I wrote a piece back in May explaining why Trump’s executive order about AI in education prompted a chicken run of executives racing to line up for a chance at federal funding. Despite clear signs that the federal government was no longer acting in the interests of educators, NGO executives and higher education leaders responded eagerly to the prospect of new funding by saying nice things about AI and the Trump administration.
Universities may be non-profit enterprises, but they exist in a system that requires them to take in more money than they give out. Making budget decisions is the first job of a university president, and the board members who hire them are mostly successful corporate managers. Money is easier to measure than the creation and dissemination of knowledge, so presidents are evaluated in terms of their success in raising and maintaining funds. Nothing else really gets counted, so nothing else really counts.
Thorstein Veblen defined trained incapacity as “an habitual, and conventionally righteous disregard of other than pecuniary considerations.” Kenneth Burke drew a memorable analogy between the concept and the operant conditioning of farm animals.
If we had conditioned chickens to interpret the sound of a bell as a food-signal, and if we now ring the bell to assemble them for punishment, their training would work against them. With their past education to guide them, they would respond in a way that would defeat their own interests.
This week the bell rang, not to announce new funding, but to signal a new reality, one that was already apparent in examples being made of Columbia, Harvard, and UCLA. And so, to avoid punishment, university leaders fired staff and faculty for their speech. In Texas, the governor is insisting that Texas Tech go after students.
The response from campus leaders as they complied was incoherent. After Clemson University fired a staff member and removed two faculty members, they stated, “We stand firmly on the principles of the U.S. Constitution,” but then claimed “that right does not extend to speech that incites harm or undermines the dignity of others.” Other institutions dropped similar squawk bombs as they scrambled to comply.
Compliance involves more than censoring speech about a high-profile murder. After a professor was criticized in a video (posted on social media by a conservative politician) for violating “Trump’s laws” about gender ideology, the president of Texas A & M, Mark Welsh, fired the professor and removed her chair and her dean from their administrative roles. After deciding not to defend his faculty’s academic freedom, Welsh issued a statement claiming, “This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility.” He resigned on Thursday as his critics complained his actions were too little, too late. His initial response to the student complaint had been to defend the professor.
Free inquiry and free speech are fundamental to the work of higher education. Campus leaders know this, but their training focuses their attention on the risk of budget cuts and layoffs. Those are terrible outcomes, and they hurt people, more people than the handful who posted ill-timed and distasteful words on the internet. I imagine that sacrificing a few individuals along with principles that protect speech felt like a difficult but necessary measure to see the campus through a challenging political situation. What could be worse than having money disappear?
Burke again:
If one rings the bell next time, not to feed the chickens, but to assemble them for chopping off their heads, they come faithfully running, on the strength of the character which ringing a bell possesses for them. Chickens not so well educated would have acted more wisely.
Fortunately, we are not all chickens. We have the capacity to see what is at stake and to defend the principles by which our institutions and our nation operate.
A wide, visible, and coordinated resistance is the best response to this abuse of power. Tell the institutions where you work and where you graduated that free speech matters. Donate to institutions that fight. Speak in support of leaders who try to protect academic freedom, even and especially when those attempts fail.
The bell is ringing. It is time for those who believe in free speech and academic freedom to speak and organize.
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