Speaking at CPAC, President Trump threw out juicy red meat to his audience: the “crises” of campus free speech. Predictably, the crowd cheered Trump’s pledge to issue an executive order “requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars.”
On its face, defending free speech at colleges and universities, even if rooted in partisan pandering, isn’t a problem. After all, there are plenty of real instances where institutions have tried to limit the rights of students and faculty — that even happened to me.
But in search of a culture-war applause line, Trump is treating a problem that’s actually improving as a crisis that gives him an excuse to increase executive authority.
The case against increasing such government authority is probably best articulated by robust defender of free speech University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer. In an open letter to the University of Chicago community, Zimmer explains, “The first feature is the precedent of the federal government establishing its own standing to interfere in the issue of speech on campuses.” As he puts it, that “makes the government, with all its power and authority, a party to defining the very nature of discussion on campus.”
He continues, “The second feature is the inevitable establishment of a bureaucracy to enforce any governmental position.” Doing that, he argues, “would reproduce in Washington exactly the type of on-campus ‘speech committee’ that would be a natural and dangerous consequence of the position taken by many advocating for the limitation of discourse on campuses.”
As with other abuses of power, it’s easy to see how what seems like an innocuous affirmation of a core principle underpinning democracy could easily be twisted to erode the very idea of academic inquiry and freedom of expression.
If Trump truly wants colleges to be the institutions of free inquiry that have allowed American higher education to flourish, more government control is not the answer. All that will achieve is schools trying to please a high council of speech regulators in order to get money to do only research in line with partisan aims of whichever party occupies the White House.
