State Universities Are Scrambling to Appease the Bigoted MAGA Regime

Now that Trump, the Department of Justice, and the wider executive branch are exercising unprecedented power—with the assistance of an impotent Congress and a craven Supreme Court—conservatives have simply swapped the nanny administration for the nanny state, using legislative majorities at the state level and threats from the Department of Justice to lean on colleges like mafiosi. Although federal shakedowns of institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and most recently Northwestern have grabbed headlines, publicly funded red-state universities susceptible to direct interference by Republican-controlled legislatures and the federal government—like the University of Oklahoma, Indiana University, the University of Alabama, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech—are scrambling to remake their policies and curricula in the image of the Trump administration. In this upside-down world, one wonders whether an explicitly anti-trans magazine or racist lecture would trigger any official scrutiny at all.

On the one hand, as I’ve argued, it does little to accuse the MAGA right of hypocrisy, because they expressly reject moral and logical consistency, aiming only for dominance and retribution. On the other, it’s worth examining the way they bamboozled a majority of Americans into believing conservatives are simply fighting for the principles of free expression and intellectual diversity. The key to understanding this is recognizing how the right worked around the limitations of the First Amendment before it had the power to extort private universities and directly censor public universities.

For years, conservatives—alongside the center-right punditry—made First Amendment jurisprudence into a culture war between “cancel culture” and “free speech culture.” Critics of higher education recognized that private universities can legally impose time, place, and manner restrictions on campus speech—for example, no protests that disrupt class time, or no blackface Halloween costumes—in excess of what’s legal in the public square. By framing First Amendment matters in terms of “culture,” they could get around the pesky fact that private, mission-driven institutions and workplaces of all kinds—universities, newspapers, trade organizations, churches—have pragmatic reasons and legal leeway to operate differently from the public square when it comes to free expression. Residential colleges and universities in particular have always had to carefully balance the students’ rights to speak and associate freely with fiduciary duties to provide physically safe and equally welcoming living and learning environments for students. Needless to say, schools don’t always strike the right balance, but the challenges are greater than culture warriors tend to acknowledge.