How Obama and Biden Paved the Way for Trump's Attacks on Universities

"Universities were bending over for federal funds long before Trump," writes Laura Kipnis.

President Donald Trump has been laying siege to Columbia University, canceling $400 million in federal grants to the elite school. In exchange for having funds restored, Columbia's administration has agreed to capitulate to a list of demands relating to campus anti-Israel demonstrations: The university will ban protesters from concealing their identities with face masks, create new disciplinary bureaucracies to punish purportedly disruptive students, and even police the Middle Eastern studies department for alleged antisemitism.

It's not inherently wrong for the federal government to refrain from funding an extremely wealthy private institution of higher education, especially one with an endowment of $14.8 billion. But the Trump administration isn't trying to save money for taxpayers—it's using the money as leverage to make the university police student expression.

While some of the protesters at Columbia illegally occupied buildings, prevented other students from attending classes, or otherwise impeded legitimate school functions in violation of campus policy, the heavy-handed measures being imposed on the university will almost certainly lead to a crackdown on nonviolent speech. Some protesters are already facing severe sanction and even deportation. There is no question that the threat of losing funds will compel Columbia's administrators to police anti-Israel expression in a manner that is careless and inconsistent with the campus's stated commitment to academic freedom.

To the extent that the Trump administration's actions have motivated this change in policy, they are drawing criticism from civil libertarians. Jonathan Zimmerman, an historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Guardian that Trump's attack on Columbia is already having a chilling effect and that he has never seen anything like it before.

"Historically, there is no precedent for this," said Zimmerman. "The government is using the money as a cudgel to micromanage a university."

Zimmerman's concerns about free speech are well-founded. But he is flatly incorrect to state that this has never happened before. Trump is following the exact precedent set by his two predecessors—Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Indeed, the Biden and Obama administrations did not merely use "money as a cudgel to micromanage a university." They used money as a cudgel to micromanage every university in the country.

This was done, beginning in 2011, under the auspices of Title IX, the federal statute that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. Under Obama, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) re-interpreted Title IX to require all universities that receive public funding to police sexual misconduct on campuses in a manner that violated both due process and free speech principles. These requirements were panned by organizations that work to defend such principles, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE's president, Greg Lukianoff, accused the federal government of forcing universities to "investigate harassment claims even when a reasonable person would not have found the speech objectionable, thereby weaponizing the sensitivities of the least speech-tolerant students of campus."

Administrators were told to take swift action against "any unwanted conduct of a sexual nature," which in practice meant that students and professors faced disciplinary measures for speaking out on such subjects. One of the most iconic and well-publicized instance of this Title IX–driven censorship was the persecution of Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis. Kipnis wrote an essay in 2015 that defended a colleague who had been accused of violating Title IX and that decried the atmosphere of paranoia that had taken hold at Northwestern. In response, she was herself accused of violating Title IX and subjected to a Kafkaesque disciplinary proceeding. As I wrote at the time:

Kipnis was informed that the charges existed—not what they were—via email. Norwthwestern's Title IX coordinator explained that the university would hire an outside law firm to investigate the complaints. Kipnis was not entitled to a lawyer—though she could bring a silent "support person"—and wouldn't be notified of the actual charges until she sat down with the investigators: either in person or via Skype. The investigators, who worked out of state, would be flown in to deal with her.

All of this occurred because a professor expressed her opinion on a matter of consequence and her critics weaponized the system to try and silence her. And Kipnis's ordeal was not unique whatsoever: Countless students and professors endured similar Kafkaesque trials.

These farcical persecutions were done at the behest of the Obama administration, in accordance with a strained legal view that federal discrimination law obliged universities to police sex-related speech. When Trump came to power in 2016, his Education Department rescinded the guidance to the universities; four years later, the Biden administration largely restored it.

The potential loss of federal funding is exactly what motivated virtually every college and university in the country that ran afoul of the OCR to fall in line and police students and professors in a manner that violated their free speech and due process rights. Virtually no university presidents stood up to the Obama and Biden administrations in the face of these threats. No elite campus behaved bravely. Not a single member of the Ivy League decided, at the administrative level, to fight back.

"People may have forgotten that the Obama and Biden administrations also 'weaponized' federal research funding by threatening to withhold funds from institutions they deemed to be out of compliance with their mandates," wrote Kipnis a recent post on Facebook. "Universities were bending over for federal funds long before Trump, spending untold billions to stay on the right side of the OCR bureaucracy."

The Trump administration is now using antisemitic discrimination as a pretext to police campus speech, just as the previous Democratic administrations used gender-based discrimination as their pretext. It's the same bad playbook, and universities are giving it the same bad reaction: total surrender.