Trump’s War on Woke: Columbia and Big Law Fall in Line

The parade of capitulations to Donald Trump’s instauration of America has been breathtaking. Like the scene on the deck of the USS Missouri bobbing in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, it has been a ceremony of serial surrender from the corporate, academic, and even the political  world.  

Like any good drama, it has typically begun with protestations of resistance before moving on the phase of grumbling, then abject, acquiescence.  Here are a couple of notable examples from the last several days.

Columbia University, one conspicuous home of Intifada wannabes, was dinged some $400 million in government contracts because it had conspicuously failed to follow laws prohibiting discrimination. As Secretary of Education Linda McMahon explained, since the October 7, 2023, slaughter by Hamas of some 1,200 Israelis in Gaza, “Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses—only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them.”

At first, Columbia officials attempted to mount some moderately high, if decrepit, horses to insist on their defiance. But just a few days ago, the administration completely caved, basically acceding in substance to all nine of Trump’s demands. The university agreed to ban masks and allow campus police officers to arrest unruly students. It also agreed to appoint a senior university official to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies. The university objected to the term “receivership” to describe this outcome. But as The Wall Street Journal noted, “the changes align with what usually happens in a receivership.”

Although The Wall Street Journal is not usually thought of as a comic publication, that column did contain one inadvertently hilarious sentence. The column noted that educational institutions across the country are watching what is happening at Columbia “with alarm.” They should be alarmed, for the same reason that John Donne advised readers not to ask for whom the bell tolls. Then came the funny bit. “Their primary concern,” the Journal intoned, was that “without freedom to follow their intellectual curiosity, the discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy will decline or even grind to a halt.”

Set the phenomenon of “intellectual curiosity” on one side of a chart. Then write down “Columbia’s Departments of Middle East and Palestine Studies.” What connects the two? It’s a baffling problem that no one has yet been able to answer.

But it is probably not as baffling as the suggestion that what goes on in those politicized, anti-Semitic redoubts has ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy” or that, absent such putative “discoveries and innovations,” said the economy would “decline or even grind to a halt.”

That would be like saying that Columbia’s “Women’s and Gender Studies” Department featured “intellectual curiosity,” as distinct from politicized grievance-mongering, or that any verbiage emitted from those hothouse quarters ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy.” Take a look.  Here’s what they are marinating their students in this spring.  One of my favorites:  “Bodiesfavorites: “Bodies of Transformation”:

Engaging trans studies, disability studies, histories of science, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer, and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice, and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: What is the corporeal real? How does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? How might one approach nonhuman interiority?

I am offering a prize for anyone who can furnish a plausible translation of this pathetic semi-literate through-speak into English. And remember, the advertised price to attend Columbia is $89,587 per annum.

There has been some pushback against the Trump administration’s threats of fiscal responsibility.  The New York Review of Books, for example, published an open letter signed by some twenty constitutional scholars, some conservative or at least libertarian, some left-wing, many eminent. Their purpose? “To defend academic freedom and the First Amendment in the wake of the federal government’s recent treatment of Columbia University.”

Note the conjunction of “academic freedom” and “the First Amendment,” as if they were the same thing. The sociologist Edward Shils summed up the salient point with his customary incisiveness in The American Scholar in the mid-1980s. Academic freedom, Shils noted, is not a universal human right. On the contrary, it is a “qualified right,” a “privilege” extended to people fulfilling a certain role in exchange for the performance of certain duties. Essentially, Shils wrote, academic freedom “is the freedom to seek and transmit the truth.” It does not, he pointedly added, “extend to the conduct of political propaganda in teaching.”

Still, a favorite strategy of intimidation among those whose goal is moral revolution has been to elide the distinction between the protections of the First Amendment and the privilege of academic freedom. It is worth noting, however, that those freedoms are often applied selectively. The basic formula is this: “Academic freedom for me, but not for thee—at least not if you have the temerity to disagree with my politically correct opinions.” That is the situation at Columbia and many other tony colleges and universities (the tonier, by the way, the more likely they are to be infected by woke ideology). I think the Trump administration is right to withhold government (i.e., taxpayer) funding for activities that seek to cloak destructive, anti-civilizational behavior with specious appeals to the First Amendment. Associate Justice Robert Jackson was right when he observed, in his dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949), that the Bill of Rights is not “a suicide pact.” When it comes to free speech, Jackson said the choice “is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.”

But I digress. I mention Columbia because it is a signal academic example of capitulation to the strictures promulgated by the Trump administration. There will be many more. An sterling example from the corporate world was the hasty retreat beat by Brad S. Karp, the chairman of the storied New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Karp and Paul Weiss have long been at the center of anti-Trump and anti-MAGA agitation. Last week, Trump issued an executive order stripping individuals in the firm of security clearances, terminating government contracts with the firm, and ordering an investigation of discriminatory DEI hiring practices at the firm.

At first, Karp resisted and talked about enlisting other big firms to challenge the order. Then he realized that the future of the firm was on the line. Last Wednesday, he went to the White House, hat in hand, and offered to “negotiate” (that’s lawyer talk for “capitulate”). The next day, Trump announced that Paul Weiss had agreed to undertake $40 million in pro bono work on issues that Trump has supported, “including a task force being run by the Justice Department aimed at combating antisemitism ‘and other mutually agreed projects.’” As a result, Trump withdrew the executive order, saving Paul Weiss but exposing Karp to the fury of the anti-Trump legal establishment.

The pond is churning with upset fauna. But the point is that all across the fruited plain, that noise you hear is the sound of the anti-Maga establishment cowering in panic. The Times goes on about this all being part of Donald Trump’s “retribution campaign.” It is a sort of retribution, but not really for the attacks against Trump personally.

As I put it in The Spectator a few days ago, “The Trump administration’s efforts to restore fiscal sanity, accountability, and common sense to the workings of government will seem like retaliation or retribution only to those who have betrayed those values.”

For them, the closure of redundant or malevolent agencies, the exposure of financial wrongdoing and incompetence, the revocation of tolerance for illegal migrants who prey on US citizens will seem simply punitive. It is punitive, because it is in response to egregious wrongdoing. But in the long term, such masculine policies will function less as a punitive expedient than as a deterrent.

The fact that must really be discouraging to the Deep State, anti-MAGA consensus is this: Trump is a mere two months into his term. He has three years and ten months to go.  And, as he and his lieutenants are quick to remind us, they are just getting started.