Piper Perils

"He who pays the piper calls the tune." In a cabaret or saloon or public house or jukebox bar, few will dispute that old adage. It rings as fair to most people, perhaps excepting young Marxists who have been pumped so full of entitlement-smoke that they expect others to pay for their entertainment as well as everything else.

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In politics, however, that aphorism, long used by the Federal government to end-around the limits of its Constitutional power over states and entities, is conveniently forgotten when it's used to induce behaviors that people don't like. Send money, attach strings, get states to do stuff they cannot be Constitutionally forced to do.

Once the money flows for a long time, people grow entitled, and they forget that the strings are there.

So it goes at some of our most prestigious Ivy League universities. Trump has opted to use the millions of taxpayer dollars that the Federal government metes out to the likes of Columbia and Harvard as leverage to induce changes his administration desires. Notably but not limited to, DEI practices, responses to campus antisemitism, and admissions practices regarding some foreign students.

This is one of those cases where there are no good actors. Harvard and Columbia have allowed and even fostered a climate where Jewish and pro-Israel students feel legitimately unsafe, and where opinions that dissent from their preferred narrative are made unwelcome. They claim First Amendment protection, but the First Amendment doesn't guarantee federal funding. The administration, dissatisfied with the response to its threatened withholding of billions, is threatening to revoke Harvard's tax exempt status and to revoke visas of many of the university's international students.

I'm fine with cutting back or cutting off public flow of funds to universities in general, for both principled and practical reasons. I'm also fine with the government saying "if you accept taxpayer dollars, we expect these behaviors." The piper has the choice of taking payment and playing the desired tune, or not taking the payment and playing whatever he wants. As recently noted in The National Review, Trump isn't the first President to leverage federal funding of universities to compel behavior. And, of course, Title IX attaches behaviors and policies to taxpayer largesse.

Using the tax code to target specific individuals is a different matter, and threatening to deport students who've done nothing wrong, other than perhaps voicing 1A-protected opinions, is absolutely a bridge too far. Instead of saying "play what you want as long as I'm not paying," which is wholly defensible and quite libertarian, the "play what I want or I'll break your legs" taste of this is disturbingly authoritarian.

If you are inclined toward believing that tax-exempt status is the same as direct federal funding, I hear ya. But, there's a subtle difference, and I think that the universities should have the opportunity to choose between federal funds + strings and no federal funds + freedom. The universities, if they truly believe their own BS about academic freedom, should say "fine, turn off the federal $$$ spigot, we welcome the liberation." Instead, we get the usual one-way street antics of those with a Marxist bent.

No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. - President Alan Garber, Harvard University.\

Sorry, Mr. Garber, if tax dollars are funding your university, the public gets to attach expectations to those dollars.

It's not as if the discontinuation of federal $$$ would cripple Harvard. Harvard has a $53B endowment, after all. Yes, there are likely contractual obligations associated with specific cashflows, and those contracts should be honored if they contain no opt-out provisions, but once they expire, I'd say "no mas." End this business of throwing money at universities that long ago abandoned education in favor of indoctrination, and let market forces sort things out.

I defend your right to say what you want, but I have no obligation to pay for it.

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Worth mentioning is the utter hypocrisy of such as Barack Obama, who put forth this highfalutin blather despite his own administration putting the same sort of squeeze on Harvard et al.

In case you forgot, it was Obama’s people who induced universities to deny those accused of sexual misconduct any sort of due process or innocent-until-proven-guilty rights.

As I’ve noted time and again, when it comes to partisan politics, hypocrisy dissuades no one.

And, as for “academic freedom…”

Good luck, dear Harvard students, dissenting from the university’s narrative.