A stylized history of modern American academics:
For decades, university administrators have somehow become adept at co-opting university resources to promote their personal social and political agenda. This has affected everything from hiring to course offerings to the funding and composition of athletic teams. Over time, much of this agenda has been encoded in federal mandates.
When parts of this agenda have proven to be controversial or unpopular, administrators have largely avoided defending their policies on the merits, instead falling back on the federal mandates as an excuse. “Hey, we have no choice. We’d lose federal funding if we did anything different.” This dishonestly ignored the option of, for example, resisting intrusive policies through reasoned argument.
Now, all of a sudden, the federal mandates no longer jibe so well with the personal agendas of the administrators, and equally all of a sudden, universities like Harvard are discovering backbones.
I have mixed emotions about all this. It is good for universities (and everyone) to fight back against governments that tell them how to run their businesses. It is bad to fight back selectively, effectively collaborating with the government when it helps you co-opt university resources for your own agenda and then resisting when the government’s agenda starts to deviate from your own. Harvard should have fought back decades ago. Now they’re suddenly fighting back. Will they revert to form in a few years, as a function of who happens to be in the White House? And if so, is a sporadic backbone better or worse than no backbone at all? I’m not sure.
Trump’s overall stance on academia is exactly the same as Obama’s and Biden’s — they all favor federal micromanagement. The small picture: Should transexual women play on women’s sports teams? Biden says yes; Trump says no. The big picture: Should the federal government be deciding this issue in the first place? They both say yes.
Trump, true to form, has overplayed his hand. If he had actually reversed policy and backed off the micromanagement, we’d have seen something really interesting: The administrators would have been forced to either defend their policies or back off them. We might have had exactly what the administrators have spent decades dodging: useful debate about things like hiring practices and curriculum development. Instead we have a battle over who should be making these decisions. It’s a battle we should have had long ago. Too bad Trump chose to be on the wrong side of it.
Very nice post.
I’ll be highlighting it in next Sunday’s weekly readings on EconLog.
David, @1:
Awesome. Anything to encourage Steve to blog more.
Consider Bob Jones University v. US (1983): By 8-1, SCOTUS upheld the decision of the IRS to withdraw tax-exempt status from the university due to the university’s policy, grounded in religious views, banning the practice or advocacy of interracial dating/marriage. According to the majority, “Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education … which substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on [the University’s] exercise of their religious beliefs.”
Give Bob Jones credit—they fought government all the way to the Supreme Ct. And now we have a precedent for withdrawing a school’s tax-exempt status for violating the President’s understanding of civil rights.
As long as the government pays, the government will say. In addition to being a faculty member, I have low level admin duties. There is a constant, real fear that if we don’t follow the government’s rules, the government will take away our ability to enroll students with federal financial aid. This fear is in the back drop of all our operations from how we treat students on financial aid to how we respond to “dear colleague” letters on title IX. Steve is correct that universities cheer these things when the federal government is a means to preferred political agendas. Universities from Harvard to the University of Texas have pushed this battle beyond higher education’s ability to win. 30 years ago, higher ed was not a political issue. You had democrats wanting to spend a few dollars more and republicans wanting to spend a few dollars less. The pubic realized universities had tremendous value. It is not that way. I live in a deep red state. There have always been “champions” of higher ed in the legislature. Now there is no one who wants to do that. They see universities as strongholds of leftism. And I can’t say they are wrong.