More about free speech. The Trump administration is forever claiming its adherence to free speech. The Vice President has even criticised other countries for their lack of free speech. The country now most actively seeking to curtail and control free speech is the United States of America.
What is going on, right now, with federal funding of universities is an outrage. Not only is the current administration seeking to get rid of the Department of Education entirely but it has blackmailed and bullied universities to change some of its programs the government thinks are critical. An article in the Guardian (from Reuters) reads, inter alia:
Columbia University has yielded to a series of changes demanded by the Trump Administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding the government pulled this month amid allegations that the school tolerated antisemitism on campus.
The university released a memo outlining its agreement with Donald Trump’s administration hours before an extended deadline set by the government was to expire.
Columbia acquiesced to most of the administration’s demands in a memo that laid out measures including banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to remove or arrest individuals, and taking control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty.
The Ivy League university’s response is being watched by other universities that the Trump Administration has sanctioned as it advances its policy objectives in areas ranging from campus protests to transgender sports and diversity initiatives.
The Trump administration has warned at least 60 other universities of possible action over alleged failure to comply with federal civil rights laws related to antisemitism. It has also targeted at least three law firms that the president says helped his political opponents or helped prosecute him unfairly.
Among the most contentious of the nine demands, Columbia agreed to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under a new official, the memo said taking control away from its faculty.
In response to this Andrew Graham, political economist, former master of Balliol College, Oxford and former director of the Scott Trust has written a piece for the Guardian entitled, Academic freedom in the US is under threat – universities of the world, unite! which can be found at:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/09/universities-lies-truth-columbia-harvard-princeton
In his concluding paragraph he states:
The truth is almost always partial, debatable and context dependent. Yet, as Bernard Williams argued so convincingly inTruth and `Truthfulness, academics must be truth-tellers. We cannot be neutral with respect to fake news, misinformation or outright lies. No matter where these come from, they must be called out. If a university does not believe this and does not act accordingly, it does not deserve to be a university.
With Columbia having capitulated, and with Harvard and Princeton under pressure to follow suit, every university, not just across the US, but around the globe, must unite in standing up for truth-telling.
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