It shouldn’t be this easy to cleave universities from one another, but, so far, it seems to be easier even than making law firms compete for the don’s business and favor. This may be because law firms define success in a way that is at least marginally closer to their ideal function (helping to uphold the rule of law) than the way universities define success is to their ideal function, which is producing and disseminating knowledge. Most prominent American universities, most of the time, measure their success not so much by the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the world as by the size of their endowment, the number of students seeking admission and their ascent in rankings by U.S. News & World Report and others, which assess the value of a university education in part by looking at graduates’ starting salaries. As for professors, while universities do compete for the best minds, they more frequently compete for the loudest names, in the hopes that these will attract the biggest bucks.
In conversations with my colleagues on these pages, I have compared the universities’ current predicament to the prisoners’ dilemma, the game-theory model in which two people accused of a crime have to decide to act for themselves or take a chance and act in concert. It’s a useful model to think about, but it doesn’t quite fit. The universities are not co-conspirators: they are competitors. And they want more than to return to the status quo ante: They want growth. They might even want to win the research funding that the other guy lost.
Trump has threatened to use many different tools against universities: pulling federal financial aid, revoking accreditation, rescinding nonprofit status, imposing an endowment tax and blocking the flow of international students. Nor — as the case of Columbia has already demonstrated — will submission end the attack. Slashing and burning its way through the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wilson Center, the United States Institute of Peace, the Smithsonian, and others, the administration has shown that it considers knowledge production worthless. In the rare areas where the president — or perhaps Elon Musk — may see value in research, the emergent mafia state is almost certain to distribute funds to its friends. One shudders to think what universities would have to do to fit themselves into that category.
In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Polish dissidents operated what they called a “flying university” in apartments across the country. Run by the country’s leading intellectuals, this university wasn’t selective and didn’t charge tuition; its only goal was to get knowledge to as many people as possible. These were the people who went on to build the only post-Communist democracy that, so far, has been able to use electoral means to reverse an autocratic attempt. In the 1990s, Kosovo Albanians responded to the Serbian regime’s forced takeover of their education system by walking out and creating a parallel underground school system, from first grade through university. Classes met in boarded-up storefronts. I met Albin Kurti, the current prime minister of Kosovo, in 1998, when he was a student — and a student activist — in the underground university.
Adopting such a radical approach, and forsaking the usual concerns of development offices and communications departments, would be costly, to be sure. The universities most actively targeted by Trump have the resources necessary to weather such a radical reorientation. But as Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, told me, “Too many of our wealthiest universities have made their endowments their primary object of protection.”
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