Now that Trump, the Justice Department and the broader executive branch wield unprecedented power—with the help of powerless Congress And cowardly Supreme Court – Conservatives simply replaced the nanny state with a nanny state, using legislative majorities at the state level and threats from the Justice Department to lean on colleges like the mob. Although federal shakeups of institutions such as Harvard, Columbia and most recently Northwestern have made headlines, state-funded red state universities are subject to direct interference from Republican-controlled legislatures and the federal government, such as the University of Oklahoma, Indiana University, University of Alabama, Texas A&MAnd Texas Tech— are scrambling to reshape their policies and training programs in the image of the Trump administration. In this topsy-turvy world, one might wonder whether an overtly anti-trans magazine or racist lecture would attract any official scrutiny at all.
On the one side, as I statedthis does little to accuse the MAGA right of hypocrisy, since they categorically reject moral and logical consistency, seeking only dominance and retribution. On the other hand, it's worth seeing how they deceived majority Americans were led to believe that conservatives were simply fighting for the principles of freedom of expression and intellectual diversity. The key to understanding this is recognizing how the right circumvented First Amendment restrictions before they gained the power to extort private universities and directly censor public universities.
For many years, conservatives, along with center-right expert– turned First Amendment jurisprudence into a culture war between “cancel culture” And “free speech culture” Critics of higher education have acknowledged that private universities can legally impose restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech on campus—for example, banning protests that disrupt class hours or banning blackface costumes on Halloween—beyond what is legally permitted in a public square. By framing First Amendment issues in “cultural” terms, they could get around the uncomfortable fact that private, missionary institutions and workplaces of all kinds—universities, newspapers, trade organizations, churches—have pragmatic reasons and legal leeway to act differently than in public when it comes to freedom of expression. Residential colleges and universities in particular have always had to carefully balance students' rights to speak and socialize freely with fiduciary responsibilities to provide a physically safe and equally hospitable living and learning environment for students. Needless to say, schools don't always strike the right balance, but more problems something that culture fighters tend to admit.
