Title: Trump vs. Harvard

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Tiffany Hansen: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen, filling in for Brian today. He will be back on Monday. Coming up on today's show, we'll hear from WNYC and Gothamist reporter Jon Campbell, who will talk with us about what's holding up the state budget. It's now almost three weeks late. It does look like lawmakers came to a tentative deal over changes to the state's criminal discovery laws, which was a big sticking point. We'll talk about those discovery laws and the changes that some folks are looking for in Albany. Plus, we'll hear about what else they need to agree on to get the budget done.

Plus, later in the show, our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, continues with the history of public education, at least since the 1920s. We'll talk about how schools were organized, what the point of public schooling was and is, and the major moments from this past century. Think about desegregation, Title IX, No Child Left Behind, and of course, big educational issues of today as well, like school choice, DEI, and more. We'll wrap up the show with a bit of citizen science on the mushrooms you might spot throughout the city's fungal ecosystem.

First, a look at how Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia are or are not standing up to the Trump administration's calls to either get in line with the president's agenda or lose federal funding. So far, it's not just Columbia and Harvard that have received ultimatums from the president. According to the White House, more than a billion dollars in federal funding meant for Cornell University has been frozen, about $790 million for Northwestern University. Officials say they're looking into alleged "civil rights" violations at those schools.

We'll talk about where things stand with Columbia, Harvard, and the other schools, and we're going to talk about the administration's efforts, more broadly, to reshape higher education in this country. With us to talk about all of that is Rick Seltzer, a senior writer at The Chronicle for Higher Education. Rick writes their daily briefing newsletter. He's with us now. Hi, Rick.

Rick Seltzer: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Tiffany: Absolutely. Listeners, we'd love to have you in this conversation as well. Are you a graduate of one of these Ivy League schools, a current student? Did your kids go there? Are you a faculty at one of these universities that we are talking about today? I'm thinking about not just Columbia, Brown, Princeton, any of the Ivy League schools on the East Coast that are being affected by this. Do you have some sort of a relationship and an opinion about what the Trump administration is demanding?

We would love you to join our conversation at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call us, you can text us at that number. All right. Rick, let's just start with Harvard because that's the news of the week. I mentioned that $2.2 billion is on the line, so I want to dig in first just to talk about the money here. What is that $2.2 billion used for at Harvard?

Rick: Sure. It is grants and contracts, largely what we know that it funds so far is research. The administration has already started sending stop work orders, Harvard has said that are affecting things like tuberculosis research, research into ALS treatments, cancer, work to mitigate the side effects of radiation exposure, that kind of thing.

I want to add one quick caveat there, which is it's hard to parse which grants are specifically being frozen because of this initiative versus some of the other work that the administration has done to slow or stop grants across the country. It's not clear what's falling into the $2.2 billion bucket because the administration is trying to exact concessions from Harvard versus a broader push they're making to slow and stop research funding.

Tiffany: Generally speaking, this federal funding fueling scientific research, that doesn't just happen at Harvard, though.

Rick: Correct. Any research university in the country and many institutions that are not focused on research draw federal funding. It is by far and away the largest funder of whether it's technology research, medical research, all sorts of different things that folks in laboratories or out in the field doing sociological studies do. The vast majority of it flows from the federal government.

Tiffany: How has Harvard responded initially? Just get us up to date here.

Rick: Last Friday, the Trump administration demanded all sorts of concessions in a letter to the university tied to allegations that Harvard did not respond to anti-Semitism appropriately. Now, the university maintains that it is very committed to responding to anti-Semitism and has, in fact, made changes to fix issues that were revealed in the last two years, with very difficult protests that sometimes allegedly went beyond protests. It maintains that it also is willing to continue to strengthen processes and make changes.

The administration, in Harvard's eyes, demanded some things that essentially infringed on its ability to be an independent institution. There were what higher ed would consider poison pills in here, giving the federal government the ability to audit all admissions data, to requiring Harvard not to admit international students that were deemed hostile to American values. I think a commitment to hiring for "viewpoint diversity" was another big poison pill.

There were some requests about reducing the power of faculty and administrators who were "more committed" to activism than scholarship. The Trump administration sends this list of detailed demands a week ago today. After the weekend, Harvard put out a response that said, "We can't do this. We won't do this. We would not be independent anymore." They had a pretty snappy campaign to show the kind of research that was on the line that the feds were cutting.

I think we've seen many on campus make the point that this research is largely separate from the allegations. The researchers that are now going to lose their work, lose their jobs, have their work interrupted if they don't lose their work and jobs. By and large, we have not seen any allegations that they were tied to anti-Semitic activity. Harvard is basically making the case that you're punishing the wrong people.

Tiffany: Some conservatives have said, "If you don't like the demands, don't take the money."

Rick: That is true. Even some Republicans who are alumni of Harvard support what's going on. I just saw a headline to that effect today. There is a larger argument here over whether an institution as wealthy as Harvard should take federal funding, needs to take federal funding. Harvard has a $53 billion endowment as of the end of its last fiscal year. It generates a lot of--

Tiffany: Largest in the country.

Rick: Correct. It has a pretty high reimbursement rate for federal grants and contracts. Those are negotiated on a one-on-one basis with universities, and there's been a long push to cut some of those rates. There is a question of process and a question of, you want the institutions that are most effective at doing research, that know how to oversee it, that have the best faculty members who can do it, that have the highest level of expertise. You want those institutions to be able to do research.

From a national level, is there an element of we want to fund the people who are going to do the work most effectively? I think there is certainly a question of whether we could spread federal research dollars around in a more equitable way, in a fairer way. There are all sorts of questions about whether Harvard and others in the Ivy League are accessible enough to your run-of-the-mill person and whether some of their work is really focused on the public good. I don't think any of that is tied to what is happening with these cuts.

These cuts are saying, "You didn't do enough to address anti-Semitism, so now we're going to pull your federal funding for research under contracts that were signed and that you thought you could count on for the next few years." Those are two very different things.

Tiffany: Had the administration came out and said something more akin to the average taxpayer should not be paying for $2.2 billion to an elite university that accepts only a percentage of a percentage of people in this country, that doesn't accept citizens from across the board, across this country, that the taxpayers should not be paying for that, do you think that would have resonated more with potential supporters of the administration's actions here?

Rick: I think it would have potentially split constituencies within higher education a little differently. However, I do think that the sector would still identify that as a risk that funding for colleges and other statuses that colleges enjoy, such as their tax exemptions, are potentially able then to be targeted for political reasons. Higher ed has been very successful over the years at uniting, even when the interests don't align between the Harvards of the world and community colleges and all the institutions that are in between those poles. It's kept a pretty unified front when it comes to the fact that we should be separate from the [inaudible 00:10:30].

Tiffany: Rick? I think we have lost Rick.

Rick: [inaudible 00:10:37] do a lot of research-

Tiffany: Here we go.

Rick: -and we're not infringed upon.

Tiffany: Rick, we lost you there for a second. Can you just reiterate that last point you were making? Because I think it's important.

Rick: Oh, yes, absolutely. Sorry about that. I think the sector has been very good at keeping a unified front and saying an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. I think the concern, no matter what the reasoning the Trump administration gave for taking actions like it's taking against Harvard, I think the sector would still have been concerned that you're setting a precedent that you can go after institutions for political reasons.

Tiffany: I wonder if that same argument would hold if this were a conservative institution being attacked by a liberal administration. I guess this is the question folks often ask when it comes to a lot of different areas. If a Democrat had done this, would it get the same response? If a Republican had done this, would it get the same response? I'm wondering, is that true?

Rick: One of the great ironies here is before this Trump administration took power, I talked to sources who said the Biden administration stretched in their views, these are conservative sources, stretched what some laws allow you to do. Definitions of how Title IX, the law requiring that you treat women equally in education, stretched that in some conservatives' views to cover gender identity, so trans students, and saber-rattled at religious institutions that took a much more strict and traditional view of gender. Conservative voices said that was an overreach.

Now the Trump administration isn't, in some cases, using that playbook or expanding upon that playbook to go after institutions that are doing things they don't like. Now, one other precedent we should mention here is that of Bob Jones University, which actually ended up losing its tax-exempt status in 1983 in a discrimination probe. Because it barred interracial dating and interracial relationships, it didn't get that tax-exempt status back for 35 years. It did eventually get them back when it dropped that process, but there is very old and really very unused since then precedent for an anti-discrimination investigation to be used against an institution.

Tiffany: We're talking with Rick Seltzer, a senior writer at The Chronicle for Higher Education. He also writes their daily briefing newsletter. We're talking about what's happening at the Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard, that are getting some mandates from the Trump administration. If they want to keep their money, they have to do X, Y, and Z. Rick and I have asked you to join this conversation.

If you have gone to an Ivy League school, if you've graduated, your kids go there. Are you faculty there? Do you have opinions that you'd like to share with us about what's happening? You can call us, text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Rick, we have a couple of texts here. "For the public good, the money could go elsewhere. Why should our tax money fund Harvard at all?" Rick, that is not an opinion that stands alone. There are a lot of people who feel that way.

My question is, and this is probably something that you can't even answer, but if we're just talking about the research, you said that these institutions are very specifically able to handle this type of research, this medical research, this scientific research, this technological research. One could argue that if the money isn't being given there for that research, it should go somewhere else so that research can continue to be done. What we're seeing is cutbacks to the CDC, cutbacks to the NIH. It's not that that money is just going somewhere else.

Rick: That is correct. I have seen no indication that the money that's being withheld from the Harvard's and Cornell's of the world is bound for standing up a major research apparatus at any other institution. I think reasonable people could have a conversation and probably disagree on whether a Harvard University should get any taxpayer funding, as much taxpayer funding as it gets. That's very different than saying, "Are we getting a return on investment for the research?

Should research be able to be conducted separate from other considerations? Should we protect research from the threat of being yanked on short notice?" Because a lot of these projects take a long time to stand up. Some of the projects that are being effectively killed right now, they've been in the works for months. A lot of money has already been spent. That's not necessarily a good use of taxpayer dollars either.

Tiffany: Let's talk with someone who's been affected by some of these cuts. Tim in Tappan. Hi, Tim.

Tim: Hi. I'm a faculty member at John Jay College, so not one of the Ivies. That's my point, is my NIH grant was cut. This is happening all over the country at every higher ed institution, not just at the Ivies. I totally support the speaker's point before that Harvard is doing the right thing in standing up for themselves, but also we need to unite behind them because you can't appease a bully.

Tiffany: Thank you, Tim, for the call. Rick, we got another call here that says, "I could see both sides of this issue, standing up for academic freedom versus maintaining critical research." We hear stories like Tim's, but then you have folks saying, "I also understand that not taking the money and for these universities to maintain their academic freedom is also important." I can see where people might feel a little conflicted about this. Are we going to see that going forward, or do you think we're going to see people line up and get behind these universities?

Rick: Tim made such a great point that this has been going on in somewhat less targeted ways at all sorts of institutions. All sorts of faculty members are seeing cuts or their grants thrown into question. One thing that was happening before this week is the sector was having a very difficult time coalescing behind any one point. The Trump administration is pushing so many changes that it's very easy to chase in a million different directions, and no message comes out.

Also, there are so few institutions that have the financial heft to do anything but keep their heads down in a moment like this, that it's really important when a large wealthy institution like Harvard does make a stand. Whether or not you agree with the stand, it is setting up one of those paramount conflicts that is going to define how the government relates to all sorts of colleges going forward. The feds were really trying to change what it means to be an independent institution. They were trying to exert a new level of control that we have not seen over independent higher education in this country. That's going to affect your community colleges, your regional publics, and your Ivy League institutions.

Tiffany: I do want to get to that broader attempt to remake higher education. Just getting back to this notion that universities should band together, let's bring in Jane in Manhattan. Good morning, Jane.

Jane: Good morning. I'm a Princeton alum, and I have a son who's currently at Princeton. President Eisgruber did take a leadership position in this. I believe that there's a need for concerted effort. I understand there's a difference amongst institutions, but this is core to the mission of education. I think we have to speak to that as did he, which is to educate and pursue the truth, and that we have to have a plurality of voices and a respectful environment, which I believe these institutions have.

We do not have to reflect the political climate. We should not weaponize anti-Semitism in this argument, and have baseless deportations and defunding and censorship. We should act in a coherent manner and coalesce in support of academic freedom and the civil liberties of our community.

Tiffany: Jane, I'm curious what you think that concerted effort by universities might look like and what you think might happen.

Jane: I know Eisgruber was the head of a higher ed association. I think there are attempts amongst university leaders to discuss. I can't say what that should be, other than perhaps even finding ways to support for the institutions with greater endowments to lead the way in support of those who are more vulnerable, smaller public institutions, community colleges. I would just say that research affects also students. My son has many friends who had wonderful research positions lined up upon graduation, medical research, et cetera. They lost those opportunities, including important fellowships. I think we have to recognize that that impacts students as well.

Tiffany: Jane, thanks for the call. Rick, we have another text here that speaks to something similar. "As a veteran of the pharmaceutical industry watching defunding of research, I can tell the impact will be felt in the slowing improvements in healthcare, slowdown in getting drugs to market, cuts at NIH impacts the entire research ecosystem, including Harvard. It's impacted community-based organizations that help make healthcare delivery equitable."

Similarly, we have a text that says, "These federal funds are public investments that benefit American society. It's not about paying the tuition of very wealthy students." Rick, I'm just going to circle back and maybe ask you the same question that I asked Jane, which is that if these universities, which it looks, I don't know, potentially they're going to start banding together in a coordinated effort, what would that look like? What's the best possible outcome for them at this point?

Rick: What would it look like is a great question. A lot of folks are asking that. I have seen proposals led by faculty members to create essentially a mutual defense pact for Big Ten institutions. The large public research universities, stretching from, what is it, Rutgers to Nebraska, I think, is-- Oh, now they're on the West Coast because the Big Ten expanded. The large public research universities, basically they would put money and make money and resources available to any one of their fellow Big Ten members if they were targeted by the federal government to fight this in court.

That is one proposal from faculty members. It has not been implemented. There have certainly been plenty of public statements circulated. I have seen draft statements that college presidents have been working on. Short of when the government comes knocking, we will accept or reject their terms, there has not been a lot of firm, here is what we are going to do, affirmative planning. I think, in part, we are only 89-- I think it's 89 or 90 days into the Trump terms. The speed at which this administration acted took a lot of folks by surprise. I think that may be one of the reasons.

Another one of the reasons is it is difficult to summon the will of a sector that is as big and diverse as this one. Best case scenario that I can see right now is a lot of these efforts that the Trump administration is pushing get tied up in court. The best case scenario for the sector is courts either rule against the administration or the clock expires, and they try to keep the status quo as best as possible until there is an election. Now, if you are a critic of the sector or think the sector needs reform, status quo is probably not a very good case scenario, however.

Tiffany: We are talking with Rick Seltzer, a senior writer at The Chronicle for Higher Education, about what's happening at Ivy League institutions and what demands are being made on them by the Trump administration. Rick, I want to talk about endowment coming up. We have to take a little break here. Before we do, let's bring in a student. Jason, good morning.

Jason: Good morning, everyone. Shout out to my mom, who was just speaking before me. Now I have the--

Tiffany: Go, Moms.

Jason: Go, Mom. I just really wanted to add more color to the student perspective. Obviously, my mom said a little bit about it before. I have a lot of friends who are looking for jobs right now who had research jobs lined up. I'm a senior. A lot of those jobs are being cut in very important research and lab positions. I have a lot of international student friends who are very afraid of getting their visas revoked. In general, just the climate on campus is very tense.

People are getting pulled off campuses and taken away to different places. I think it's really important to understand, as students, that this is really impacting us on the ground. It's not just a headline that we're seeing in the news. There are a lot of folks who are just really nervous right now as they enter the workforce and as they navigate the changing political climates, being international students or having family members that are undocumented.

Tiffany: Jason, thanks so much for the call. Thanks, Mom, as well. Rick, I do want to get to some of the tension that Jason mentioned there is over this demand that the Department of Homeland Security made to Harvard to turn over detailed records of their foreign student visa holders by the end of this month. There's also the IRS reviewing Harvard's tax-exempt status, which you touched on a little bit. Let's get to that after the break. We're going to take a real quick one, and we'll be back. You're listening to the Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Tiffany Hansen, in for Brian. Don't go anywhere.

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Tiffany: It's the Brian Lehrer Show here on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen, in for Brian. Today, we're talking about Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia standing up or not to the Trump administration's calls to either get in line with the president's agenda or to lose their funding. We're having this conversation with Rick Seltzer, who is a senior writer at The Chronicle for Higher Education. Rick also writes their daily briefing newsletter.

Rick, I promised I would talk first about the endowment that Harvard has, because I'll tell you, I was one of many people who, when the news of this broke and I found out that Harvard got $2.2 billion in federal funding, my first reaction was, "What? They have an enormous endowment. How is this not something that is funded by this $53-whatever-billion that they have in the bank?"

Rick: The endowment top line number, that $53 billion, folks who run endowments will tell you that's not a checking account. They target about a 5% draw every year from that so that it exists into the future. That is actually legally how endowments are structured. You are required to have this be something that the corpus is supposed to exist and continue funding the institution at a similar level into infinity. You can't just draw more than 5% from it.

A 5% draw on $53 billion, when you look at some of the other things that institutions use it for, financial aid, supporting things like facilities, supporting faculty members, even a $53 billion endowment is not going to be able to support the level of research that the federal government funds. Then you get back to the question of, do we, number one, want to fund research at universities? Number two, do we want to fund research at universities that have the money to draw the best faculty members and researchers? Do we want to fund research at other institutions rather than these ultra-wealthy institutions that have, in my opinion, very legitimately been criticized in some cases as only enrolling very, very wealthy students and children of their alumni and donors?

There are all sorts of criticisms lobbed at the Ivy League's institutions for doing this over the years. It is a question of where do you want to steer the money, how do you want to steer the money, and who do you want to do this research? I think it's less of a question of, can endowments make up for or do this level of federal funding on their own? They simply cannot. I saw one really interesting analysis by the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, and I don't have the numbers right in front of me.

It basically looked at all the federally funded research that we have in this country, and it said, "Could we replace it with private foundation spending?"If you pulled all of the spending that private foundations have done or do every year, it still wouldn't match the federal research spending. It would come a lot closer than I expected it to, but it still would not match it. That is if you take all of the spending that these foundations do. The foundations do not only spend on research. There's a pretty big gap there in what private dollars can do versus what the federal money has been doing.

Tiffany: I mentioned before the break that the IRS is now reviewing Harvard's tax-exempt status. The Department of Homeland Security has ordered the university to turn over detailed records of its foreign student visa holders by April 30th. These two prongs of this approach by the administration are just part of the larger effort focusing in on this university, right?

Rick: Yes. Actually, there's a third prong that just hit my inbox about 90 minutes ago. The education department asked Harvard for detailed records after saying it did a review that found incomplete and inaccurate disclosures about foreign gifts and contracts to Harvard. Now, the first Trump administration had a big push on foreign gifts and contracts.

It's not clear whether that's the review they're referencing, whether they did a new review, but this is now two or three agencies this week that have come out and said, "We are looking at Harvard. We are asking for information from Harvard. We are reviewing one of their statuses." It's a multi-pronged effort where the government is bringing the full weight of the executive branch down on this institution.

Tiffany: This is the same education department that the Trump administration is talking about dismantling.

Rick: That is one of the big questions is they cut close to, I think it was 50% of the staff of the education department, how do they have the capacity to do this? They've cut, obviously, from other arms of the government, too. The question is, are they doing reviews that are as comprehensive as they have in the past? If this ends up in an appeals process or in a court, will the administration have the capacity to defend itself or make a good case that it followed the appropriate procedures, which is going to be really important for these kinds of investigations actually having a sticking effect?

Tiffany: One of the things the Trump administration officials have said, particularly as it relates to Cornell and Northwestern, is they're looking into "civil rights violations" at the schools. We've been talking about the administration demanding an audit of some academic programs, and they have cited specifically what the administration views as anti-Semitic behavior endorsed by or at least not condemned by the universities. I want to bring a couple of callers into our conversation here, Rick, and then get your opinion. Let's talk first with Michael in Brooklyn. Good morning, Michael.

Michael: Hi. Thanks for having me on. I wanted to say first that in the last two days, I've heard nothing but the idea that Harvard and other schools are great research institutions, as though that's their primary functions for everybody, and as though they're going to benefit the United States and the whole world. However, the Trump administration's attacks on the universities might never have occurred had those universities been more forthright in not only condemning, but in acting on the kind of anti-Semitic demonstrations we've seen, and also the extensive use of DEI.

The graduate student level is probably much higher than the undergrad, and they're very often people from far-off other countries, which are not like the United States. I'm just wondering, is Harvard really being honest with us when they say they want to fight back when they could have eliminated the reason for a fight long ago?

Tiffany: Thank you, Michael. Then, Rick, really quick, let's bring Jacob in, and then we'll get your opinion here on what these folks have to say. Jacob in Queens, good morning.

Jacob: Hi. I actually disagree with the previous speaker exactly on that point. In my perspective, what Trump's administration is doing has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It's a clear attack on science in itself, because every regime is afraid of basically free thinking, because science ultimately tends to prove the things that the right-wing media currently wants to pin as woke or disagreeing with their agenda broadly. I don't think Trump's attack on Harvard has anything to do with anti-Semitism on its own.

Tiffany: Thank you so much for the call, Jacob. Rick, we have both sides of the coin here. Again, this is a very nuanced issue for a lot of people when we're talking about the allegations of anti-Semitism, when we're talking about research. There are people coming at this from very different perspectives.

Rick: Absolutely. I think this is a case where there's validity to both perspectives. Some of these institutions really did have terrible incidents happen on campus. Actually, Harvard was not forefront of mind for the protest incidents. In my mind, there were some incidents at Columbia and UCLA that I thought were potentially much more damaging for those institutions over the years, but there were certainly incidents at Harvard as well. There was a very high-profile several congressional hearings with college leaders probing their responses to alleged anti-Semitic activity, where they really did not come off well.

I think it is 100% fair to say that they could have addressed these issues better in the past. Now, what better is, I think different people will probably split hairs, but there was an exposure there. There was a potential liability there that they missed or did not act quickly enough. Some of the Trump administration's demands certainly are tied to those things.

Some of them, probably, if you gave truth serum to higher ed leaders, they would say some of these requests from the administration that we're seeing them make of Harvard and others could potentially be good policy reforms.

More consistent application of your enforcement of protest rules don't interrupt classes, time and place and manner restrictions that protect the protesters' rights they have to be able to protest, but also protect students' right to learn. Things like that and enforcing consistently. Most people would say there is reform that can always be done. If you had to call in the NYPD like Columbia did, or if you did call in the NYPD like Columbia did because of protests, you might want to bolster your police force the way that they agreed to at the Trump administration.

The administration is also, to the second caller's point, pushing for things that go far and away beyond what I would have expected from an anti-Semitism investigation. Merit-based hiring reform, requiring structural and personnel changes, that was one of the requests they made to Harvard. It's starting to get pretty far away from, this is clearly about civil rights and anti-Semitism, and getting into, are they just pushing it to see how far they can push it? That becomes a legitimate question.

Tiffany: We haven't talked much about Columbia up to this point. Can you just bring us up to date where things stand now?

Rick: Sure. Columbia was actually the first institution that the administration made demands of and said it was going to withhold federal funding if it did not reform. Several weeks ago, the Columbia administration basically said, "Here's what we're going to do." It was widely viewed as conceding to the Trump administration's demands. Columbia was trying to get back $400 million. Their president said, "Here's what we're going to do." Higher ed said, "Oh, my gosh, you agreed to do this." Then the Trump administration said, "We're not going to release the money anyway." This is a starting point for negotiations.

I think that was viewed as a bad-faith effort. Columbia has actually had a leadership change since then. It already was on an interim president. This week, their new acting president came out and said, "If we had been presented the list of demands that were--" I'm paraphrasing here. "If the Trump administration had demanded things as extreme as they demanded of Harvard, we also would have rejected their terms."

Tiffany: This is Claire Shipman, you're talking about? Claire Shipman?

Rick: Correct. Yes. That was the letter they posted on Monday. I saw it after Harvard had rejected the demands. Read into that what you will. Columbia is basically, as last I saw, still negotiating with the Trump administration. Although it should also be noted that Harvard said it would negotiate over things that were not poison pills as well. There's a degree of difference there in what they've done, but it's also unclear how far the Trump administration really did try to push Columbia in negotiations.

Tiffany: Let's bring a Columbia student in the conversation, Rick. Let's talk with Mimi in Manhattan. Hi, Mimi. Good morning.

Mimi: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I had a comment and a question. My comment is really about fundamental research. A lot of the dialogue is about things like cancer research, which is easy to understand. I think the point people are not talking about is when it comes to academic research, we need to take the long view.

For example, computers would not exist if not for 400 years of fundamental math and science research that came before it. People in those times couldn't have imagined computers. The thing is, we don't know today what social good will come out of the research that we're doing, and that's the difference between academic and industry research. Therefore, I think we should fund it as a society for our future.

Tiffany: Mimi, thanks for the conversation. Thanks for the call. Rick, anything to respond to that? Then I just want to ask you a little bit about looking ahead here on what's next.

Rick: All I really have to say is thank you to the caller. As a journalist, one of the things that's very hard is to explain the breadth of research that these institutions do and why it matters in the long run, so that's a wonderful contribution.

Tiffany: We have heard from some Columbia officials that perhaps this all ends in the courts. There was a quote that I saw from former Columbia president, Lee Bollinger, who said, "I think the way you get to the end of this is to go to court, basically." Is that where we're headed?

Rick: That is my best guess. I do think we will see a large, long court case. I think in the interim, while that is winding its way through the courts, there will be elements of it, at least I would expect, that will probably make it to the Supreme Court. While it's winding its way through the courts, I think that's institutions that are targeted by the administration are probably in for a lot of pain. We talk about the huge endowments they have, but their operating budgets are a different beast.

When the administration starts to withhold funding, that means they are going to have to do things like make cuts. That means they are going to have to do things like lay people off, borrow money. There will be impacts, both financial and on the ground, at these institutions as they do eventually end up, whether it's through negotiations or, as I would expect, in the courts, as they do fight this.

Tiffany: We talked about the fact that this isn't just a one-off, whether it's the IVs, whether it's Columbia or Harvard, but that it's really an effort. Some view it as an effort by the administration to really reshape higher education. My question to you is, if the administration is successful in that, in reshaping higher ed, what does that look like?

Rick: It's a great question. I'm going to draw from some of the precedent we've seen in the states, because I think the Trump administration is drawing some of its framing, some of its strategies, though not all, from some things that states have done. We have seen states take a more active role in what is required of students to go to and graduate from college, do more to shape curriculum, do more to curtail faculty power over what is taught in classrooms. There are varying levels of that, but I think the administration will likely be pushing to reshape who gets admitted to colleges. I think you will see a very different view of what civil rights means.

You're already seeing the administration do that, saying you can't consider race in ways that you've considered it in the past. It's basically a much more activist role for the government, which, even if you are a conservative and believe that these institutions have strayed from their missions of promoting shared values that we should all have, I think that is a real concern, because it is possible that we will not have an administration that agrees with you in the future. I think the big concern here is that higher ed finds itself in the middle of a back-and-forth culture war, tug of wars over who's admitted, what's caught in classrooms, and it's exhausting and pretty destructive for all of us.

Tiffany: Rick Seltzer is a senior writer at The Chronicle for Higher Education. He also writes their daily briefing newsletter. Rick, first of all, tell us how we can get that newsletter.

Rick: If you go to chronicle.com/newsletter/daily-briefing, you can find it there. It's also linked from just the chronicle.com homepage.

Tiffany: Second, Rick, thanks for the time today. We appreciate it.

Rick: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

 

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