The attack on universities

 NY Times - Donald Trump was demanding $400 million from Columbia University.When he did not get his way, he stormed out of a meeting with university trustees and later publicly castigated the university president as “a dummy” and “a total moron.”That drama dates back 25 years.

Today, these two New York City institutions — the billionaire president of the United States and the 270-year-old Ivy League university that has cultivated 87 Nobel laureates — have been locked in an extraordinary clash involving free speech, academic freedom and the federal government’s role in funding higher education. 

Robert Reich -  A cornerstone of academic freedom is that professors can research and teach what they want. Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught.

Trump also demanded that Columbia ban the wearing of face masks, so that protesters can be more easily identified. Columbia has agreed to do this, too.

But don’t Columbia students and faculty have a right under the First Amendment to hide their faces while demonstrating? Trump’s obvious goal is to intimidate protesters.

In fact, it’s all about intimidation — not only at Columbia but at every other university in America. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties.

This week, the Trump regime also targeted the University of Pennsylvania, threatening to cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university allowed a transgender woman to participate on a women’s swim team....

What’s next? Trump demanding that political science departments hire an equal number of registered Republican and Democratic professors? That sociology departments ban the teaching and study of Karl Marx? That law schools offer courses on the efficiency of dictatorships?

Once we start down this road there’s no stopping. Today, Columbia University’s president and trustees established a perilous precedent, which opens the doors of all academic institutions to wanton tyranny.