The New Yorker:

The biggest mistake that some universities have made is to presume that the White House is operating in good faith. It is not.

By Jelani Cobb

On a morning in May, Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, testified before a congressional subcommittee about the prevalence of far-left ideas among his faculty and students. Given that the federal government has historically provided funding for the university’s budget, through an annual allocation, Johnson had a difficult choice to make. He could respond to representatives’ questions with a defense of the free exchange of ideas (and risk them holding up the allocation) or take the safer path of conceding their criticisms and promising to work to insure that the thinking on campus better aligned with putatively American values.

Johnson’s dilemma will be familiar to anyone who has observed higher education in this country during the harrowing academic year that is now coming to a close. Spring is typically a joyous time on campus, when graduating students celebrate having overcome whatever challenges they may have faced along the way. This month, administrators and faculty are likely equally relieved to have made it through. That, in fact, has been the prevailing sentiment since December of 2023, when Republicans in the House of Representatives—citing harassment and, in some cases, even the physical assault of Jewish students on campuses, in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel—began summoning university presidents to appear before committees, where they were berated and belittled. Those appearances prefaced the subsequent resignations of the leaders of Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania, all of them women. Johnson’s appearance, however, occurred not in the current wave of federal overreach but in May of 1935, amid a feverish preoccupation with communism in academia. The hearings of these presidents are separated by nearly a century of history, yet their quandaries are strikingly similar.

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