Harvard shows resistance is possible. But universities must join forces | Jan-Werner Müller

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

49% : In principle, not just progressives, but self-respecting conservatives - if any remain - should be responsive to such a three-pronged strategy.
49% : Those who say they worship the Founders must wonder whether they can tolerate daily violations of the constitution, as Trump works to impound funds approved by Congress (for research, among other things). Self-declared free speech defenders must question why they would support an administration inspired more by Mao than by Madison.
47% : Self-criticism should of course be part of university life, but trumpeting on page-one op-eds that there are deep structural problems with higher education is naive at best.
47% : Or unless one exhibits willful ignorance of the fact that the government does not just shovel cash to universities so they can organize more pride parades, but that it concludes contracts for research after highly competitive selection processes? Clearly, the Trump administration is in the business of unprecedented national self-harm.
41% : But universities must realize that the government is adopting a divide-and-rule tactic: they should collaborate on a shared litigation strategy, take a common approach in getting the public on their side, and do everything possible to have Congress push back against Trump treating money allocated by the legislature as if it were a private slush fund to be used for political blackmail.
40% : Besides the obvious contradiction of violating freedoms in the name of freedom, there is the rank hypocrisy of demanding "viewpoint diversity" while seeking to outlaw any diversity initiatives not based on political ideology.
29% : It has become abundantly clear that Trump 2.0 is using a moral panic about "woke" and pro-Palestinian protests as pretexts to subjugate institutions posing multiple threats to aspiring autocrats: universities constitute an independent source of information; they encourage critical thinking; they gather in one spot young people easily outraged by injustices.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.