Negotiating With Terrorists, Unsuccessfully
How to lose ideological battles by believing in nothing.
Yesterday, Brown University signed an agreement with the Trump administration. You can read it here. In exchange for having its government funding restored and (it hopes) having the government stop incessantly hounding it, the school agrees to pay $50 million, to acquiesce to right wing obsessions over bathrooms and trans people, to absolutely end giving racial or income preferences in admissions, and to take a number of performative actions regarding “antisemitism”—which is to say, to position the school as pro-Israel and to agree to serve as a persecutor of anti-Israel sentiment on campus going forward.
There are few obvious things that stand out about this agreement (which will differ only in details with similar agreements already signed by Columbia, and soon to be signed by many other elite colleges). The first and most hilarious thing is that as soon as the agreement has completed its anti-DEI pontificating about Brown’s “compliance with anti-discrimination laws,” it immediately launches into a lengthy section about all of the special things that Brown must do for Jewish students specifically. Which sound a lot like… DEI? I mean:
Brown is committed to taking significant, proactive, effective steps to combat antisemitism and ensure a campus environment free from harassment and discrimination. These shall include actions to support a thriving Jewish community, research and education about Israel, and a robust Program in Judaic Studies, through outreach to Jewish Day School students to provide information about applying to Brown, resources for religiously observant Jewish community members, renewed partnerships with Israeli academics and national Jewish organizations, support for enhanced security at the Brown-RISD Hillel, and a convening of alumni, students, and faculty to celebrate 130 years of Jewish life at Brown in the 2025-2026 academic year.
Brown will engage an external party to conduct a survey in 2025 to evaluate the campus climate for Brown students, including the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry, and to evaluate social media harassment.
Isn’t this exactly the kind of stuff that Fox News personalities were mocking five seconds ago, when it was being done for non-white people? As always, “DEI” is fine if it is cementing power for right wing allies, and otherwise, not. All discussions of “DEI” as a policy are insincere and should be treated as such.
The second thing to note is that the money aspects of these agreements—$50 million for “state workforce development organizations” from Brown, $200 million from Columbia, and perhaps as much as $500 million from Harvard—are just performative ways for the government to have the schools eat shit. Just punishment and forced groveling. An economic form of getting their knees to kiss Donald Trump’s feet. That’s all.
The third thing to note is Brown’s willingness to explicitly sell out trans people, in response to demands from bigots. In addition to saying it will strictly define “male” and “female” according to the right’s preferences, there is this: “The University will not perform gender reassignment surgery or prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child's appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.” This has nothing to do with education, at all. It is just an item from a bigot’s grievance list. Brown is expecting to get hundreds of millions of dollars of funding restored after striking this agreement, but I imagine that the school would have agreed to sell out an unpopular minority for an even lower price, if asked.
The fourth thing to note about this and all of the other agreements is that, even in terms of pure transactional negotiation, they are bad deals. Why? Because the schools cannot enforce them. The underlying purpose of these deals is to get funding back, and, more broadly, to get the government to leave the schools alone. But will it? No. The Trump administration will do what it wants. What will Brown do if Trump sees something on Fox News about some class at Brown that pisses him off, and orders the funding turned off again? The school will run to court, waving this agreement. Either a right wing higher court will give them an adverse ruling, or the Trump administration will blow off or drag its feet complying with a ruling in the school’s favor, or the Trump administration will simply find another convenient way of persecuting the school. The Trump administration does not care about the law. They care about their own will. This agreement includes provisions like, “Nothing in this Agreement prevents the United States (even during the period of the Agreement) from conducting subsequent compliance reviews, investigations, or litigation into Brown's future admissions practices occurring entirely after the Effective Date of this Agreement to ensure that those practices are in full compliance with all applicable laws and not a proxy for prohibited discrimination.”
A lawyer may tell you that this means something solid, but to the Trump administration it means “we will just come back and say you are guilty of more stuff in the future if you piss us off.” The belief that legalese will offer any protection from the White House is a very pre-2024 notion. Wake up.
We are going to see repeats of this deal, at America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, for a weeks and months to come. We will hear varied explanations for these deals from the leaders of these institutions, but all of them will come down to the same thing as Brown. They are doing this to try to appease the Trump administration. One year ago, all of the leaders of all of these schools would have said that all or almost all of the demands that they are now agreeing to are unreasonable and contrary to the dearly held values of the universities. Now, they have signed their names on the line. If Trump had demanded that these schools agree that 1+1=3 in order to have their funding restored, you can be sure that the schools would have done so, while adding a sub-clause noting that they have only the highest respect for the concept of mathematical truth.
Which brings us to the most important thing to be said about what is happening here: These schools do not believe in anything. A fuller way to say this is that, like many institutions that come to thrive under capitalism, these schools do not have any ideological values other than their own flourishing. In the case of private corporations, this quality is taken for granted—they exist to serve their own interests. But in the case of universities, this conclusion is obscured by a thicket of declarations about the timeless nature of education and learning and knowledge and serving the values of mankind. Still, the actions of the schools tell the full story. They define their own survival as the highest inherent good. Therefore they will pay whatever price is necessary to punch their own ticket to the future. They will throw as many people overboard as necessary in order to ensure that the ship itself continues sailing. If you are trying to figure out the ideological beliefs of America’s most respected institutes of higher education, you will come closest to the truth by concluding that they do not have any ideology at all.
This is why it is certain that the Trump administration will crush them as much as it chooses to. The schools are non-ideological contestants in an ideological battle. They are hollow shells facing iron wrecking balls. Their opponents may be bigoted, deranged, power-mad, and dishonest, but they believe in something. The schools believe only in self-perpetuation. It is easy to understand how this dynamic inevitably causes the schools to acquiesce to increasingly outrageous demands. They have no ideological firewall blocking their own retreat. They have no philosophical reason to say to themselves, “Stop giving in at this point.” They will always give in, sell out, accede to whatever they think is necessary to preserve what they can of what they have. You can see in university presidents the same quality that you see in many business CEOs: They envision their own task not as vision and leadership towards a higher goal, but as one of balancing the competing demands of various stakeholders in the least damaging way possible. When there is a stakeholder—in this case, the US government—that is ideologically driven to go beyond reasonableness, institutions that do not have any equal and opposite ideological drive of their own find themselves pushed backwards. That is what we see in higher education, right now.
This is not an effort to be cool or edgy; nor does this understanding deny the many positive effects of the research and education carried out by these universities. It just acknowledges that those positive effects are incidental, rather than core to the universities’ purpose, in the same way that “great customer service” is incidental to the underlying purpose of a bank. None of this is surprising, exactly--Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is named after Ron Desantis’s biggest financial backer, for fuck’s sake—but it can be jarring if you had believed, before now, that all of the stuff that the schools said about timeless values was true. To see the hallowed Ivy League, the self-proclaimed keepers of liberalism’s flame, lining up to agree to persecute particular disfavored minorities, throw out all institutional efforts at economic and racial diversity, and pay bribes to an aspiring dictator may feel a bit, you know, disappointing. But you are only experiencing that unpleasant feeling because you believe in something. Stop doing that, and you can feel free to share in the prestige that these institutions enjoy.
Veritas, cowards.
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Related reading: College Is an Education in Bullshit; Adult Babies; Rules and Their Limits; The More You Have, the Less You Fight.
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This sentiment has been bouncing around in my head for awhile, that there is no ideal that Americans in general, and our leaders in particular, will not sacrifice for money. I take your point that the right has some type of idealism, but it is the crude idealism of having someone to shit on. Other than that, I’m pretty sure all their other talking points - freedom of expression, individual liberty, etc - are shown the door the minute they’d have to grant them to people outside their sphere. In short, they don’t really believe in these things at any foundational level.
Liberal Jews know this is bad for America and for the Jewish people.
This is a right wing Christian attack on secular education. For which the Jews are the intended scapegoat. They might not see it. Along with Muslims.
This pits one minority against the other.
Of course all students should feel safe.
Peaceful protests against Israeli actions are legal.
This attack on free speech is not.
Brown is caving.
Columbia caved.
More have and will.
Simple human behavior.
Lots of money at stake.
Will voters wake up?
Nah. Most can't spell Brown.
Let alone understand what is really happening.