Michael Goodwin: Cash is king at Americas lefty universities and Trump is hitting them where it hurts
The screaming headline was prophetic: “Trump’s Policies Shake Academic World and May Reshape U.S.Culture.” My first reaction was YES, that’s the whole point! The president aims to shake up the arrogant, radical university system and save taxpayers money at the same time. Somebody finally gets it, I thought. Alas, that headline appeared in The New York Times, and writer Alan Blinder definitely doesn’t get it.
His article was drowning in doom and gloom. “If the President realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors,” he wrote. Unfortunately for Blinder and others with a pornographic-like addiction to seeing Trump through the darkest possible lens, their version of Armageddon is a big step closer. Within hours of the article’s publication, Columbia University agreed to all of Trump’s demands to protect the civil rights of Jewish students and others who don’t subscribe to the school’s hard-left indoctrination against America and Israel. By also agreeing to ban face masks during demonstrations, give 36 campus police officers the power to arrest students and appoint a senior official to oversee two faculty departments that are hotbeds of antisemitism, Columbia presumably gets to keep the $400 million in grants and contracts Trump threatened to cancel. Money talks, who knew? Most important, with some 60 other schools in the federal crosshairs for similar misconduct, including Harvard, Penn and Northwestern, a clear settlement pattern has now been established. Bet your bottom dollar the other schools will fall in line. They can’t afford not to. Like Columbia, they are addicted to federal money.Without it, much of the research they do wouldn’t be affordable. And without that research, which ranges from the hard sciences to social sciences, and carries global implications in such...