Vance called professors the enemy. On campus, the right wants to replicate what it hates | Opinion
The moment in the movie “Wicked” that keeps coming back to me is the one when the animals of Oz, including a professor at Shiz University, lose their ability to speak.
That, of course, has nothing at all to do with what’s happening in our universities, where speech is similarly being silenced by a lifelong con artist and his even more frightening second, only there are no power ballads or gorgeous sets.
Free speech is in a corner, put there by people who claim to be all for it. Not only is everything labeled “diversity, equity and inclusion,” being successfully banned, but dissent of any kind is being shut down under the pretext of protecting Jewish students, and women, and now — if you never see me again, it’s because I drowned in irony — white people. In Kansas. Of course, none of these will be immune to the damage done as our institutions are demolished.
But the University of Kansas is one of 45 universities under investigation by the Department of Education over allegations that it worked with The Ph.D. Project, a nonprofit that has in the past — no more, it says! — offered particular support to racial minorities seeking a doctorate in a business-related field. We can only hope KU is cleared in connection with such heinous acts.
Sixty universities are also under investigation for tolerating antisemitism, and the Trump administration has already canceled some $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
I do have to say that antisemitism on campuses across the country has become a very serious problem. And that universities have not shown the tolerance for diversity of thought, particularly conservative thought, that they should have.
But what’s happening on campuses now is such an overcorrection that it’s not wrong to call it a purge. History is being rewritten, and minorities and women written right back out of it. Even information on the Arlington National Cemetery website about Black and female service members has been scrubbed. A Harvard epidemiologist called the disappearance of publicly available federal health data “a digital book burning.”
Research funding cuts are already sidelining some of our best science students — how this makes America great, please tell me. Johns Hopkins had to lay off 2,200 employees. And universities are not only to be humbled, but made to bleed. Which brings us back to what’s happening at Columbia.
Khalil’s arrest will be ‘first of many’
Whatever you think of Mahmoud Khalil’s politics, we still don’t really know what the former Columbia student, who led anti-Israel protests on campus following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, is alleged to have done exactly. He says he is in no way aligned with Hamas. But we do know that arresting a green card holder who hasn’t been accused of any crime very effectively shuts down speech.
First you go after someone who is apt to be seen as highly unsympathetic, and if that goes OK, well then you say there are lots more just like him posing a threat to American Jews.
I could take this argument a lot more seriously if Donald Trump had objected a single time to his patron Elon Musk’s repeated affronts on that front, most recently when he shared a post that said, “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.” No wonder he’s going after our public sector employees with a chainsaw.
Leo Terrell, the head of the Justice Department’s antisemitism task force, called Khalil’s arrest a “deterrent,” but to what, exactly? That this administration regards him as a terrorist means nothing when it also says it wants to jail political opponents, journalists and others who simply disagree.
Khalil’s arrest “is the first of many to come,” Trump says, and this I believe. A Palestinian woman accused of overstaying her student visa is also in federal custody in connection with the Columbia protests and a doctor from Lebanon was deported as a Hezbollah supporter over the weekend, even after a federal judge ordered that she not be removed without due process.
The Trump administration itself is clearly flouting the law now. It’s brazenly ignoring the court order to stop deporting Venezuelans under the wartime-only Alien Enemies Act of 1798. So as the uncertainty of what laws will be enforced and for whom grows, so too will the fear of speaking out, along with the necessity to do so anyway.
Kathy Kiely, the Lee Hills Chair in Free-Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, says the fact that faculty are concerned that saying the wrong thing could get them in trouble is certainly nothing new. “The difference here is the force of the federal government is being used. They want to drive everyone with a different point of view out of academics and out of politics, and that’s cancel culture with the power of the purse behind it.”
‘Destroy Columbia University’
In fact, Trump is faithfully following parts of American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Max Eden’s “Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education,” which not only argued for crushing universities by raising the endowment tax but said, “To scare universities straight, (Education Secretary Linda) McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.”
He also recommended throwing well-regarded former Columbia president Lee Bollinger in prison: “Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.”
In just the kind of thoughtful interview that made him so widely respected, Bollinger had no comment on the “lock him up” provocation but told the Chronicle of Higher Education that as he sees it, academia is “being put in a vise of dealing with an admittedly serious problem” — antisemitism on campus — “and being presented with an existential threat by forces unclear about what they really want.”
He in no way underestimates the first: “I view what’s happened to many Jewish students and faculty and the antisemitism they’ve experienced as horrendous. Universities do need to attend to that. I think our systems of discipline for violations of that kind and many others are inadequate to the moment. We lack a rule of law at universities, and that rule of law is needed for there to be a robust free-speech commitment.”
But having just watched Vance’s 30-minute 2021 speech, ”The Universities Are the Enemy,” I would say of the existential threat that they absolutely do know what they want, and it is the complete annihilation of thought that is at odds with theirs. In other words, they want to replicate what they hate.
“We live in a world that has been made, effectively, by university knowledge,” Vance said, and we need to unmake that world, “honestly and aggressively attacking the university in this country,” as it is “dedicated to deceit and lies.”
When Vance went back to visit his alma mater, Yale Law, it struck him as “genuinely totalitarian,” he said. He called progressive politics “a language used by our new oligarchy to do two things: to rob the people blind and to tell them to shut the hell up about it if they dare complain.” Did you see that as a blueprint, then, Mr. Vice President? Because I couldn’t have described what’s going on right now any better.
Vance even added this about Anthony Fauci: “What is the claim that Anthony Fauci has” on any authority with the American people? “We didn’t elect him. Nobody voted to make him the Lord over our entire economy.” I’m trying to think who this accusation reminds me of.
Again, here is Lee Bollinger, because we need to hear this: “We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.”
I’m very sorry to say I agree. And since there is no amount of going along to get along that will mollify or appease the authoritarians, the sooner we see what’s happening for what it is, the better.
This story was originally published March 18, 2025 at 7:06 AM with the headline "Vance called professors the enemy. On campus, the right wants to replicate what it hates | Opinion."
