Safe Spaces Are Coming Back to Brown University—All Thanks to Trump
The campus' settlement with the federal government is bound to create free speech headaches.
Brown University has settled with the Trump administration, which is currently waging war on elite institutions of higher education. Under the guise of combating antisemitism on campuses—an important problem, though not one the federal government is well-suited to address—President Donald Trump's Education Department has gone after Columbia University, Harvard University, and also Brown.
Brown's deal with the federal government has been described as more favorable to the university than Columbia's; Harvard has yet to reach an agreement at all, but is reportedly willing to spend up to $500 million to settle the matter. Large sums of money are at stake for all three universities, as the federal government is responsible for doling out billions of dollars in research grants. Brown is the recipient of $510 million in public funding.
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So it's not surprising that Brown wanted to make a deal. It's unfortunate, of course, that the Trump administration is using the threat of a funding reduction to dictate terms to what is ultimately a private institution. This is obviously a version of jawboning, in which political figures use non-legislative means to achieve some sort of policy end. When the Biden administration threatened social media companies and browbeat them into making different moderation decisions, it was swiftly recognized as a free speech issue by many conservatives, libertarians, and even some on the left. It's similarly vexing when the Trump administration—which has pledged to restore free speech and end federally driven censorship—does this.
It's true that institutions of higher education are not entitled to federal funding, which, after all, is paid by taxpayers. The Trump administration, or any administration, could decide, in a moment of unusual frugality, that the U.S. is too indebted to continue sending billions of dollars to wealthy private organizations that have their own massive endowments. But the government shouldn't use the threat of a funding cut as a form of coercion. That's no different from how the Obama administration handled Title IX enforcement: Obama's Education Department instructed campuses to adopt policies that were hostile to free speech and due process, and they implied that federal research dollars would evaporate in the event of noncompliance. Indeed, the extent to which the Obama higher ed coercion blueprint has been adopted by Trump is under-acknowledged.
All that said, the details of the Brown settlement are disturbing in their own right. It's true that Brown avoided some of the harsher penalties that Columbia got stuck with, and it's good that the settlement recognizes that the government has no "authority to dictate Brown's curriculum or the content of academic speech." Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, complains that the settlement includes "no barrier to government interference in faculty hiring," but the only thing it really says about hiring is that it must be race neutral. The Supreme Court has already held that race-based hiring and admissions policies are almost always impermissible, so this is hardly some unreasonable, out-of-nowhere demand.
But Dubal is also concerned about a provision of the settlement that permits the feds to collect and read Brown faculty course evaluations, and that's legitimately concerning. In fact, it speaks to the most troubling aspect of the settlement: It lends itself toward the creation of a campus antisemitism police that will be laser-focused on identifying, cataloguing, and eliminating uncomfortable and offensive speech that is nevertheless clearly protected by the First Amendment. In other words, the Trump administration is directly encouraging the formation of campus safe spaces.
The settlement instructs Brown to survey students on their feelings of emotional safety. The survey questions are really something, and include: "whether they feel welcome at Brown; whether they feel safe reporting anti-Semitism at Brown; whether they have experienced harassment on social media." These are vague questions that will prompt subjective answers. Social media harassment is a particularly fraught topic; what constitutes harassment? If one student is being unkind to another student on Instagram or TikTok, is it really the university's job to intervene?
Brown should act to counter identity-based harassment in cases where it is egregious, is criminal, or abjectly violates the code of conduct. If students are drawing swastikas on Jewish people's doors, the university should certainly intervene. But the language in the settlement is too non-specific, and almost requires university administrators to overreach. No one should be naive about this, because it's obvious what's going to happen: An anti-Israel student will go after a pro-Israel student on social media, the pro-Israel student will say they are being harassed, and Brown will feel obligated to respond.
No student should be made actually unsafe—i.e., be a victim of violence—because they are Jewish, or for any other reason. But it should be self-apparent to everyone who criticized the liberal safe space trend of the 2010s that re-orienting the campus speech police around the protection of Jewish students' subjective feelings of discomfort is not a positive development. This will produce the same sort of histrionics that existed when campus authorities were dedicated to policing speech that was perceived to be anti-black, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-trans, etc. There will be an uptick in bias incident reports as students discover that they can weaponize the process against perceived enemies, as students absorb the idea that the administration is responsible for making them feel emotionally well at all times.
I really thought the idea was to undermine the ideological foundations of the safe space mentality, not expand its identity-based reach. The Trump administration is erecting an edifice that would have been much to the liking of all those Play-Doh-loving, coloring-book-needing, puppy-hugging, safe-space liberals circa 2015.
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