How Trump caught big-government fans in their own trap

President Donald Trump is using every tool he has to challenge woke practices in America — and he has a lot of them. Notably, none of the mechanisms that the president is using were put in place by conservatives for leverage against progressive institutions. No, Trump is simply availing himself of the vast federal apparatus created by liberals on the assumption that an ever-more powerful and extensive federal government was synonymous with righteousness.Now that someone is in charge who doesn’t agree with them and who is willing to use all the influence that the progressive state affords him, they are vulnerable to the centralized power that they’ve eagerly built up over decades. Expanding the federal government has been a progressive priority since the time of Woodrow Wilson, and now its tentacles — via federal funding and a skein of rules — reach into practically every corner of American life. Universities are particularly dependent on government and intertwined with it.They are quickly learning how uncomfortable it is when their paymaster isn’t ideologically aligned with them and is willing to throw his weight around. A recent interview in the online publication Slate was headlined, “Colleges Are Getting in Line: An expert in higher-ed finance explains why every school in the US is vulnerable to Trump.”“The power is essentially the same for every college in the country that gets federal funding,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “and it does not make a difference whether it’s public or private.”“If the federal government is giving money to students for research, all that money can be taken away,” he said.“And that’s the leverage that the federal government has over the vast majority of higher ed.

Some large universities can get well over $1 billion a year in total revenue from the federal government.”The interviewer asked, “Did any leaders in higher educ...