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The Trump administration has gone to war with elite universities, even as it claims its latest missive was sent by mistake. Its approach, as in many other policy areas, has been to shoot first and ask questions later. Power seems to grow out of the barrel of a tweet, with punitive action favoured over due process and principle. This might achieve results in the short term, but cannot win a battle of ideas that by definition requires a consistent philosophical stance.
That said, it is difficult to shed a tear for institutions like Harvard which openly champion partisan political causes, run intellectual dissenters like Roland Fryer or Carole Hooven out of their posts, ride roughshod over academic freedom and contain a faculty which is 1% conservative. The university’s appeal to academic freedom comes across as contrived rather than principled.