Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Today: Trump and the Universities — submission and resistance. Later in the hour — Mahmoud Khalil is the Palestinian student activist at Columbia arrested and jailed by ICE. The Trump administration intends to revoke his status as a permanent resident—a green-card holder–and deport him – they say, to protect Jewish students on campus. That’s clearly a violation of freedom of speech. But is deporting Palestinian student activists a good way to protect Jewish students on campus? David Myers doesn’t think so–he teaches Jewish history at UCLA. But first: David Cole, former legal director of the ACLU, analyzes three cases where Trump is attacking universities using different pretexts. That’s coming up—in a minute.
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A key source of opposition to authoritarian regimes in recent history has come from universities and colleges, and Trump has been attacking the independence of American universities, demanding they submit to his requirements, and using massive funding cuts as his weapon. For comment and analysis, we turn to David Cole. He recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown. He writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, and he’s Legal Affairs Correspondent for The Nation. David Cole, welcome back.

David Cole: Thanks for having me, Jon.

JW: Today I want to look at three fronts of this war: Trump’s attack on universities over student protest focusing on the Gaza war, Trump’s attack on universities ostensibly over trans athletes, and his attack on campus efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. In each of these, he’s been cutting and threatening to cut millions of federal funding that has been essential to the existence of the universities. And all of these moves have provoked massive opposition.
Most of our attention for the past couple of weeks has been focused on Trump’s attack on Colombia, with concern, of course, for the protests there against Israel’s war in Gaza and Center on Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist who’s been arrested and detained. The Trump administration intends to revoke his status as a permanent resident, a green card holder, and deport him, they say to protect Jewish students on campus. And Trump says this is, “Only the first arrest of many to come.”
The government has not said that Mahmoud Khalil is guilty of any criminal activity. They want to deport him apparently for things he said about the Gaza war. And Trump is withholding $400 million in federal funds from Colombia until it agrees to his conditions. There’s a long list, but they include putting three of the school’s departments under academic receivership, the programs in Middle Eastern studies, South Asian studies, and African studies. And nothing like that has ever been even attempted, even at the peak of the Red Scare of the ’50s. And Trump has warned 60 other universities that they too could face similar penalties from pending investigations into anti-Semitism on their campuses. What’s your analysis of the efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil and cut Colombia’s funding?

DC: Well, I think you have two things going on here, Jon. The first is Trump is clearly trying to neutralize the opposition. And as you say, universities and colleges are often a place for criticism, critique, opposition, and the like. So he’s using the excuse, and it is an excuse, of anti-Semitism to target universities, weaken universities, exert control over universities.
And then secondly, he’s seeking to deter the fundamental American right to protest by going after, in a very prominent way, someone whose only sin was to have engaged in such protests on a college campus. And claiming that he has the authority to deport that person, Mahmoud Khalil, not because he engaged in criminal activity, not because he violated any other particular condition of a green card, but because the Secretary of State has determined that his presence here would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences.
That is a ludicrous claim. The notion that the United States foreign policy will fall victim to the fact that there’s a student on a campus in the United States protesting Israel is just ridiculous. It’s a patent pretext designed to suppress free speech. So he’s going after a bastion of free speech, the universities, and he’s going after the core First Amendment right of all of us in the United States to protest.

JW: There’s a second front of Trump’s attack on universities focusing on a different part of his day one executive orders. A central theme of Trump’s campaign for president was a pledge to ban trans athletes from competing in sports. And this has now turned into a battle focusing on the University of Maine and the state of Maine.
The story here begins, people may remember this, February 20^th, Trump summoned the governors to a meeting at the White House, where, among other things, he reiterated his campaign pledge to blocks trans athletes from competing in sports. And then he said, “Is Maine here, the governor of Maine?” And Janet Mills, the governor said, “Yes, I’m here.” And he said, “Are you not going to comply with it?” His ban on trans athletes. She said, “I’m complying with state and federal laws.” And Trump responded, “We are the federal law.” And she spoke up and said, “We’re going to follow the law.” “You’d better comply,” Trump warned, “otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.” And Governor Janet Mills replied, “We’ll see you in court.”
Now, just a little background here: 23 states have passed laws that allow students to compete in sports consistent with their identified gender. 24 states have banned trans athletes from competing. The NCAA announced on February 6th that it would follow Trump’s orders and prohibit trans athletes from competing. And the University of Maine currently has no trans athletes competing in sports. In the entire state of Maine, there seemed to be only two trans athletes competing in high school sports. There’s one very famous case where a couple of weeks ago, a trans athlete at a Maine high school track and field event won a pole-vaulting competition, high school student.
Okay, back to Trump’s actions in Maine. Only a few hours after this confrontation with the governor, the state officials learned that the state was under investigation by several federal agencies for Title IX violations. Title IX is a longstanding federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs that receive federal funding. And the Trump administration is arguing that allowing trans athletes to compete in girls’ sports is a form of discrimination against female athletes. This has not gone to court yet.
Two days after the announcement of this Title IX investigations, the Department of Health and Human Services declared that Maine was in violation of Title IX. Now, this is a record for a findings, usually, these investigations take months. And no state officials were interviewed or asked to provide any evidence before this finding was announced.
And a few days after that, the state announced that it had lost $4.5 million in something called Sea Grant funding, which is overseen by the university and supports business development of fisheries. Maine was the only state targeted among 33 that currently receive funding under this program, and there’s no connection with Title IX that they declared.
The next day, Maine officials were alerted that the Social Security Administration was ending a decades long practice of allowing parents to register their newborn children for a Social Security number at the hospital. And now in Maine, parents were required to register their newborn children by visiting one of the state’s eight Social Security offices in person. And again, Maine is the only state targeted for this change. And then the next day, they changed their minds and reversed it.
And then, the day after that, the Department of Agriculture announced it was suspending funding for the University of Maine system, $56 million in grants supporting agricultural research. And again, two days later, they reversed course. What is going on between the Trump administration and the state of Maine?

DC: Retaliation, pure and simple. The governor of Maine stood up to the president and he has obviously directed all manner of government entities in the executive branch to punish Maine, to make life miserable for Maine. It’s like a mafia Don. He hasn’t ordered a hit, but he has definitely sought to make his power shown and to punish a state.
And this, again, is the states – is an effort to neutralize the opposition. States are, in our system, it is a federalist system, a lot of power is reposed in the states precisely because we are concerned about having too much concentrated power at the federal level, that’s why we created a federalist system, not a nationalist system. And states are and have been checks on the president. Many of the state attorneys general have brought lawsuits that have succeeded in blocking many of Trump’s illegal initiatives.
So like universities, states are an impediment to his getting what he wants, and so he is using the cudgel of federal funding to try to punish any state that dares stand up to him. And good for Maine for standing up to him. An outrageous retaliation by the president against Maine on all the fronts that you just described.

JW: It seems like the transgender athletes are a tiny part of this.

DC: Oh, yeah, it’s just, that’s, again, it’s just an excuse. It is an excuse for targeting Maine because the Maine governor dared to speak up to the president and this president is using his power. He’s done the same thing with law firms. He’s done the same thing with the press. He is going after those entities that might stand in his way of doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. And courts are sort of the last bastion, and we’ll see whether he goes after courts. But it’s very, very disturbing and I think we need to support those instances in which people and institutions stand up and push back because that’s ultimately where our redemption lies in the opposition of Americans to outrageous actions by this president.

JW: The third case I want to talk about is Trump’s attack on universities and colleges, focusing on their programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’ve kind of lost track of what DEI programs actually do. You wrote about this for The New York Review of Books’ website and described what the typical DEI office of a university does. Could you just remind us about that?

DC: Yeah, basically what most DEI offices do is provide trainings. They provide education. They orient students when they arrive, all with the idea of ‘let’s make sure that we are aware that we are coming from different places, that we might have different perspectives, that we should celebrate the fact that we have different perspectives. We should respect our diversity and we should be a welcoming place for all, not just for the majority, but for all.’ That’s what they do. They educate, sometimes they provide gatherings, places for people who – LGBT center is open to all but focused on issues of interest to the LGBT community. Or a women’s center or an African American house.
And these are the kinds of things that they do. As a rule, they do not issue benefits or punishments based on race or sex. They educate. They educate. That’s what they do.

JW: Trump has declared all of this is unacceptable and will be punished. And the Chronicle of Higher Education has been tracking DEI changes. It’s identified, I think it’s now 41 campuses that have dismantled their programs or altered them. Columbia, just to run down some of the highlights on the list, removed diversity, equity, and inclusion policy language from several of its websites. Northwestern’s business school did the same thing. The University of North Carolina went farther and ordered all its colleges to remove DEI-related courses from its requirements for specific majors or for general education. The University of Virginia Governing Board voted to end all DEI at the state’s flagship school.
And there’s this list of banned words, dozens of words which are not permitted any longer in applications for federal funding. The New York Times put these on page one. The banned words include: gender, discrimination, bias, injustice, immigrants, diversity, segregation, social justice, sexuality. These are called “flagged” words. And colleges and universities are submitting to Trump, cooperating with Trump flagging grants that contain them so that no one will apply for a federal grant to study discrimination, bias, injustice, and so on. I wonder if you have any comment on that.

DC: It’s a combination of George Orwell’s 1984 and ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil.’ By wiping the word ‘social justice’ or ‘discrimination’ off of the books, you don’t solve the problem, you don’t end the problem. You close your eyes to the problem and that’s what the administration is doing.
And in a way, that’s what its attack on DEI is as well, because what DEI does is talk about the ways in which our past sins continue to affect who we are as a nation today in the hopes of moving beyond that, of rising above that, of not getting mired in that. And yet the administration seems to think that the better course is just to deny that there’s any problems at all. And if we deny that there’s any problems at all, then there must be no problems. It’s really beyond comprehension.
But I will say this, the DEI order that Trump issued is actually much narrower, when you read it carefully, than it has been presented and that colleges and universities have treated it. What it actually bans is federal funding to DEI programs that violate federal anti-discrimination law. Not all DEI programs, but only those DEI programs that violate federal anti-discrimination law. And that’s an important qualifier because, in fact, most DEI programs do not violate federal anti-discrimination law, do not even conceivably violate federal anti-discrimination law.
What federal anti-discrimination law says is you can’t impose a penalty or hand out a benefit based on race or sex. That’s what it says. It does not say you can’t talk about race, you can’t talk about sex, you can’t talk about gender, you can’t educate. Those actions, which is the core of what most DEI programs do, do not violate any conceivable federal anti-discrimination law, and therefore, they are not barred by Trump’s order. The Department of Education essentially conceded as much in a frequently asked questions document that it issued on February 28th where it said, “Yeah, DEI trainings, by themselves, they don’t violate federal anti-discrimination law. It really is when you hand out a benefit or impose a penalty based on race.”
So if you did DEI trainings and said, “Only Black people can come to these trainings,” or, “Only women can do this, that, or the other thing,” that might be a violation of federal anti-discrimination law. But the fact that you have a DEI training in your MBA program violates no law whatsoever. And yet colleges are running scared and wiping their programs clean of any discussion of this simply because they know President Trump wants to kind of whitewash American history, and they’re going along with it. It’s very disturbing. It’s understandable given how much they’re dependent on federal dollars, but it is not required by law. President Trump has no authority to punish an institution for doing DEI training, and yet every school is running scared.
I don’t think all DEI trainings are great. I think some are better than others, to be sure. But that’s not the issue. The issue is – should the federal government be able to control what universities do to try to create a learning environment for all in their institutions? Under the principles of academic freedom, they have the right to make those decisions, not Donald Trump.

JW: David Cole – he wrote about universities complying with Trump’s demands on DEI for The New York Review website. You can read him at nybooks.com. David, you’re really good at this; thanks so much for talking with us today.

DC: Always good to be here. Thanks, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia, was arrested by ICE and jailed on March 8th. The Trump administration intends to revoke his status as a permanent resident, a green card holder, and deport him – they say, to protect Jewish students on campus. And Trump says this is only “The first arrest of many to come.” But the government has not said he’s guilty of any criminal activity. They want to deport him for things he said – about the Gaza war. That’s clearly a violation of freedom of speech. But is deporting Palestinian student activists a good way to protect Jewish students on campus?  For comment, we turn to David Myers. He’s a distinguished professor at UCLA where he teaches Jewish history. He’s written for The LA Times op-ed page, The Forward, and The Atlantic, and he’s been an activist working for Mideast peace for decades. David Myers, welcome back.

David Myers: Good to be with you, Jon.

JW: Khalil is in jail because, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” That’s a quote from the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, a central plank of McCarthyism. When Rubio was asked to explain that here’s what he said: “You pay all this money to these high-priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem, and you can’t even go to class. You’re afraid to go to class because these lunatics are running around with covers on their face, screaming terrifying things. If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would never have let you in. If you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.” What do you think about our Secretary of State’s reasoning here?

DM: It fails almost every discernible measure of good logic, and for that matter, democratic principles. I think what’s happening is they’re trying to change the rules of the game. It’s interesting that they’re not altogether discarding the rules of the game, they haven’t declared martial law. They’re trying to change the rules of the game and still maintain that they’re playing the game.
I heard on NPR a deputy secretary of state try to explain the actions against Mr. Khalil, and he couldn’t answer a single question about any substantive query that came his way. What did he say? What did he say that was objectionable? Would it be a deportable offense if you criticize the government of the United States? Simply was unable to answer because I don’t think there are any credible answers. I think this is part of a very deliberate attempt to marginalize and punish political undesirables on one hand, and on the second hand to subordinate the university to a broader political agenda. In that regard, Jews, Palestinians, DEI officers are all pawns in a larger game.

JW: And let me just add one footnote. Marco Rubio talked about these “lunatics running around with covers on their face.” Khalil did not cover his face. His face is extremely well known, his pictures on the front page of The New York Times, so even the one factual thing he said is incorrect.

DM: Yeah, the one factual thing. In fact, the reason that Mahmoud Khalil was apprehended was because he didn’t have a mask on his face and thus was more identifiable. But I’m still waiting to hear the evidence that suggests that he said things that were akin to material support for terrorism or, for that matter, did things that were akin to support for material terrorism. It seems like he didn’t say anything that would fall away from accepted standards of political speech. And at various points, at least according to reports that I’ve heard, called for the liberation of both Palestinians and Jews in that land in Israel, Palestine.
It’s clear that they want to make an example. They want to bring the university to heel. And it’s ironic that they’ve chosen Columbia University, which has been more pliant than virtually any other university in America in submitting to their dictates.

JW: The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil has divided the American Jewish world. The ADL supports it, but the opposition comes not only from the Jewish left, from Jewish Voices for Peace, Bend the Arc, and IfNotNow, but also from J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobbying organization.
I just want to read J Street’s quote. “The Trump administration’s arrest, detention, and threat of deportation of Columbia protest leader and permanent legal resident Mahmoud Khalil is a violation of existing law and without due process. It’s an affront to the constitutional right of free speech to which everyone, not just American citizens or allies, is entitled. While J Street does not endorse Khalil’s actions or positions, we are appalled by the dangerous precedent set by his arrest. Our community can and must stand up for constitutional rights for all.” And they added, if the Trump administration was, “serious about fighting anti-Semitism, it might start by throwing out the slew of bigots and conspiracy theorists it has promoted to top positions in its own ranks.”
And it’s not just statements coming from the liberal Jewish establishment. The Jewish activist groups led by Jewish Voices for Peace organized a sit-in at Trump Tower in Manhattan March 13th, during which protesters chanted, “Free Mahmoud Khalil,” and 300 supporters of Jewish Voices for Peace protested and almost 100 were arrested.
On the other side, there was something called Betar, the group that claimed credit for the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. It claimed it had submitted, quote, “thousands” of names for similar treatment and they warned the effort would extend beyond immigrants. “Expect naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month,” the group’s post on Twitter read. What is Betar?

DM: Betar USA is the latest iteration of a youth movement established in 1923 by the revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. Revisionist Zionism was the most right-wing of the Zionist movements that emerged within the first quarter-century or so of the Zionist movement. It advocated not just Jewish control over the entire region to the west of the Jordan River, but also demanded control of the East Bank of the Jordan River. So both banks of the Jordan River should be under Jewish control, according to Revisionist Zionism.
Jabotinsky was a very interesting character. A very literate, charismatic orator who was drawn not just to the principle of Jewish sovereignty as a way of resolving the Jewish question in Europe, but very drawn to fascist ideals, symbols, and aesthetics, and designed the Betar youth movement on fascist principles quite consciously in the 1920s, such that it had a fascist feel to it and was very much committed to the idea that Jews who belong to it should never submit in the face of physical threat. In fact, Jews of Betar, members of Betar, should be the ones doing the threatening and the intimidating in order to bend others to their will.
I would say of Betar that they’re un-American, unconstitutional, and un-Jewish, what they’re proposing, particularly the un-Jewish part. There’s a very strong inhibition in Jewish tradition against informing, especially on other Jews, to the gentile sovereign, as it were, to be a moser, a moser. There’s a very strong inhibition against that, and these people are sort of proudly declaring themselves as moserim, turning over other people, including Jews, to federal authorities for sanction, punishment, and in some cases deportation.

JW: And how big, how important, how significant is Betar USA in the American Jewish world right now?

DM: I think it’s really marginal. It’s a very, very small but loud group. It’s probably got a membership in the dozens, maybe the low hundreds. It’s kind of burst on the scene in part because of its very demonstrable actions, which include physical threats to people like Peter Beinart and Norman Finkelstein. They’ve sort of targeted notable Jews on the left and threatened them physically and as a result of that have gotten attention. They’ve also gotten a lot of attention by their claim that they have lists of thousands that they’re going to hand over to federal authorities. But as of now, they’re quite a marginal phenomenon and have been condemned by many across the Jewish political spectrum.

JW: Yeah, including the ADLwhich  has condemned them.

DM: Including the ADL on this one. Yeah, on this one, we can side with the ADL.

JW: So the big picture here — we have two strands of Jewish culture in America right now, one seeking allies among other minorities, defending the rights of all minorities on the grounds that we need allies and that we have much in common with other minority groups. That J Street quote, “Our community can and must stand up for constitutional rights for all.”
On the other hand is this view that the world is against the Jews, that we can’t rely on allies or friends, and that Jews need to be militant and aggressive in protecting themselves so that we ‘never again’ see something like the Holocaust. Do you think I’ve described that divide correctly?

DM: Yeah, I think that’s one way to describe it, and I would maybe build on that by saying there are two vectors that we can identify that I think relate to those two camps. The latter camp, the camp that holds to a decidedly lachrymose or a tearful view of Jewish history that sees an Amalek, an eternal enemy, in every generation, favors what has been called the vertical alliance, an alliance with state authority.
What you described as the more progressive camp, at this point, understands the great danger in aligning with state power, and is preferring or opting for a horizontal alliance, an alliance of allyship and solidarity with other minority groups and other groups that have fallen under scrutiny and attention of federal authorities; groups who are, in some sense, beleaguered and threatened.
Throughout Jewish history, Jews did survive very often by aligning themselves with the sovereign, the local sovereign, as a way of protecting themselves against a hostile populace. That tradition was decisively shattered, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt pointed out in the 1930s. The tradition of reliance and dependence of Jews on state authority completely disintegrated with the rise of Nazism.
What’s the lesson that we learn? I think the lesson we learn is that Jews have to be prudent in deciding which alliance to choose. In this case, I think it’s a highly dubious choice to align myself with a regime that is committed to the unraveling of the democratic order — because ultimately that will not be good for the Jews, amongst many others. And I guess that’s a major point that we want to expose in taking on this claim that the Trump administration is acting to combat anti-Semitism on behalf of Jews. Well, they are instrumentalizing anti-Semitism in ways that I think will ultimately have very deleterious effects on many groups, including Jews. So this may be a moment at which the horizontal alliance makes a lot more sense than the vertical alliance.

JW: And this same divide exists on our campuses now, and it’s something you’ve been very much involved with at UCLA. Trump says all this is about campus anti-Semitism. Just to review where we stand at UCLA, I’d like to start with the horrible events of last May when a violent pro-Israel mob came from off campus and attacked the Gaza protest encampment.

DM: That was April 30th.

JW: And the police did not stop them for several hours. You talked about that night on this podcast shortly afterwards. And it’s clear that at UCLA, the truly violent attack was not against Jewish students, it was against Palestinian students by a pro-Zionist mob. So let’s not start with the need to protect Jews on campus, let’s start by agreeing that “we dwell in a broader ecosystem of hate.” Those are your words.

DM: Yeah. Right. I think there have been instances of harassment and intimidation of Jewish students identified with the pro-Israel side of the spectrum, and we need to be attentive to that. But I think what’s almost always forgotten in the equation is the unrelenting attack upon those who hold to a pro-Palestinian view, those who support the principle of Palestinian freedom. There’s almost no expression that we can identify as pro-Palestinian that doesn’t evoke the claim of anti-Semitism.  What could you say? If you say, “From the river to the sea,” that’s anti-Semitic. If you say, “We believe in a single democratic state,” that’s anti-Semitic. If you say, “I believe in armed struggle,” that’s anti-Semitic. There’s nothing left to say in favor of Palestinian self-determination that isn’t interpreted as anti-Semitic.
So I think we neglect a very substantial part of the equation when we talk about hate and unsafety and intimidation and threats on our college campuses. It’s not a zero-sum proposition. We need to attend to anti-Semitism; we need to attend to threats against Jewish students. We need to create an environment in which they may be uncomfortable but not unsafe.
But at the same time, we really need to pay attention, to name and acknowledge the unbelievably powerful anti-Palestinian forces that are relentless, that are constantly pushing to shift the focus away from the threats to those who dare to raise their voice in support of Palestinian liberation or dare to call out Israel’s horrific actions in Gaza. Our university’s leaders can’t be blind any longer to that. It’s really unconscionable to possess this single-minded focus on one and only one group in the midst of this wider ecosystem of hate.

JW: Of course what universities do best is educating. You’ve been concerned for a long time with how to teach about all this in our courses, in our departments. What do you think we should do now?

DM: Right. Well, there’s been a very substantial investment over the last decade and a half in Israel studies, in the study of Israeli society, politics, and culture. I think from my part, it’s a worthy topic of study. But I think we need to make a significant investment in Palestine studies as well, studying the history, politics, and culture of Palestine and Palestinians. And for my part, I’d be really pleased if we were to do that in some sort of collaborative fashion, meaning studying Israel and Palestine together.
I made a decision a number of years ago that I wasn’t going to teach Zionism any longer without teaching it together with the history of Palestinian nationalism  — that it was really impossible, it’s an artificial pedagogical move to do so. So this isn’t to say that one can’t study the history of Palestine on its own, but in the current environment, I think there’s much to be gained by studying them in conjunction, in parallel fashion. And what that really means is a major new commitment on universities in the United States to funding investing in Palestine studies.
That seems completely unlikely given the political environment and the fear that has been engendered by the Trump administration, that has focused all of this attention on anti-Semitism and protection of those who are supportive of Israel. But I also think this is a moment where university leaders need to stand up and say, “These are the principles for which we are prepared to fight,” like democracy, like open-mindedness, like recognition of the legitimacy of expressing some support for Palestine or the importance of Palestine studies. These are some of the principles I think we need to stand for in the face of, admittedly, enormous pressure. But that’s what leadership is in moments of crisis.

JW: And the alternative has been made very clear by Trump at Columbia in withdrawing $400 million in funding. He has stated a willingness to negotiate about restoring that if the school meets several requirements, including placing several departments under academic receivership. Trump wants Middle Eastern studies, South Asian studies, and African studies at Columbia to be put in academic receivership for a minimum of five years — as a prerequisite to negotiations between the university and the government over restoring that $400 million in federal funds. And they warned that 60 other universities could face penalties similar to that from pending investigations into anti-Semitism on their campuses.  Including UCLA. Your response?

DM: Well, it’s Trumpian transactionalism at its absolute worst. It reflects a high measure of moral bankruptcy, extortion, trying to compel, through financial incentives or disincentives, the university decision on the course of its academic direction. I think we should remember that already in 2021, JD Vance gave a speech in which he basically called for the destruction of the university as we know it. That’s what they want to do. It’s a classic feature of the authoritarian playbook. Take down the university, a bastion of open-mindedness, liberal thinking, democratic values, and the path becomes even clearer for you.
So I think we should understand that, and I think we should not be pliant and submissive in the face of this pressure. I know it’s enormously difficult to say. I think UCLA gets a billion dollars a year in federal grants money. Can you imagine what the effects would be if a billion dollars were taken away?
However, as I was thinking about and talking about it with one of my daughters, it may be a moment where our leadership needs to say, ‘This is an extremely difficult period, a period without precedent in the history of the university, but we will not submit to the attempt to destroy the university. If this means that we all have to take a salary cut in order to survive in this period, we will have to make that sacrifice together in the name of standing strong in the face of this pressure.’ I don’t know how realistic that is, but I think that’s what’s absolutely necessary because once they succeed in bringing the university to its knees, they’ll continue to the next bastion or pillar of democracy, and there may be less resistance. So I think the stakes are enormously high. I think the attention on Jews, anti-Semitism, pro-Palestine protests, DEI are all instruments in this larger battle. And we should understand that at every turn.
And if I were recommending to fellow Jews what to do, I would say don’t be deluded for a minute in thinking that you’re going to be any safer. First of all, there are many Jews who identify with the pro-Palestine cause. And even if you don’t, the erosion of democracy and the attempted destruction of the university, which has been such an important gateway to Jewish integration into American society, will not redound well to the Jews.
So let’s mobilize, let’s be brave, and let’s be prepared to sacrifice, but let us not submit.

JW: David Myers – he wrote about “How to Fight Anti-Semitism on Campus” for The Forward. You can read his new piece at Forward.com. David, thanks for your leadership on this, and thanks for talking with us today.

DM: Always a pleasure to be with you, Jon.