Obama calls on universities to resist threats from the Trump administration

Former President Barack Obama urged universities to resist attacks by the federal government that violate their academic freedom in a discourse on campus on Thursday.

He also said that schools and students should engage in self-reflection on speaking environments on their campuses.

“If you are a university, you may have to understand, do we actually do things correctly?” He said during a conversation at Hamilton College in New York State. “Have we actually violated our own values, our own code, violates the law in one way or another?”

“Otherwise, and you are just intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this great endowment.”

The comments of Mr. Obama came while the Trump administration threatened universities with major discounts. He won $ 400 million in Columbia University and Contracts in March. He then suspended $ 175 million at the University of Pennsylvania and said this week that he was examining around $ 9 billion in arrangements with Harvard and his subsidiaries.

In Harvard, where the university has made efforts to meet the criticisms and republican concerns of Jewish students and teachers, more than 800 members of the faculty have signed a letter urging their leadership to resist administration more and to defend higher education.

Universities have received criticism from all sides, including those outside of leadership, saying they should do more. But the issues are high, and large parts of endowments are often intended for specific causes that make dip it as a fund of difficult rain days. Johns Hopkins, for example, has an important endowment, but still dismissed 2,000 workers following federal cuts.

Many universities seemed to be short enough to do. But some presidents, including those of Brown and Princeton, who were also informed that they would have millions of federal subsidies canceled, said they would retaliate against the administration, which sometimes counted it as a struggle for academic freedom.

Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber described the targeting of Columbia University as “the biggest threat to American universities since red fear of the 1950s”.

Mr. Obama’s advice to rely on the endowment in the face of threats and standing was also approved by his former Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, in a invited test this week in Times. “Believe me, a former Harvard president,” wrote Summers, “when I say that the means can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been assigned by their donors to other uses.”

For many on the right, and even some on the left, one of the reasons why Mr. Trump attacks higher education is that universities have become politically weakened, in part because they have not taken the free concerns of the conservatives seriously.

In his remarks on Thursday, Obama also called law firms, who also faced threats from the Trump administration, to defend their principles, even if they risked losing business.

Obama said to the crowd, which included students, that everyone should defend the rights of others to say wrong and hurtful things.

“The idea of ​​canceling a speaker who comes to your campus, trying to shout them and not to let them speak,” said Obama, according to a transcription on his average account, “even if I find their ideas unpleasant, well, not only is not what universities should be, it is not what America should be.”

He added, to applaud: “You let them speak, then you tell them why they are wrong. This is how you win the argument.”