Complicity, v2
We don’t know everything about the threats currently made against my institution, Harvard, but we know enough. What we know determines what a principled response must be, and what failing to act with principle is.
But let’s start with how we know. Everyone recognizes that our media today is broken. We live within our own bubbles or loops; those loops maximize engagement, not understanding or truth. To escape distortion, we need strategies to check what we believe we know. Those strategies must look to those we respect but whose views we disagree with. For a liberal, that means the views of conservatives or libertarians, at least of those at the stage of their career where they can afford to do what’s right, or can’t live with themselves if they don’t. This doesn’t mean my truth is held hostage by them. It means only that my confidence in what I believe rises substantially if confirmed by them.
There have been many who have analyzed the illegality in the administration’s threats against the universities. David Cole’s prejudices are my own, and I find his analysis of the Title VI threats against Penn compelling. Eugene Volokh’s prejudices are not mine, but his post on Reason.com, endorsing the analysis of Chicago’s Genevieve Lakier, resolves this issue for me. Quoting Lakier in part (you should give the clicks to Reason.com),
These demands are breathtaking in their ambition. The administration appears to be asking Harvard to change not only how it regulates speech and conduct on campus but how it performs its core educational and research functions, how it determines who constitutes the university community in the first place, and how it self-governs — although, again, without giving Harvard clear direction in any of these respects.
…
There also can be no question that the demands the administration is making of Harvard are intended to suppress protected expression, of various kinds. To avoid the loss of federal funds, Harvard will have to refrain from advocating for, or empowering others to advocate for, the viewpoint that diversity, equality, and inclusion are important educational and social values. It will have to change how it oversees faculty research and teaching, and what kinds of scholarly viewpoints it hires and promotes. And it will have to suppress student speech and association, including core political expression, more severely than it has chosen to do so far — or at least it will have to promise to do so.
… The fact that this kind of tactic can succeed in coercing even very rich and powerful institutions to comply demonstrates how effective, and dangerous, it can be as a tool of speech suppression.
That part (and again, the full analysis is compelling, so please read that as well) establishes the Trump administration’s wrong. But it is the next part that’s important to me. Given the wrong in the Trump administration’s actions, what are the obligations of the Harvard administration? Lakier writes:
Hopefully the fact that complying with the government’s demands will require Harvard to abandon the values it has argued are “uniquely important” to it as an educational institution will mean that, in the end, the university will not choose the path of appeasement that Columbia has chosen so far but will instead defend its own institutional expressive interests, as well as those of its student and faculty, in court. If Harvard does give in, however, we should all recognize what it is doing — namely, enabling, and thereby encouraging, the unconstitutional actions of an administration that appears hellbent on destroying the independence of American higher education, one rich ivy-covered institution at a time.
Please read these two sentences carefully, and distinctly, because they express fully the complexity of the moment.
I am “hopeful” that Harvard will do the right thing. I have worked with the President; the Provost is a friend; the members of the Harvard Corporation that I know are all people of the highest integrity. None of them got to where they are by ignoring right, or giving truck to wrong.
But friendship and confidence aside, each of us must affirm what is true so that we each, individually, will face the costs of hypocrisy if right caves to wrong. So let this be my own clear statement: If my university gives into these illegal and unconstitutional threats, then it will be complicit in these wrongs, and responsible, in part at least, for every victim after us. Julia Ioffe puts it well:
I don’t doubt that fighting these wrongs will be costly. All of us should be willing to bear part of that cost. But we come from the land of Thoreau, and we should be willing to embrace his essential truths — if not “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” then at least this:
Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations.
Thoreau called such action “revolutionary.” Ten weeks into this nightmare, “revolutionary” is not the right word. For us, now, “action from principle” is resistance — a resistance against the revolution that Trump is illegally effecting. For this revolution was not what America voted for, it is not what America supports, it’s not even what Trump’s own party has endorsed. It is simply the authoritarian acts of a man who feels (justifiably, see Trump v. United States) that the Supreme Court has given him a free pass to practice his mob-like influence to whatever insane end he is pursuing. (And obtw, which country escaped Trump’s new tariffs?)
This is the Trump revolution, enabled by the most comfortable cowards humanity has ever known, and which people — and institutions—of principle, on the right and left, must stand together to resist.
