Since re-entering the Oval Office, President Donald Trump has taken aim at many of the nation’s most prestigious universities. So far, the administration has targeted numerous schools—including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Northwestern—often on the grounds that they tolerated antisemitism.
In an unprecedented decision, the administration froze $2.2 billion in funding to Harvard after the school failed to capitulate to the administration’s demands, including hiring a third party to monitor faculty accused of contributing to antisemitism on campus, ensuring merit-based hiring and admissions, shuttering all DEI programs and offices, and banning masks.
There is no doubt that American universities have failed Jewish students who were subject to severe and pervasive harassment, in many instances. Jews were blocked from entering parts of their campuses, assaulted, and had their common spaces vandalized. In many instances, campuses looked more like something from a Louis Farrakahn speech than an institution of higher education.
As Judge John Cronan said, “These events took place in 2023—not 1943—and Title VI places responsibility on colleges and universities to protect their Jewish students from harassment.”
However, the Trump administration’s demands exceed necessary efforts to combat antisemitism on campuses. The actions are illegal and violate the First Amendment’s protections of free speech and academic freedom.
“This is probably the greatest threat to academic freedom in the history of our country, even greater than the McCarthy era,” University of Texas Law Professor and First Amendment scholar David Rabban ’71 said on So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast.
Rabban is right. Demanding ideological diversity in the hiring and admissions process violates universities’ own First Amendment rights.
A given university gets “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in his concurring opinion in the 1957 case Sweezy v. New Hampshire.
But the Trump administration’s demands to universities would violate the spirit of Frankfurter’s opinion. The administration wants to determine the makeup of universities’ student bodies, professors, and teaching material. Look no further than their demand that Columbia place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under academic receivership.
These actions could go well beyond the courtyards of a few Ivy League schools. You don’t have to squint too hard to see how these demands could ultimately result in a school like Wesleyan losing its “weirdness.” Before you know it, Kid Rock will be leading the music department.
Some might argue that the demands of the Trump administration are justified to fix what is a problem on campuses: ideological uniformity. This is a real problem. Between seven and nine percent of professors in the social sciences identify as Republicans, while close to 18 percent of professors in certain social sciences identify as Marxists. Students who identify as Republicans or Independents reported self-censorship at rates much higher than their Democratic counterparts.
However, the solution is not to turn these schools into some sort of government “vassal,” as Nico Perrino wrote in a post on X. Rather, the solution should come from pressure from donors, trustees, and other outside forces to encourage ideological diversity. And those exact efforts were actually beginning to work. Before the Trump administration stepped in, many schools were making necessary changes to try to address these legitimate concerns. Yale Law School hired Keith Whittington, a center-right academic, and Garrett West, a former clerk of Justice Samuel Alito. Georgetown Law hired Stephanie Barclay, an originalist scholar and former clerk of Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Furthermore, under federal law, there are clear steps that must be taken before funding can be cut off under Title VI.
“The [Department of Education] must give notice to the institution…and provide an opportunity for an administrative hearing where the institution can challenge the determination,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) writes. “If the determination stands, [the Department of Education] then has to report this to Congress and give 30 days’ notice before it actually terminates funding to the affected programs.”
By bypassing these rules established by Congress, the Trump administration also violates the Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine, which states that actions relating to major political or economic actions must be clearly authorized by Congress.
It is true that universities must do more to protect Jewish students. They must also foster more ideological diversity on campuses. But strong arming universities and trampling on the Constitution is not the answer.
Blake Fox is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached bfox@wesleyan.edu.
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