Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia’s president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.
The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA sufficiently complied with Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion.
UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump’s lackeys claim the university didn’t go far enough in rooting out DEI.
This is the first time the Trump regime has explicitly tied grant dollars to the resignation of a university official. It’s unlikely to be the last.
On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University violated federal civil rights law by failing to address the harassment of Jewish students on campus.
On Tuesday, the regime released $175 million in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, but only after the school agreed to block transgender women athletes from female sports teams and erase the records set by swimmer Lia Thomas.
Let’s be clear: DEI, antisemitism, and transgender athletics are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They’re excuses to give the Trump regime power over America’s colleges and universities.
Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power?
They’re following Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s playbook for creating an “illiberal democracy” — an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this:
First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check.
Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check.
Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check or in process.
Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check.
Then go after the universities.
Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by former Rep. Elise Stefanik (Harvard ‘06) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired.
It’s good politics because most of the 60 percent of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally.
Behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism.
JD Vance (Yale Law ‘13), has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Viktor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination” of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on May 19, 2024:
“Universities are controlled by left-wing foundations. They’re not controlled by the American taxpayer, and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.”
I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orban has ever done [but] I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.
His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”
Yet what, exactly, constitutes a “conservative idea?” That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency?
The claim that higher education must be more open to such “conservative ideas” is dangerous drivel.
So what’s the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime’s attack on education?
Not incidentally, that attack extends to K-12. Trump’s Education Department announced Tuesday it’s withholding $6.8 billion in funding for K–12 schools, and Trump has promised to eliminate the entire department.
Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
That’s why slave owners prohibited enslaved people from learning to read, fascists burn books, and tyrants close universities.
In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance, and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind.
Friends,
Today I want to talk about the real meaning of patriotism.
It’s the exact opposite of the version peddled by Trump and his white Christian nationalists — that the nation is losing its whiteness or its dominant religion, that too many foreigners are crossing our borders, that men are competing in women’s sports or children are using school bathrooms inconsistent with their sex at birth, or that teachers are not celebrating the nation’s history.
To the contrary:
True patriots don’t fuel racist, religious, or ethnic divisions.
Patriots aren’t homophobic or sexist.
They aren’t blind to social injustices, whether ongoing or embedded in American history. They don’t ban books or prevent teaching about the sins of the nation’s past.
They don’t abduct hard-working people and put them in prison camps in the Everglades.
They don’t rob from the poor to reward the rich. They don’t cut Medicaid and food stamps so the wealthiest Americans get a tax cut.
True patriots are not uncritically devoted to America. They are devoted instead to the ideals of America — the rule of law, equal justice, voting rights and civil rights, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from fear, and democracy.
True patriots don’t have to express patriotism in symbolic displays of loyalty like standing for the national anthem, waving the American flag, and shouting “USA! USA!” They express patriotism in taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going, sacrificing for the common good.
This means paying their fair share of taxes rather than lobbying for lower taxes or seeking tax loopholes.
It means refraining from making large political contributions that corrupt American democracy.
It means blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one’s job.
It means volunteering time and energy to improving one’s community and country.
It means standing up to tyranny — protesting, boycotting, organizing, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience.
And never, ever losing hope.
Patriots don’t make baseless claims that millions of people vote fraudulently, and seek laws that make it harder for people to vote.
Patriots strengthen democracy, defend the right to vote, and ensure that more Americans are heard.
Patriots understand that when they serve the public, their responsibility is to maintain and build public trust in the institutions of democracy.
They don’t put personal ambition above their love of America. They don’t try to hold power after voters have chosen not to reelect them. They don’t attempt a coup.
They don’t make money off their public offices.
They don’t usurp the powers of Congress. They don’t defy the courts. They don’t try to take over universities or law firms.
When serving on the Supreme Court, they recuse themselves from cases where they may appear to have a conflict of interest.
America’s problem ism’t that the nation is losing its whiteness or its dominant religion or that too many foreigners are crossing our borders or that men are competing in women’s sports or teachers are not celebrating the nation’s history.
Our problem is that too many Americans, including the person who now holds the highest office in the land, don’t know the true meaning of patriotism — and what it requires from all of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment