leaders of the mainstream party see Mamdani as a threat rather than as an opportunity, while doing precious little to stir electoral enthusiasm themselves. Unless something changes, it looks like Trump will continue to roll happily over this house divided.
But the situation of the universities is more immediate, and more dire. It would be nice if more professors (and students!) could recognize that the peril these institutions are facing should just possibly take precedence, for the moment, over trying to effect radical transformations of these institutions. Because otherwise, there soon may be precious little left to transform.
What bothers me--and I realize I may be in a distinct minority--is that no serious attention has been directed by anyside on the academic study of Israel and of the Middle East. My own view, again recognizing it as old-fashioned--is that the purpose of teaching students about the Israeli-Palestine Conflict is to provide instruction aboout HOW to think about it, not WHAT to think about it. That is, in my classes filled with many more students from Pakistan or from various Middle East countries than American Jews, I taught from texts that explained how Palestine's Jews and Arabs dealt with developments from the late Ottoman era to the contenmporary period. As a political scientist, I talked about how and why political positions were forged and what advantages and disadvantages flowed from the stances. My purpose was not to try to turn my students into activists for one or another side or to reinforce their identities. I tried to impart knowledge and to strengthen skills-writing, analysis, speaking. The sheer ignorance on display at campus protests--at least as reported-- from what transpired in the encampments depressed me. If one is quoting Fanon's first chapter, one ought to cite his later chapters which cast a sobering shadow over the call to violence. Or, on the campus of Columbia, once known for its CC curriculum. not to hear Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau brought into discussions is to me, a distress signal coming from the academy no matter what happens in the encounters between universities and the Trump administration. The attention on process will do nothing to correct the scholarly deficits which will persist for generations.
I appreciate and agree with Donna Robinson Divine about the oroblem of the history of the people, lands, ideas and politics of the middle east being taught (and studied for sone students) in certain disciplines from perspectives that expect a clear position to be the outcome.
I am wondering David if there has been a moment of amalgamation in your essay. "As of this writing, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding that normally would have flowed to Princeton have been frozen, because of complaints by Rufo and others about discrimination and antisemitism."
You obviously knoow the situation at Princeton better than anyone. But nationally, there are, if one looks carefully and talks to people involved, 3 different agendas and groups here. The Musk/DOGE budget slashing which seems to have been behind some cuts such as the elimination of funding for Dept of Education grants, IMLS grants and some NEH programs.
A second agenda is that of cultural warriors in the White House such as Stephen Miller, friezing of research grants across agencies that were deemed to be focused on "diversity" (including, as you know, research on bio-diversity among microbes!).
A third is the Antisemitism Task Force of DOJ and DOE-OCR (outside the WH) led by Leo Terrell which has focused in specific institutions that were previously under title VI investigation since 24. That is the basis for the freezing of grants to Columbia. This group has been, as you note, discussing with the institutions specific measures it wants them to take to address specifically antisemitism. (I note to be clear that I do agree it was bad policy to move this out of OCR and to lay off a large number of career OCR field office attorneys, a move that one could see coming last fall during the campaign when Trump proposed to eliminate the DOE and which I tried to explain to those who opposed Harris on the grounds that the administration was "weaponizing title VI enforcement.")
And yes there is a tension of the Terrell group with the WH cultural warriors as evident in the Harvard negotiations, when an apparent deal with the Task Force fell apart and a new and broader series of demands were made by the White House.
Finally the Rufo and his claims. Whose primary method is to bring title VI and title VII complaints about racial and gender discrimination which he (and the administration) base on the SFFA and Grutter decisions (which held against use of race in admissions). The administration has interpreted that to mean a prohibition on ANY differential services or programs that address race INCLUDING ones based entirely on socio-economic status.
I think its worth keeping these differences in mind, because the amalgamation is, I believe, part of the Trump/Rufo/Miller strategy of creating a generalized sense of conflict and contention both within higher ed and on the part of the general public looking at higher ed.
I also think that while the situation is clearly a real threat for large endowment/ high research elite private institutions, its not that new for public institutions in a lot of states, where cuts to research, defending of programs deemed not economically viable or supportive of the state's leading industries, and direct interference by boards in campus policy has been common for 2 decades.
I think you are absolutely right to note that 2020 led many institutions to announce rapid wholesale changes (eg Mellon Foundation) which have not really borne out while the Rufo strategy has been long term and well organized and dates back to the 1970s.
Its why I believe the problems yiu highlight require thoughtful, experienced and broad based leadership from faculty, administration and elected officials.
Instead we have the current board of AAUP.