It’s not often American higher ed lands on the front page of every national news site for days and days in a row, but that’s happened in part thanks to the Trump administration’s $400 million defunding of Columbia University.

“Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement on the matter. “Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus.”

On Monday came the announcement that the federal probe into alleged campus antisemitism had widened to target 60 universities and colleges. The next day the Boston Globe reported that “Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology froze new hiring, and students and administrators alike were left slack-jawed after the Trump administration took extraordinary measures to widen its crackdown on universities during a frenetic four-day blitz.” Prior to this, Cornell and Stanford instituted freezes.

The economic pressure is coming not just from potential defunding from antisemitism probes by the Department of Education, but also the confusion and defunding of academic science and medicine through cuts to the NIH and Medicaid. Some universities are halting or even rescinding offers to next year’s crop of graduate students. The University of Massachusetts’ Chan Medical School has cancelled admission to those who had been accepted to its biomedical science PhD program, citing concerns about federal funding cuts.

The gutting of the Department of Education has begun in earnest, with about half the staff of that federal agency fired on Tuesday. Inside Higher Ed reports, “On Tuesday, the Trump administration fired nearly half of the Education Department’s roughly 4,100 employees, leaving the agency with a skeletal staff of about 2,183. Now, a day later, the scope and impact of those layoffs are beginning to take shape.”

Summing up the situation as “a blow to data collection,” Inside Higher Ed explained the cuts will negatively affect academic researchers’ ability to conduct investigations in the same area, meaning that there will be a ripple effect in terms of loss of knowledge about what’s happening in American education.

All this follows New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s move last month ordering CUNY’s Hunter College to remove a job ad she deemed “vile, antisemitic propaganda” and directing CUNY to conduct a probe into antisemitism in the classroom. This week, HxA President John Tomasi explained how the ad should have been done much better, and HxA Director of Policy called out the governor’s overreach.

The dean of Georgetown’s law school has “rebuffed an unusual warning from the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., that his office won’t hire the private school’s students if it doesn’t eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs,” according to AP. “Dean William Treanor told acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin that the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating what Georgetown’s faculty teach or how to teach it.”

Meanwhile the feds have arrested and detained Columbia grad student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, because of his pro-Palestinian activism on campus. Our friends at FIRE, a free speech organization, have decried the move:

“If constitutionally protected speech may render someone deportable by the secretary of state, the administration has free rein to arrest and detain any non-citizen whose speech the government dislikes. The inherent vagueness of the ‘adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests’ standard does not provide notice as to what speech is or is not prohibited. The administration’s use of it will foster a culture of self-censorship and fear.

“This is America. We don't throw people in detention centers because of their politics. Doing so betrays our national commitment to freedom of speech.”

Assuming no new evidence that Khalil engaged in criminal activity comes to light, not only does the arrest of Khalil violate freedom of speech—vital for advancement of true viewpoint diversity on campus—it also imposes an extreme chill on campus culture. There is now reasonable fear that any expression, including lawful expression, could result in severe sanctions.

“Days after immigration officers arrested a prominent pro-Palestinian campus activist, administrators at Columbia University gathered students and faculty from the journalism school and issued a warning,” the New York Times reported Wednesday. “Students who were not U.S. citizens should avoid publishing work on Gaza, Ukraine and protests related to their former classmate’s arrest, urged Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor. With about two months to go before graduation, their academic accomplishments—or even their freedom—could be at risk if they attracted the ire of the Trump administration.”

It’s not just at Columbia. We’re seeing plenty of reports coming in, from around the country, of academics and administrators self-censoring with the goal of getting out of the sites of the Trump administration and fearing that students will be unable to express themselves and learn because of parallel state actions around DEI.

Writing of “Profiles in Self-Censorship” for The New York Review of Books, David Cole bemoans what he sees as the lack of courage by higher education administrators. And over at Bloomberg Law, David Lat suggests “that when DEI efforts go too far, limiting free speech in the classroom isn’t the answer; defending the First Amendment is most important when one disagrees with the viewpoint expressed.”

In a thoughtful op-ed for The Atlantic this week, Nicholas Dirks, former chancellor of UC Berkeley, suggests that if, over the years, higher education leaders had done a better job of explaining their institutions’ value—including in terms of life-saving and life-improving research—and had not let partisan politics (including the use of DEI litmus tests) get such a foot in the door, academia might be in a much better position to defend itself now.

“Now the war has begun in earnest,” Dirks writes. “Trump’s directives to restrict funding for science, especially the mandate to dramatically reduce National Institutes of Health grants for scientific infrastructure, equipment, and lab support—all essential components of university science—will cripple biomedical research across the country….If the Trump administration sticks to its decision to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia over the charge of tolerating anti-Semitism, we haven’t seen anything yet.”

The scene is sparking a lot of conversation about the wave of commitments to institutional statement neutrality in higher education. The core concept is that institutions and top leaders should refrain from issuing statements on partisan issues not directly related to their institutions’ missions. It does not imply a vow of silence on the part of campus officials. It bears repeating that all of the items discussed above have clear impacts on institutions’ ability to fulfill their missions, and thus campus leaders can be engaged on those issues even if they subscribe to a general policy of institutional neutrality.

Interested in institutional neutrality? Take note that, this week, Heterodox Academy released a new report chock full of interesting data on the trend towards institutions adopting a policy of institutional neutrality. HxA’s report was covered in the New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, Reason, and The Boston Globe, among others.

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