Life, Liberty, Property #119: Trump’s Academic Gambit
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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Trump’s Academic Gambit
- Video of the Week: Government Shutdown Standoff: What’s Really at Stake? — In the Tank Podcast #513
- Republicans in the Obamacare Trap
- Cartoon
Trump’s Academic Gambit
The Trump administration announced on Wednesday a proposed agreement with American universities to implement campus policy reforms in exchange for preferential treatment in the distribution of federal funding.
The 10-page “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” would require the universities to comply with federal laws regarding nondiscrimination in hiring and admissions, refrain from increasing tuition charges for five years, limit undergrad enrollment of foreign-born students to 15 percent, stop grade inflation, require student applicants to take a standardized academic achievement test such as the SAT, and commit to traditional definitions of sex and gender.
The compact also would require the institutions to create a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus” and in particular to prohibit any actions that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” abolishing any departments that do so.
Universities that sign on and adhere to the agreement would essentially receive a trust relationship with the federal government, protecting them from challenges to their federal funding, plus first-tier status in seeking federal taxpayer dollars. The New York Times reports,
Colleges that agree would get priority access to federal funds and looser restraints on overhead costs. Signed compacts would also serve as assurance to the government that schools are complying with civil rights laws. Federal civil rights investigations have been used to halt much of the research funding that the administration has blocked so far this year.
Controlling costs is an important element of the proposed agreements, The Wall Street Journal reports:
Beyond addressing campus politics, the compact seeks to tame the cost of college.
It asks schools to freeze tuition for five years and reduce administrative costs as far as possible. Schools are asked to post earnings after graduation for each academic program and to refund tuition for students who drop out during the first semester.
In addition, the Times reports, “The demands in the compact also include providing free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other ‘hard sciences’ if endowments exceed $2 million per undergraduate.”
The government would monitor the institutions’ adherence to the agreement, with the schools paying for the assessments themselves, the Journal reports:
Schools that sign the compact are asked to police themselves by hiring an independent auditor to conduct anonymous polling among faculty, students and staff to evaluate the university’s performance against the agreement. The results would be made public and reviewed by the Justice Department.
The White House offered the agreement to nine institutions: Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University. The University of Texas quickly stated that it was “honored” by the inclusion of UTA in the group, while the others held off on any official comments, the Times reported.
The White House chose those particular schools because they are or could be “good actors,” said May Mailman, a senior adviser for special projects at the White House, the Journal reports. “They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” Mailman said.
All too predictably, the head of the institutions’ trade association was quick to denounce the Trump administration’s attempt to broker a fairer relationship between the extremely left-wing higher-education complex and the taxpayers who send it billions of dollars every year. The Journal story reports:
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,500 presidents of colleges and universities, said he found the idea of a compact troubling, particularly its points regarding political expression and views.
“Who decides if the intellectual environment is vigorous and open-ended? This is not something the federal government should be involved in and adjudicating,” he said. “The implications for free speech are horrifying.”
Mitchell “served in the Obama administration,” the Times reports. No surprise, then, that he represents overwhelmingly leftist higher education institutions and resents the suggestion that the nation’s elected president should make sure that the taxpayers’ money is being spent on worthy endeavors:
“I hope that this just hits the ground with a thud,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I hope institutions do not sign this compact. I do not think it’s in their best interests individually, and collectively, it’s a horrible precedent to cede power to the federal government.”
Mitchell said the program “violates campus independence and undermines free speech,” and he characterized Trump as Mephistopheles, the devil, NBC-TV 5 of Burlington, Vermont reports. “‘It’s not worth the compromises that they would have to make,’ he said. ‘This is a Faustian bargain,’” the station reported.
The claim that these institutions would be ceding power to the federal government is obviously false. No one has to sign the agreement. They can happily go their own way without taxpayer money. “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” the compact states.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, the unhinged governor of a chaotic, spectacularly failed state, exemplifies leftists’ fear of colleges having to accept responsibilities when they take taxpayer money. Newsom threatened to defund any state institutions that sign the agreement:
“IF ANY CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY SIGNS THIS RADICAL AGREEMENT, THEY’LL LOSE BILLIONS IN STATE FUNDING — INCLUDING CAL GRANTS — INSTANTLY. CALIFORNIA WILL NOT BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM,” Newsom said in a statement.
The Los Angeles Times quoted multiple students and professors denouncing the proposed deal, also highlighting a prominent state legislator’s claim that freely signing the compact would infringe on freedom of speech and academic freedom:
“No self-respecting university should sign on to this proposed compact,” said state Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), who chairs the Assembly Education Committee. “Universities will never be able to live down a reputation of selling out their principals of academic freedom and free speech on these enticements of preferential treatment.”
Those are rights that these very institutions have blatantly and systematically denied their students and faculty, especially conservatives, for more than two decades now, through direct harassment, illegal and politicized faculty hiring policies, explicit rules against public speaking by “disruptive” conservatives, suborning of violent protests against campus speakers, and other openly oppressive actions.
A Washington Post story provided additional quotes in opposing the plan as an incursion against freedom of speech:
“No self-respecting university could ever accept something like this,” said Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar and former Columbia University president. “Trying to protect conservative ideas against being ‘belittled’—that’s about as violative of the First Amendment interests as you can get.”
Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said: “While this document purports to advance academic freedom, it actually creates an enormous chilling effect on the dissemination of ideas on our university campuses.”
“Creates an enormous chilling effect”? That’s like trying to cool down Antarctica.
The Post story quotes another so-called free-speech advocate who is apparently blind to the real conditions on American campuses, knowledge of which one might think useful in such a position:
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said university leaders who sign onto this agreement could set a dangerous precedent.
“Maybe the leaders of the University of Texas can live with these restrictions, but what about the ones imposed by the next administration?” Jaffer said. “If universities normalize this, there may be no end to federal meddling.”
It is “meddling” when the government makes sure that taxpayers’ hard-earned money goes to endeavors worthy of such support. We should just pay up and shut up, these illustrious people argue.
Similarly, a once-prestigious academic leader and Clinton administration Treasury secretary criticized the plan as not being up to his assumedly sophisticated standards, even though he acknowledges the nation’s top institutions of higher education are off the rails, The Wall Street Journal reports:
Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard University, said in a social-media post that the proposed compact “is like trying to fix a watch with a hammer—ill conceived and counterproductive. The backlash against its crudity will likely set back necessary reform efforts.”
Summers has welcomed some of the administration’s prior settlements with universities and said in the Thursday post that he believes “America’s elite universities have lost their way.”
Another East Coast university leader echoed Summers’ concern about the scale of the proposed agreements, the Journal reports in the same story:
Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, criticized the concept of a sweeping federal pledge. “Federal funding for universities should never depend on a loyalty oath,” he said. “The health of our democracy depends on the freedom to work with the federal government without having to follow the ideological dictates of those in power.”
Fine, say I. Don’t take the taxpayers’ money. You shall have your freedom.
The heads of the national association of university professors and a major K-12 teachers union displayed outright panic in denouncing the program:
“The Trump administration’s offer to give preferential treatment to colleges and universities that court government favor stinks of favoritism, patronage, and bribery in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson and American Freedom of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement.
These people’s concerns about the plan suggest that it is a very good idea indeed.
As always, however, leaders and foot soldiers of Conservative, Inc. are quick to express doubts about doing something now, for fear of what somebody else might do a few years from now. The Journal story on reactions reports,
Conservative-leaning groups agreed with the aims of the compact but raised concerns about the approach.
“Do we really want to wind up with each successive administration blasting out fast-pass conditions for federal research funds and federal aid?” asked Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
The response to that is perfectly simple: yes, we do want that, if the federal government is going to send taxpayer money to wealthy, powerful institutions run by demented, hormone-crazed Communists.
The policy principle is straightforward and morally clear: Do the right thing today, win political power again tomorrow, and then do the right thing the day after that.
If that seems difficult to do, that’s only because success in anything worth doing is generally hard to achieve—but that does not make it any less necessary.
(Also, it is fatuous to argue that winning on this issue would make it more difficult to win elections down the road. For decades, Republican me-tooism has been the downfall of the party and the movement it supposedly represents. Giving the people what they voted for is a much-needed innovation.)
Institutions of higher education across the country have benefited from enormous injections of government money in recent decades, not only through direct grants but also, and much more significantly, through government-guaranteed student loans that allowed those schools to profit by increasing tuition drastically—which they have done by more than four times the overall U.S. inflation rate since 1980:
Source: Visual Capitalist
The Trump administration’s plan is a way to ensure that universities follow the laws and provide a decent payback to the nation’s taxpayers for any additional federal spending in the coming years. That is the minimum we should expect.
Interestingly, Liz Wolfe of the libertarian magazine Reason likes the Trump administration’s offer: “most of the asks are eminently reasonable, and would make it so colleges now conform with the law instead of flouting it outright,” Wolfe writes. As I noted last week, when the government has its tentacles deep into everything, it takes government action to remove them. Here’s how Wolfe sees it in regard to the current situation:
In a sense, this is federal government intrusion into the affairs of universities. Who is a federal bureaucrat to decide how many international students a college ought to admit, when the college should be able to decide what’s in their best interest and what’s not? It’s not like a system of arbitrary nationality limits is especially meritocratic. But the case made by Trump administration officials like May Mailman is that we don’t get to pour tons of American taxpayer dollars into the higher education system and then routinely educate the world’s students; that’s not a good return on investment or aligned with what’s in the nation’s best interest.
The solution Mailman and the Trump administration more broadly offer is, I think, sound: If you’re a university that doesn’t want to sign onto these demands, you may forego federal funding and retain full independence. But if you’d like to dip into federal coffers, you must agree to certain standards and maintain environments that foster more intellectual diversity. We’ll see whether this holds up whenever it’s challenged in court.
It’s interesting to see a libertarian publication become so sanguine about government intrusion into higher education. The money the federal government has spent in recent decades has corrupted the universities by removing market discipline and allowing them to stray far, far away from their mission and their customers’ wishes. Subjecting that spending to serious oversight is certainly better.
The best option of all, however, is to follow the Constitution and leave regulation and taxpayer support for colleges and universities to the states.
Sources: The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal; The Los Angeles Times; The Washington Post; The Wall Street Journal; Reason
Video of the Week
The United States government has shut down once again as Democrats demand the reversal of major spending cuts while Republicans and President Trump refuse to back down. At the same time, the ADL is facing growing backlash after its “Glossary of Hate” targeted groups like TPUSA, prompting even the FBI to distance itself. Meanwhile, Chicago schools continue to struggle with failing literacy rates, yet the teachers union chose to highlight and celebrate Assata Shakur, a convicted terrorist. And while the Wall Street Journal claims the U.S. is losing the race to China on green tech, is that really the full story?
Republicans in the Obamacare Trap
Last week I noted that the Democrats do not have much leverage in the shutdown battle. Nonetheless, Republicans are doing their best to provide the opposition party with a win. That includes President Trump, it appears.
The president’s advisors are pushing Trump to save the enhanced Obamacare subsidies, which account for $450 billion of the Democrats’ demand for more than $1.5 billion in new spending, The Wall Street Journal reports:
President Trump has projected unwavering confidence that he is winning the messaging war over the government shutdown. But behind the scenes, his team is increasingly concerned that the issue at the center of the debate will create political vulnerabilities for Republicans.
Advisers are worried that the GOP will take the blame for allowing healthcare subsidies to expire, raising costs for millions of Americans ahead of next year’s midterm elections, according to administration officials.
Obamacare premiums would rise significantly because the scheduled 10 percentage point decrease in the taxpayer-subsidy share (from 90 percent to 80 percent), would drive healthier people to other options.
“The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 3.6 million people will find the insurance not worth the new price and will drop their coverage,” writes John Goodman, president of the Goodman Institute. “Since these will be mostly healthy people, they will leave behind a sicker insurance pool, and premiums will substantially rise to cover the cost of insuring everyone who remains.”
It is a classic case of the socialist ratchet: leftists increase the size of government, and conservatives end up having to figure out how to pay for it.
Democrats are claiming that Trump may be heading toward exactly that decision, not implausibly. The Journal reports:
Following a meeting with Trump on Monday in the Oval Office, Democrats said he seemed taken aback by the consequences of the expiring healthcare subsidies, which they took as a sign that he was interested in a potential deal.
Never underestimate Republicans’ ability to miss a slam dunk: “Even though none of us were supportive of the ACA to begin with, we can’t walk away from the people that have had no place else to go to get their healthcare coverage,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R., S.D.),” the Journal reports.
The fact that people are counting on the enhanced subsidies is an important consideration, yet that is true of all government spending. The subsidy increase is a time bomb the Democrats left the Republicans, and the GOP has heretofore made the case that it is simply unaffordable, which is true. Now, however, when they have to back up their tough words, many Republicans are ready to turn tail.
There is still a strong GOP contingent demonstrating fortitude, according to the Journal story:
Any effort to extend the subsidies would face resistance from within the Republican Party. Hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus have made it clear they would oppose any deal that increased spending. “Most of these reforms were done in the tax bill in July,” said Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser to Trump. “So why would we rewrite that bill?”
In a very good analysis piece, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kimberly A. Strassel says that a Republican surrender on the enhanced subsidies will stick the GOP with responsibility for the entire Democrat-imposed national health care disaster that is Obamacare:
When the smog clears from this first government shutdown in seven years, there will be ownership. Either a chastened Democratic Party will own the embarrassment of a foolhardy closure, or an outfoxed Republican Party will own the 15-year-old unreformed calamity known as ObamaCare.
Even before Vice President J. D. Vance vigorously rejected the Democrats’ frankly ludicrous demand of a spending increase of more than $1.5 trillion in exchange for seven weeks of funding for the federal government, others in the party had already started to wet themselves, and they quickly convinced Vance to back down, Strassel notes:
Could we be accused of being meanies if those handouts lapse? Might an ObamaCare bailout ease our path to re-election next year? And what better excuse for spending that money than to cite the shutdown as good cause to hear out Democrats? Before 24 hours had elapsed, Mr. Vance was back at the podium, offering Democrats a shutdown off-ramp, via a simple reversal of order: First vote to reopen the government, then we’ll give you everything you want. [italics in original]
What is really harming the Republicans’ case is that their framing of this issue is all wrong, Strassel notes:
Knowledge, and courage, would require Republicans to explain to the public that most of the ObamaCare premium increases that are coming in 2026 are a result not of those expiring bump-ups, but because ObamaCare overall is failing. The government mandates and insurance subsidies have created a toxic stew of industry consolidation, inflated payments, opacity about those payments, constrained choices, and the steady erosion of (better) employer-provided coverage. Continuing to shovel money into “temporary” Covid-era bonuses—to avoid a “cliff”—isn’t even the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a femoral artery bleed. It’s making the cut bigger.
The GOP should look at the current “crisis” as an opportunity, just as Democrats have regularly done in the past. Strassel writes,
One glimmer of possibility: Some Republicans are making the case that getting nothing in return for giving everything is, to use the words of Donald Trump, not so smart. The GOP senators working on an extension compromise with Democrats had vaguely suggested that there might be some (minor) price to extending the enhanced handouts—say, income caps, or minimum amounts participants must pay for premiums, or fraud prevention. But that’s doing little more than making the Covid-era expansion of ObamaCare a little less bad.
Republican health reformers, those who still exist, are instead making the case that Democrats should have to give far more. If what’s driving ever-increasing prices is the structure of ObamaCare itself, the trade for more subsidies needs to be structural reforms to the underlying program. Making the rounds is a recent op-ed by health guru Avik Roy, who proposes pairing any extension of enhanced subsidies with permanent reform of ObamaCare’s more costly insurance regulations, for instance rules that land younger Americans with outsize costs. Some senators have been bringing in healthcare gurus to give briefings on other ideas, and there are many—essential benefits, the medical loss ratio, etc. There are plenty of problems Democrats should be expected to own, and to fix, as a trade for more dollars.
Goodman has likewise offered multiple reforms that would reduce the worst distortions of Obamacare by tackling its most destructive flaws:
There are seven main problems with Obamacare insurance: (1) it is absurdly expensive; (2) it leaves people vulnerable for huge out-of-pocket costs; (3) it imposes high marginal tax rates on earned income; (4) it often excludes the best doctors and the best hospitals; (5) it gives insurers perverse incentives to avoid unprofitable enrollees; (6) it over-subsidizes the healthy and under-subsidizes the sick; and (7) it invites widespread fraud.
Goodman’s solutions to these problems make sense, and as Strassel notes, Obamacare is in truly catastrophic condition and steadily getting worse. Saving Obamacare in anything like its current form would be absolutely foolish, and for Republicans to take on the mantle of saviors of that insane and ruinous national money pit would be absolute madness. Therefore, we must take seriously the possibility that they will do exactly that.
“Before spending $450 billion to continue this very flawed health insurance program, Congress should focus on how to reform it,” Goodman writes.
The question I have is how on Earth the congressional Republicans could possibly put together a workable reform plan in the short time remaining before Obamacare applicants receive their premium notices for next year, with coverage shopping beginning on November 1.
One approach the Republicans could take is to sit tight, let the Democrats stew, develop a reform plan behind the scenes, and then present it as the way to decrease Obamacare premiums that Democrats have foolishly forced into the stratosphere, once the Democrats agree to let the temporary spending bill pass.
In that scenario, the Republicans would once again present themselves as rescuing the system from disaster and bringing down premium costs for recipients. That would be another big twist of the classic socialist ratchet.
A far better approach, in my view, would be for Republicans to put together a package of comprehensive health care reforms that tackle the health care system as a whole: equalize federal tax treatment of all health care expenditures, foster greater choice in insurance (indemnity insurance, short-term plans, etc.), reform charity care laws and regulations, provide direct cash for Medicaid recipients to use in getting care with freedom of choice, adopt numerous other market-liberating reforms, and get rid of Obamacare in the process by making it unnecessary.
This is another case where government reform requires major government action. The way to clean up the grotesque American health care mess is to strip away as much of the vast web of government intrusion as possible, and fast. Republicans should think big in discussing reforms, this being their best chance to make the necessary fundamental changes.
Establishment of major health care reforms would require some sort of patch to be put in place for Obamacare while awaiting full implementation of the new system. It might even be worth $450 billion in extension of the current enhanced subsidies as a tradeoff. Obamacare has steadily become increasingly wasteful for the taxpayers and unsatisfactory for its recipients for many years now. Saving the current system would cost the nation much more than $450 billion. Reversing the slide into fiscal catastrophe and reforming the nation’s health care system by allowing an actual market to form would be a great boon to the United States.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal; Goodman Institute; The Wall Street Journal
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