Academic Freedom Schtonk
Freedom Lessons from Chris Rufo
It is darkly fascinating to be following the adventures in reactionary centrism and “cancel culture” grifters during the second Trump administration. For both the podcast and on the Substack, I have been following (and will be continuing to follow) how people who’ve been droning on about the threat of a new left wing woke authoritarianism are coming to terms with the very obvious right wing authoritarianism whose talking points they’ve been parroting. For a future episode of In Bed with the Right, we’ll be looking at a very funny aspect of that phenomenon: books that were clearly written for a future in which Kamala won, or Trump 2.0 turned out to be not quite what the libs had warned about. I’m including Thomas Chatterton Williams’s dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers Summer of our Discontent, Lawrence Krauss’s amazingly timed The War on Science, which is all about how the Left is coming for the teaching of science and the pursuit of research. For those of you who read German, there’s Ijoma Mangold’s bizarre essay for Die Zeit, in which he explains that parroting the opinions of the rich and powerful has been a heroic act of resistance actually. It’s a tough time for them, thoughts and prayers.
Today I want to look at a different genre, though. Not the ones trying to desperately put daylight between themselves and the authoritarian crackdown on the universities. But those seeking to join it, all without giving up their earlier rhetorical strategies or tics, because updating shit like that is work. I am thinking here of a piece by a huge booster of the “wokeness”-panic, published by the grand marshall of the “cancel culture”-panic, signed by a who’s-who of the right wing assault on higher ed. The “Manhattan Statement on Higher Education” authored by Chris Rufo and signed by exactly the people you’d expect.
The piece appeared — perhaps not insignificantly — on Bari Weiss’s Substack The Free Press. On the one hand, it’s more of the same, on the other hand, it’s clear that some people have left behind their pose of anti-woke liberalism for something far more overtly authoritarian. Sure, the fact that Chris Rufo thinks universities “have contributed to a new kind of tyranny”, or that Bishop Robert Barron or paleocon Victor Davis Hanson think that universities have “in effect, declared war on millions of Americans who simply want to live, work, worship, and raise families in peace”, isn’t that surprising. Jordan Peterson, Mark Bauerlein and David Rieff have long been explicitly conservative critics of US universities.
But in the case of some others — Niall Ferguson, for instance — adding their name to this manifesto suggests that these people are grappling with the new situation by, to use a phrase they’d hate, leaning in. People like Peter Boghossian, Christina Hoff-Sommers, Roger Kimball, Eric Kaufman (who — just by the way — doesn’t even go here), Dorian Abbot and Gad Sad have had long careers (almost forty years in the case of Kimball) claiming to be defending the liberal, pluralistic university against the totalitarian onslaught of the PC/CC/woke Left. In the case of Ayan Hirsi Ali, that was initially her entire pitch: defending Western secularism against some sort of islamoleftism. Rufo’s post frames the critique as what it has long been: conservative.
This claim to liberalism was always threadbare — whenever they attacked anyone in higher ed, it was the left; whenever they had to name a supposedly imperiled position in academia, it was a policy preference of the right. But the fig leaf was still integral to their whole shtick. It does seem interesting that these deeply opportunistic members of the anti-woke grift machine are now aligning themselves openly with fascism. My suspicion is that what this indicates is that they see their role changing: their critiques of campus politics, such as they were, long presumed that the institution would not change much, and that they’d be able to repeat the same old cavils and disseminate the same disinfo every 5 years in a book and make some money off of it. They seem to now be betting that the assault on higher ed will really transform the university. So I think it’s worth looking through the document in some detail, because it might well tell us where these people are going, and where they see the institution going.
The other reason it’s worth looking at is the exact opposite one: it’s astonishing how little these people feel like they need to adjust their talking points of the last 40 years, their supposedly full-throated defense of “classical liberal” values, to accommodate themselves to full-out authoritarian state control of educational institutions. I think it underlines something I pointed out in my book: for forty years these people have warned in apocalyptic terms about the imminent far left takeover of the universities, have cited contorted statistics and the same few out-of-context anecdotes to support those warnings. And very rarely, if ever, were they asked a very simple follow-up: what do you propose to do about this? The reason they wouldn’t say, or the reason that when they did say it was such absurdly milquetoast shit that it wouldn’t possibly remedy the problem as described, is that their remedies were always, well, this. What Trump, Rufo, DeSantis, McMahon, Miller, Thiel, Kennedy, etc. are pursuing. What is, we can now safely say, the official education policy of the ruling party of the United States.
So let’s look at this thing — and Chris Rufo’s framing of it — more closely. It’s an interesting bridge document in that it combines some old conservative cavils with an implicit defense of Trump’s crackdown on free speech and academic freedom. The actual demands of the “Manhattan Statement” are cast as deliberately anodyne, the kind of shit that polls well, but that presumes a bunch of facts that are not actually given. They build on the fantasy version of tHe CAmPUs conservatives have managed to establish in the American popular imagination. Some examples:
“The universities must advance truth over ideology, with rigorous standards of academic conduct, controls for academic fraud, and merit-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.” First off, we already have tons of that. None of the authors of this statement went through it, but that’s not really a shocker — rigorous standards are for libs, not for conservatives. More importantly, what would this look like? Conservatives routinely describe research aimed at discovering the truth “ideological”, when they don’t like the truths it discovers.
“The universities must cease their direct participation in social and political activism; the proper vehicle for criticism is through the individual scholar and student, not the university as a corporate body.” The idea that our universities as institutions — hedge funds with large law firms advising their every move and pronouncement — somehow engage in political activism is risible. What we do get are members of university faculty, staff or student bodies saying stuff conservatives don’t like. Which, it turns out, these people don’t like either, given how many of these folks they’re trying to get fired or deported. Oh, is “the proper vehicle for criticism … through the individual scholar or student”? I guess someone forgot to tell the woman who published your piece, because she tried to get professors fired for saying stuff she didn’t like (also being Muslim).
“The universities must uphold the highest standard of civil discourse, with swift and significant penalties, including suspension and expulsion, for anyone who would disrupt speakers, vandalize property, occupy buildings, call for violence, or interrupt the operations of the university.” This one isn’t even worth spending time on, because the moment there’s a noose outside of a Black fraternity, or a conservative student yells “die of AIDS, f*ggot” outside of an instructor’s windows, they’ll think the university is faaar too quick to punish student speech. Think I’m making that up? The student in question was Keith Rabois, and Peter Thiel and David Sacks wrote an entire book about why he should get to say that shit.
If you’ve read any of my work, you’ve heard me talk about arguments like this, and why they’re not nearly as neutral as they pretend. But I’m actually interested in something else here: Rufo starts with a hat-tip to the kind of phony even-handedness these people almost compulsively traffic in. “The administration’s supporters have applauded the president’s decision to strip billions of dollars in funding from the Ivy League, while critics have warned that such actions are an overreach and will have a negative impact on the hard sciences.” On the one hand, this is deliberately obtuse. These people have made perfectly clear where they stand. But note also that while their demands are meant to sound exceedingly reasonable, they also echo almost verbatim the Trump administration's purported reasons for attacking the universities. If you read the document from its supposed description of the problems, you get the vibe of a reactionary centrist document. When you read it from the prescriptions backwards, you get a straight-up endorsement of Trump’s war on science.
But the document doesn’t quite come out and say that either. Who could possibly say whether stripping billions from cancer research because someone in the grant used the word “gender” is good policy, or even legal? Whether all this shredding academic freedom might perhaps be schmutzing up our first amendment fetishism? Our anti-woke pundits don’t want to get tripped up in such specifics, because such specifics are terrible. So they do what they always do when the evidence for their claims isn’t there: they paint an abstract picture of a Big Mood.
“Beneath the dueling headlines, however, there appears to be an uneasy, if often unstated, agreement: Something is deeply wrong with academia, and no one is quite sure what to do about it.”
You know the drill: You were only able to find eight examples of attempted disinvitations for the year? Easy, just cite three and then talk about the “climate of fear” these must be indicative of. Is the only example of someone on a campus going rhetorically overboard the associate vice-dean of student affairs who got fired immediately after they opened their mouth? Well, still, doesn’t their saying it tell you all you need to know about the vibe on campus? Still, it’s worth dwelling on what exactly this document is doing: it seems to want to claim the very longevity of disingenuous claims about higher education in the US coming from the right attests to the fact that they are now somehow correct. And it tries to restate for the Trump age the core principle of conservative attacks on academia: that it is insufficiently like the country, doesn’t react correctly or quickly enough to the country. But also that when it comes to things they don’t like (Black Lives Matter or COVID, for instance), the university has been too quick to react to the country it finds itself in.
“The American people have been enormously generous to our universities. It is time for the universities to honor their end of the bargain. […] Its deepest purpose is to remind the public that there is a compact between the citizen and the university, and that we all have a common interest in seeing the universities succeed.”
As the authors of the Statement duly note, theirs is an old complaint, first popularized by William F. Buckley in God and Man at Yale: the universities are too different from the country in which they find themselves. Buckley, recall, charged in 1951 that the universities were taking the money of individualist capitalist Christians and using it to turn their sons into godless homo communists. This is essentially also the criticism of the “Manhattan Statement”: the American people are not woke, America being entirely peopled by anti-woke pundits with decades-old Ph.D.s, and the universities are taking their money to turn America’s kids woke. But that’s the thing with long-running cavils: they are long-running. And this cavil has been running during a period of absolute dominance in US higher education. This is the central contradiction in this document: either higher ed has fallen away from its purpose and is less successful because of it, but if so, that’s a fairly recent development, and earlier versions of the critique were wrong. Or conservatives (as distinct from Republicans, by the way) have simply always had a problem with higher education, and this is yet another restatement of it.
Because they are trying to create a sense of crisis, the authors of the Statement imply that somehow universities are more out of touch than they were then, and more dependent on the government dole (“enormously generous”). That’s where their fixation on elite schools transcends distortion and becomes straight-up disinformation. As a matter of fact, the American people are significantly less generous with their universities than they were 20, 30 or 50 years ago. Individual Americans of course have had to make up the difference with enormously onerous student fees and tuition. But in terms of public support of the universities, the numbers are clear: the reason tuition is so high, the reason universities are so dependent on big money donors, the reason grants from NSF and NIH can have the impact they have, is that universities are getting less from the state than they were forty years ago.
Are colleges becoming more elitist, and do fewer Americans enroll in them. No: when Buckley was writing, about 5 % of Americans had attended some kind of college. By 1990 that number was 21%, by 2020 it stood at 37%. This development is not without problems, but in general it is absolutely true that college students today on the whole reflect a broader swath of the American populace. And let’s be clear: part of the right’s increasing emotional and fiscal disinvestment from higher education likely has something to do with that fact. Recall that these are the people who paved over public pools rather than integrate them. They are fine with public assistance, so long as they don’t suspect that public assistance might also benefit people they deem their inferiors.
Whatever the case, there is a deep paradox at work in conservative criticisms of higher education: due to the retrenchment of public financial support for universities, due to the takeover of university boards of trustees by conservative donors out of private industry, and the takeover of boards of regents/governors by appointees from red state governors, a lot of universities have become more and more like the kind of thing conservatives pretend to love: a private business. What has emerged is something that — to the chagrin of lefties like me — looks very much like a marketplace, where universities compete for just about everything. This is something conservatives understand. We know that because their attempts to establish their own institutions of higher learning have been an abject failure: PragerU may make money, but not sure anyone’s gonna expect groundbreaking research out of it anytime soon. Hillsdale College has managed to become a YouTube channel with an associated campus. And Bari Weiss’s fake university offers “forbidden” courses so forbidden you could literally enroll at any college in the US and take a version of them.
But that’s the thing with our new conservatives: they go on about competition, but they do not, in fact, like to compete. “Competition is for losers”, Peter Thiel was fond of saying in the course he got to teach at Stanford. And that’s exactly been their plan for higher ed all along. None of their fly-by-night segregation academies, or their wingnut welfare programs for scholars of skull measuring and age of consent laws have ever been able to dim the luster of hated institutions like Harvard or Yale. Or, for that matter, any state university in the country. But their plan has always been a slightly different one, one in which the takeover of the university was more of a bonus and less the main goal.
I sometimes think people make too much of the Powell-memo, a document from 1971, in which Lewis Powell made the case that private business and businessmen needed to start seeing right-wing think tanks and lobbying orgs in order to win back the country from communism (read: New Deal Democrats) — including at the universities. I think its importance as a kind of secret plan is vastly overstated. But it is super important in intuiting the basic outlines of a future grift economy. This wasn’t a way so much to get Americans to switch their allegiance away from science and expertise, with all their well-known liberal bias. But it was a way of getting rich off some Texas oil heir. Around the time of the Powell-memo, the conservative project increasingly became:
Astroturf fake institutions, fake science, fake journals.
Have those crank out copy or events that flatter rich conservative weirdos.
Fleece said rich conservative weirdos.
What the 21st century has added to this playbook is a fourth step — but notice how that fourth step isn’t actually necessary for the grift. Almost all the people who signed the “Manhattan Statement” are products of this machine: they’re fellows at right wing think tanks, their research is funded by right wing foundations, they make their money substacking about how wokesters are trying to suppress their work. But Rufo embodies the next step. He’s got a sinecure at the Manhattan Institute, but he aims higher. Step four is:
Hope for the conservative weirdos to take over the government so your fake institutions can take over the market.
This has now happened, and it’s paying dividends already. PragerU content is replacing NPR content in America’s classrooms. The demise of the Department of Education will make it easier to launch and fund weird quasi-universities. And an assault on the accrediting bodies seems only a matter of time.
So this is what they want. But it’s fascinating to look at their old arguments and see how they’re being marshaled towards these new (or newly acknowledged) ends.
“Conservatives have long made the argument that academia has been corrupted. And since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the Hamas terror campaign of 2023, an increasing number of centrists and liberals have joined the chorus, recognizing that many once-great universities had been captured by destructive ideologies and are no longer truth-seeking institutions.”
What I’d like to do in the final section of my essay, just for a moment, to pretend that there’s merit to a blanket assertion like “academia has been corrupted”. Let’s forget for a moment that “academia” in this sentence consists of over 5,000 institutions that are all quite different from one another right down to their structure, org chart, financing model, intellectual mission, etc. etc. Let’s say it happened. “Academia” got “corrupted”. How would that happen? How would “once-great universities” be “captured by destructive ideologies”?
The obvious rejoinder here is that the periods of greatness that Rufo’s “once-great” is meant to hearken back to where periods when conservatives made those exact same complaints about the universities. The universities where the atom was split? Became targets of McCarthyism and Red Scares. The universities where the modern social sciences and humanities were established? Were in Reagan’s crosshairs. The universities where the ground was laid for modern information technology? Bastions of “political correctness” that had “lost their way”, according to some of the same people signing the “Manhattan Statement”. So the greatness of these institutions is always in the rearview mirror, no matter the year. My private suspicion is that every reader of such a line is supposed to imagine the year they graduated as the high watermark of US higher education, and the one professor whose class they hated as the beginning creep of the “corruption”.
While we’re at it, let’s be clear: the university Buckley was fondly looking back to in 1951 — insofar as it existed at all — was ultimately a comparatively mediocre one. It was open to very few, its standards were astonishingly lax, people complained about the unseriousness of the students all the time. Many, including Stanford, were finishing schools for the super rich, lousy with pseudo-scientific weirdos, and in many fields really lacked international stature. For a long time, my department kept all dissertations in our department library in bound volumes. The ones from the 40s and 50s were, as a rule, these spindly affairs of generously 50 to 70 pages, on like one poem of Virgil’s. By the late 60s, they had ballooned — to the general length and scope they have today. Ironically, I think that bygone version of the US university is the one we will return to once Rufo and his ilk have succeeded in their campaign. The university that established the supremacy of US academia is identical with the university conservatives were, and have always been, at war with.
So Rufo and his fellow conservative critics have to pretend that the “corruption” is of more recent vintage. Otherwise this whole thing doesn’t fly. They want you to understand their sudden reshaping of American higher education as a reaction to an earlier, equally sudden reshaping done by lefty wokesters. It’s not true, of course, but they’ll keep trying to tell this story. You can’t really blame them because liberal institutions and media let them get away with that story for decades. Why change tune now? Of course, Rufo being Rufo doesn’t give us any specific examples or benchmarks for what constitutes either “greatness” or “corruption”, what constitutes “truth-seeking” and what “ideology”. But he does give us two recent events — Black Lives Matter and the Gaza protests. He of course hedges his bets and says that these events have only “revealed” the corruption. But it’s worth asking: has there been a major shift in the academy in, let’s say, the last ten years — a shift that 2020 and 2023 might then have “revealed”? No, of course not, and the authors of the manifesto know that too.
How do I know they know that? Because Chris Rufo, as he’s the first to point out (in paragraph three of his post), has been running the New College of Florida, and by all accounts running it into the ground, for a few years now. Rufo’s assault on New College, the Trump administration’s assault on universities, don’t by and large target casualized labor and student life. They use student expressions to attack much less temporary structures. The trumped-up complaints about Columbia were about what students had said and what the university had done about what they said. But the demands included … changing departments, changing faculty governance, changing faculty hiring, etc. They are most interested in going after tenure, after institutes and departments, after long term research. So it’s worth noting that any university you look at cannot possibly change dramatically in and through normal functioning in the kind of timeframe Rufo suggests.
Think about how slowly the professoriate teaching at a place like Stanford changes. How few of my colleagues in 2025 were hired after 2015. The vast majority of those hired at a place like Stanford are assistant professors, many of them don’t get tenure, many of them leave for other reasons, and getting a search re-authorized can be an incredibly onerous task. And things are even slower when you’re hiring above the assistant professor level. I once was part of an effort to fill a newly created professorship that took either seven or eight years to complete (depending on whether you count to the moment the colleague accepted the offer or to the moment she actually arrived on campus), including two failed searches and negotiations with three separate candidates at various moments in the process. Imagine trying to “corrupt” an institution on that sort of timeline — you’d be retired before you even got the institution 25% pod peopled!
Let’s talk timelines: my unscientific estimate is that most departments fully turn over every fifty years — meaning you have to go a half century for no one to be left from whenever you started to count. The oldest member of my tiny German department at Stanford joined the faculty in the mid 80s — 1984 or 85, I believe. He is still an active faculty member, and indeed he’s department chair of my other department. When I arrived at Stanford as an assistant professor, two faculty members out of seven had been on the faculty the year I was born. Meaning: if someone tells you the standards of a department have slipped, they are telling you about a development that happens on a very large timescale. It can happen of course — a department can decline in quality. Every field’s convention gossip is full of talk like that.
But, as Henry V says, “Every subject’s duty is the King’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.” A department that is slipping of course reflects on the university as a whole, but it would go a bit far to say that it constitutes a decline in the university if the accounting faculty are dysfunctional or the music department keeps hiring bad composers. It wouldn’t be hard for you to find a literature professor who is unhappy with the way their own field has developed, or a computer scientist who is dismayed by the mercantile attitude of their students. It’s not hard to find faculty who think another department’s research is essentially frivolous. But these are, insofar as they are well founded, discreet stories of specific disciplines and even within those disciplines specific fields.
For a “destructive ideology” to take a hold of a university, all these departments, fields, intellectual enterprises and business models would have to move in lockstep for going on a quarter century. Engineers and sociologists, the dance department and data science would need to embark on this together. This makes sense under two very specific conditions. One is: you suppose that a bunch of people who have nothing to do with each other, do not on the whole like each other, are beholden to very different professional standards, economies of prestige and the like, all decide to get together in secret and settle on promoting a destructive ideology just because they’re evil. You have to, in other words, be a conspiracy theorist.
The other is the one that I think people like Chris Rufo has in mind: authoritarianism. Viktor Orbán was indeed able to change the overall character of teaching at Hungarian universities, even if he had to shut down one or two in order to do it. Vladimir Putin was able to change the overall project of the Russian university, even if a surprising number of people had to accidentally fall out of windows to accomplish it. And for that matter the Nazis managed to completely change the make-up of the faculties at German universities in 1933. We know many of the signatories of the Manhattan Statement like the first two, I sort of feel we’re getting an indication they might not be totally against number three either.
Maybe this isn’t about departments. Is this about the institutional framework outside of traditional academic fields, about newfangled centers, institutes, and the like? It might be — the “Manhattan Statement” certainly keeps citing newly established “DEI” programs (though their definition is overbroad, to be sure). But those are usually student service programs. They don’t involve teaching faculty, research, or anything else. The attacks on higher ed target the business of teaching and research, even if the rhetoric (and the layoffs so far) has targeted staff. The very fact that professors (whom these people hate) haven’t been fired in as large a number as these people would clearly like them to, tells you that these weren’t the most powerful people on campus by a long shot. What happened was that universities indeed invested more in diversity in recent years, but mostly by hiring easily fireable staff. Then, at the first sign of trouble, they fired them. Rufo and company are casting the most cynical ass-covering by these universities as an expression of their most central governing principles, as an indicator not of their timorousness, but of their “corruption”.
But when it comes to the attack on higher ed, “DEI” is clearly intended as a trojan horse. RFK, Jr. isn’t cutting funds for mental health services (mostly because he can’t); the new threat of political appointees reviewing all federal grants to universities isn’t targeting academic affairs officers; and most of all, note that Rufo and his co-signers are talking about the mission of the university as dealing with “truth-seeking” — clearly they’re thinking mostly of research, and secondarily of teaching.
So are there many new research or teaching bodies of recent vintage? No, the US university as a rule hasn’t added a ton of new programs, centers, schools or departments in recent years. For the very simple reason that adding any of those things is a massive headache, and the upper administration tends to hate adding them. Stanford is actually an outlier in this respect in that, starting in 2020, it began turning its program in African and African-American Studies (AAAS) into a department. So that would seem to confirm Rufo’s point perfectly, wouldn’t it? A new department studying (gasp!) identity-categories and (double gasp!) focusing on non-white people, established (triple gasp) in the wake of what Rufo calls the “Black Lives Matter riots”!
Well, let’s slow our roll here for a second. Has this new department brought a whole bunch of new scholars to campus? I’m not asking whether it led to the kind of transformation Rufo claims (spoiler alert: it didn’t); I’m asking: could it even? And here too the answer is no. As far as I can tell, the newly formed AAAS department has not brought any new faculty to campus — not surprising, a good search takes time. All members of the department were hired into other departments, years, in some cases decades, ago. Their current chair started his career in 2001, and has taught at Stanford since 2006. The other members of the department, were hired into a variety of departments in the aughts and early 2010s. There are no assistant professors in the department at all — most likely because the prospect of undergoing the tenure process in a newly established department is quite daunting, and could be quite fraught. Before the current leadership team, the nascent AAAS department was steered predominantly by scholars who started at Stanford in the 1980s!
To be clear: I welcome the change the AAAS department embodies, and I believe it is a change. But, as someone frustrated by the pace of that change, I’d feel remiss not to point out how incredibly incremental it has been. The point one has to make against people like Rufo isn’t that academia isn’t changing — let’s hope that it is! It’s that this change is incremental, measured, careful and thoughtful. Stanford departmentalized AAAS after having it as an interdepartmental program for a measly six decades — it was first created in 1969, the year US universities and scientists helped put a man on the moon. And the year Ronald Reagan sent the California national guard to attack students at Berkeley, and the national guard ended up shooting and killing a bystander.
Some of the changes people from Reagan to Rufo have bemoaned are not real, others are. But they are slow, incremental and based in rigorous analysis. And from McCarthy via Reagan to Rufo runs a long and storied history of conservative attacks on higher education — attacks that have been, 100% of the time, been underinformed, slapdash, and most of all careless. The picture of academia beholden to rash and hasty change, irresponsible when it comes to tradition, given to fads and shallow thinking that emerges in these attacks is essentially a self-portrait. It has been what has characterized their attacks, not the thing they attacked. Each time, they have presented their attacks as being motivated by a sudden, recent and decisive shift within the universities away from “America”. “America” in each case being spoken for by some dweeb with a bowtie and right-of-right politics.