Freedom of speech. Due process under the law.
They sound good, don’t they?
They’re the twin pillars of a free society and a free university. And they’re both under assault from President Donald Trump’s administration.
The only way for universities to fight back is to join hands around these principles. Everything else is just a distraction, designed to divide us.
Witness last week’s announcement that the White House is suspending $175 million in grants to the University of Pennsylvania — where I teach — for allowing trans female athlete Lia Thomas to compete on the women’s swim team in 2021 and 2022.
As soon as the news broke, my inbox exploded with angry messages about the “transphobic” decision to penalize Penn. That assumes we were right to allow Thomas to swim on the women’s team and that anyone who thought otherwise was a bigot.
But that’s a formula for division, not unity. Reasonable people can and do object to the idea of trans women competing on female teams. If we read those people out of our circle, we make it that much harder to resist Trump.
The problem with the $175 million penalty wasn’t that it was transphobic. The problem was that it was authoritarian. It imposes Trump’s view on a complicated and contested public question. That violates our shared norms of — yes — free speech and due process.
Shortly after he re-entered the White House, Trump signed an order to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. Now that he has fined Penn, how many institutions will be brave enough to criticize his policy? The safest move is to stay quiet, so he doesn’t come after you next.
Nor are Penn officials likely to raise their voices, in the face of even bigger threats. A senior Trump official told Fox Business that the fine was a “proactive punishment” and that Penn is at risk of losing all of its federal funding as part of the administration’s Title IX investigation of the university.
“This is just a taste of what could be coming down the pipe for Penn,” the official warned. Message to Penn: Keep your big mouth shut, if you know what’s good for you.
Let’s also remember that the White House paused Penn’s funding before the Title IX investigation was complete. We don’t know what — if anything — the probe revealed, and we certainly don’t know how the administration came up with the $175 million number as a fine. Does that sound like due process to you?
Finally, federal law says you can’t pull funding from a university without a formal hearing and a report to Congress. Again, none of that happened. Score: Trump 1, due process 0.
But we also shouldn’t establish our own informal limits on who can say what on the issue of trans athletes. Well before Trump got in on this act, my students told me that anyone who questioned whether Thomas should swim on the women’s team would be labeled a transphobe. So they kept their mouths shut, too.
Did some of Thomas’ critics engage in transphobic rhetoric? Sure. Calling her “Liar” Thomas — as if she was deliberately faking her gender — certainly fits that bill. Ditto for some of the fulminations by Trump, whose order referred to transgender women as “men.” That’s gratuitous, mean and — yes — hateful.
But it doesn’t follow that everyone who doubted whether Thomas should swim on the women’s team is a hater. Some of the doubters are trans themselves. “I only want to win if I know it’s fair,” declared trans female runner Andie Taylor, explaining her ambivalence about racing against other women.
So we shouldn’t make that a political loyalty test in the battle against Trump. We can combine forces to denounce his attacks on universities, whatever we think about trans athletes.
Ditto for “DEI,” another perennial Trump bogeyman. Pressing federal agencies to scrub words like “diversity” or even “women” from their websites is a radical attack on free speech, and we should all condemn it on those grounds. But we shouldn’t demand that everyone rally behind DEI itself, which has lots of reasonable critics.
Some people think it’s window dressing, which lets institutions virtue-signal around race. Others worry that some DEI initiatives — including diversity trainings — might have exacerbated the same racist attitudes that they seek to redress.
On a recent Thursday, I enthusiastically participated in a protest at Penn to denounce the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. But I didn’t sign a faculty petition against those attacks, because it also demanded that Penn uphold “nondiscrimination” against trans athletes — which, presumably, means letting them play on the team that matches their gender — and that it retain staffers who implement DEI policies.
Those are defensible positions, of course, but they’re also arguable: That is, decent and informed people disagree about them. You shouldn’t be required to affirm them in order to fight Trump. That will simply alienate potential allies. And right now, we need all the friends we can get.
So please, professors, no more political litmus tests. Say it loud, and say it proud: Free speech! Due process! Americans believe in those principles, deep in their bones. They will believe us, too, if we keep to the script — and keep everything else out.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
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