Freedom for Sale
At a time when the Red Scare remained a palpable memory, a law professor named Charles Reich warned of government’s arbitrary power to withdraw the wealth it poured into institutions as diverse as universities, corporations, and welfare programs. “Government largess” was his term for such wealth—wealth carrying sweeping power on a “vast, imperial scale.” The flow of money, and fear of its loss, augmented the power of government “to investigate, to regulate, and to punish.” Buttressed by loyalty oaths and blacklists, largesse induced fealty and abridged civil liberties, enabling “government to ‘purchase’ the abandonment of constitutional rights.”
Today, largesse once again represents a potent form of government coercion. A devil’s bargain is on the table, with freedom up for sale—a bargain involving unconscionable conditions: losing largesse is the price paid for asserting constitutional rights. That was the lesson taught at Columbia University last month, an example of the unfreedom so worrying to Reich a half century ago. At Columbia, $400 million purchased the abandonment of a lot of academic freedom, a deal prompting some belated university repentance about ill-gotten gains and avowals of independence.
Lately, I’ve begun worrying about my own academic freedom. I’m a historian, and I teach a class on American civilization, and even aspects of American history once seen as ordinary textbook fare have become no less fraught than, say, Middle Eastern studies. The problem is that in my American civilization class students learn about ideas that may seem unworthy to the White House paymaster, who is now using the power of the purse to govern private universities as well as to control history teaching in public institutions, including the Smithsonian.
Especially subversive might seem ideas about property or equality or slavery, raising questions of justice that students explore when learning about the workings of American democracy in my class. For instance, that Andrew Carnegie favored an inheritance tax, whereby “the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.” That the Supreme Court has long deemed immigrants—even when classified as “aliens” and “strangers”—as entitled to equal protection of the law. That Abraham Lincoln justified the Civil War as a divine punishment for slavery’s sins, “as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” Such ideas belong to an American canon of moral thought but run contrary to MAGA doctrine.
Moreover, the language studied and spoken in my American civilization class is filled with words designated suspect by an official White House list—words such as “historically” and “political” and “community” and “expression” and “promote” and “men” and “women” and “equality.” For how can I teach history without saying historically? Or speak of people without saying men and women? Or ask students to think about the promise of America without invoking equality? To forbid such words means restricting knowledge of aspirations to realize the rights of American freedom.
Soon, I fear, the ideas I teach about may bring another devil’s bargain. I’m afraid that the pressure of government largesse may erode my freedom to teach the fullness of the ideas that form American history—that my class on American civilization could be scrutinized under an academic receivership demanded by the White House.
Perhaps I’d be shielded by the ideals affirmed by my own university, codified a decade ago as the Chicago Principles of Free Expression, and adopted by colleges across the country. Ideally, the principled defiance of Harvard and Princeton would become a model. No doubt, I’d be defended by the American Association of University Professors, a teachers’ union that has defended academic freedom for more than a century.
If all this failed, the unconscionable condition would prevail: a bounty of largesse exchanged for loss of free inquiry. No university can evade the risk of this trade-off, even if, like mine, it hasn’t yet confronted the surveillance of the executive branch for alleged violations of antidiscrimination rules on antisemitism, DEI programs, and transgender athletes. The risk inheres in the arbitrary power of largesse.
Often, brutal needs—of a vulnerable public—are at stake in the dependence on government largesse. Here, universities join the ranks of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Institutes of Health in facing the human suffering caused by the punitive withdrawal of federal funding for projects supporting public health, food assistance, and environmental sustainability. The harm is immediate, evident in the rising incidence of disease and malnutrition, with deadly effects on the future of the world community.
Of course, constitutional protections exist against the arbitrary withdrawal of government funding. Courts have adopted an “unconstitutional conditions doctrine,” meaning government can’t require ceding rights in return for receiving something valuable from government—a doctrine that especially protects “interest in freedom of speech.” And due process entitlements forbid revoking government funding without a prior hearing. So does Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the antidiscrimination law cited by the White House in sanctioning universities, which requires a hearing before any funding is withdrawn.
But present harm is not stopped by rights guarantees. Courts seldom act with all deliberate speed, and the appeals process is full of uncertainties—uncertainties heightened by a White House that now brazenly flouts court orders. This is hardly to discount the pursuit of rights claims. Rather, it’s to illustrate the cruel power of government largesse, which now makes the funding of life-saving projects depend on giving up constitutional rights—like mine to talk of the Red Scare’s legacies in teaching American history. As we await relief in the courts, it’s worth remembering the historically subversive words of that era: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” But authoritarianism never has yielded to moral appeals unattached to political power and mass dissent. To think otherwise would be ahistorical.
[Amy Dru Stanley is an American history professor at the University of Chicago.]