As the Trump administration continues its attack on higher education, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has laid out some guidance for how universities can keep the attack dogs at bay: just share the values of the administration and do exactly as it asks.
“Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish,” McMahon said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday morning.
The statement came as the Trump administration is locked in a standoff with Harvard University over, in part, the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. Yesterday, Trump ordered all federal agencies to cancel their contracts with Harvard, cutting off the university’s access to about $100 million in funding. That follows an earlier attempt to freeze $2.2 billion in federal funds designated to go to Harvard and a pause on all new federal grant funding to the school. Trump has also threatened the school’s tax-exempt status and attempted to bar the university from being able to enroll international students.
Harvard has sued the Trump administration over its actions and has successfully fended off some of the attacks, but Trump seems to have his sights locked on the school and wants to make an example of it, as he continues to try to scare higher education as a whole into submitting to his whims.
Trump and McMahon already successfully bullied Columbia University into making changes in exchange for keeping federal funding, including banning face masks on campus and giving the administration oversight over the school’s Middle East studies department. It has also stripped more than $1.5 billion in federal grant money from university programs across the country, leaving research projects in limbo and researchers without work.
McMahon’s insistence that Harvard and other universities can keep their money as long as the work they do is “in sync” with the administration’s goals is a vague but certainly threatening position that sets the expectation that these schools take their orders directly from Trump and company. It’s also about in line with her previous statements, that colleges just need to “obey the law” in order to receive federal funding—a moving target as the Trump administration tinkers with what exactly the “law” is. Perhaps university faculty should prepare to research why vaccines cause autism and why ‘clean’ coal is better than wind power.
Harvard’s president Alan Garber has encouraged schools not to give in to the attacks. “I would say that we need to be firm in our commitments to what we stand for,” he said during an appearance on NPR’s Morning Edition earlier this week.
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