Walter Olson
Walter Olson
No civil rights law on the books requires “viewpoint diversity” in university admissions or hiring or creates a protected class of students or faculty based on ideological views.
No law of any sort entitles the federal government to reach into private universities to restructure their governance and disciplinary procedures to “improve [their] viewpoint diversity and end ideological capture”—whatever that means—or to require college brass to intervene to restructure named departments and schools that federal overseers designate as ideologically out of line—even, incredibly, a divinity school.
These are all things that the Trump administration is demanding of Harvard University on pain of massive peremptory cutoffs of funding for ongoing scientific research and other programs—cutoffs that appear to violate a number of legal safeguards meant to prohibit arbitrary or spiteful defunding without due process.
I’m glad that Harvard is fighting back, and I hope other institutions do too. I also hope right-of-center legal and policy thinkers who spent years resisting Washington’s heavy hand in university governance will realize that they need to defend Harvard too.
I wrote last month about the Columbia University case, in which Trump’s appointees went for a test run against one prestigious university and got it to fold its hand.
Central to the technique, with Columbia as with Harvard, was the method called “punishment first, verdict later.” The confrontation would begin with the funding cutoff, and the institution would then be in a position of weakness during the ensuing negotiation over whether and how it had erred and what it would do to get back on the rulers’ good side.
But as legal scholars pointed out at the time, the law specifically prohibits that way of proceeding. Before a funding cutoff, the law prescribes steps that must include clear specification of the charges, a chance for the accused institution to respond, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/feds-cant-regulate-ideological-diversity-schools-harvard