Cowardice is the Through-Line

I cannot agree with something that Howard writes below. Among my extraordinary range of talents is the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time, while recognizing that of the two walking is probably more important. (It depends on the flavor of the gum.) So I'm not sure I get his point about "no one noticing" the enormous chilling effect on speech this administration is having "because people have been screaming about woke college students for so long."

For one thing: People notice! Most certainly including the same people Howard seems to suggest are benighted. They are fully capable of engaging in some version of "screaming about woke college students" while also believing--and saying--that the the use of state power generally is more worrisome than the threat of some moron in a North Face balaclava shouting "Go back to Poland" or blocking a public thoroughfare. Indeed, even in the interregnum between the first Trump administration and the present Trump kakistocracy, some individuals who were concerned about unhealthy exercises of private and mob power in public discourse not only charged that Donald Trump and other "forces of illiberalism" pose "a real threat to democracy," but warned that extreme or illiberal tactics on the part of those "woke college students" would be easily exploited by "right-wing demagogues." (Not that it took a genius to predict this. But then, it hardly took a genius to work harder to forestall it. And despite the obviousness of the point, any number of people, some of them college students, along with one or two candidates for president, spent most of either or both of 2020 and 2024 either not seeing it, or demonstrating by word and deed that they didn't care.)   

The same people are not only capable of believing that abuses of state power can be and generally are worse than abuses of private power. They are also capable of believing, and saying, that the particular uses this regime is making of state power are more worrisome than the average speech-chilling abuse of state power by the average Democratic or Republican administration, because they are more widespread, more lawless, more corrupt, more political, administered by more servile and incompetent hacks, less interested in paying lip service to existing law, and so on. It's not a question of "real" and, one supposes, "fake" chilling effects, but of bad and bad-plus-dangerous. It is possible to believe that both private actions and state actions can damage public discourse, but that state action doing so is more worrisome. Indeed, unless one wants to use state power to regulate those private actions, "screaming" about private behavior that chills speech or distorts discourse is precisely what one is supposed to do; in the case of state action, one screams--but one also sues and votes and lobbies.   

With respect to the universities, there is one sense in which the two unequal things--the use of "woke student" power and the corrupt exercises of state power--are  connected: the cowardice of universities in the face of both. Despite the many university administrators who did in fact support or give a pass to illiberal conduct for ideological reasons, I tend to believe that at the very top, the determining factor was cowardice far more than ideology. Universities treaded too lightly too long in the face of frankly illiberal conduct, often unlawful and generally disruptive of universities' ability to carry out their core missions, not because they were all in for Hamas or whatever the cause of the moment was (and the cause was more sympathetic in 2020), nor because they were trying to bend over backwards to protect First Amendment rights. Rather, they did it because universities are corporate enterprises that deal with both internal forces and external competition. They generally prefer not to rock the boat. They worried about blowback from faculty and other on-campus constituencies, and about alienating a small but select slice of the current or prospective student body, in a market that is always competing for students, rankings, and reputation. Privately, or so my experience suggests, university officials could be scathing about the student organizers they were dealing with, as well as those off campus who often used them as stalking horses. But they worried that any firm early steps would just lead to escalation. And they worried too about the calls and headlines they would get if they started suspending or expelling students, not to mention the ones they would get if--as is sometimes fully consistent with a university's duty, especially when some of the individuals impeding the university's operations are non-students and others are students who mask themselves to avoid being identified and disciplined --they called in the police to make arrests.

They were right to be nervous. Students wreaked havoc when their fellows were expelled. Students and faculty complained when students who were disciplined for disrupting university events realized that multiple suspensions might actually affect their visa status. Being students and faculty, they complained about everything. And although I lack sympathy for the students, one can see why they were surprised. Having first timorously underenforced their own rules, both in 2020 and 2024, the universities, after coming under pressure from various external forces including Congress, ramped up enforcement drastically and sometimes unevenly in a very short time. From my perspective, both the laxity and, when it finally came, the more draconian enforcement were equally motivated by fear. One understands that large institutions should act prudently. But to call all this "prudence" is an undue compliment. 

It thus can't be surprising that the universities are now offering statements in response to the current regime's law-adjacent crackdown that are milquetoast at best and at worst servile. (Servility, the status of a mere "subject," and "ritual self-abasement" being the things this regime desires above everything but money, from its Manchurian Cabinet all the way down to we poor suckers who just live here.) It certainly helps that the regime will punish universities without any clear goals, limits, instructions, guidelines, or guardrails, and that it is more than willing to take revenge on anyone who questions it. And it helps that the universities, along with every other institution in American life, have come to rely on the infusion of massive amounts of federal money and taken for granted the significant strings that are attached. It's not true that Columbia doesn't care about civil liberties. But, like other universities, it cares even more about being decimated. 

Beyond that, though, one important reason why universities have offered a cowardly response is that they have been trained for it. A university that has spent years afraid to utter simple, fully free-speech-respecting phrases like "pack up your stuff after 5 p.m.; you're not sleeping on the lawn" or "stop occupying this office or I'm calling the cops"--both things it should be saying as a matter of course--is hardly going to be habituated to telling a vindictive, force-wielding, semi-arbitrary political/law enforcement regime to go to hell, or that its job is to maintain order on campus, not to get rid of people with lousy ideas.

For Howard, the current moment demonstrates the folly of ever having treated private threats to a well-functioning free speech regime as serious. To me, it demonstrates that institutions that fall out of the habit of standing up for themselves in response to smaller problems are unlikely to find the backbone to deal with graver ones.