Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) and which parts were added in light of the demands (“several additional actions.”)
The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’
I want to put this episode in a wider context. But before I get there, I make two of my background commitments explicit. First, there is no essential connection between the modern research university and the values of liberal democracy other than, as (recall) Michael Polanyi noted, that they can have the same enemies. The German research university with its cosmopolitan Humboldtian ideal rose and fell in the absence of liberal democracy. The very first modern research university Stateside, Hopkins, was a private institution that was, however, shaped by Jim Crow (and racially integrated rather late in its history).