On a morning in May, Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, testified before a congressional subcommittee about the prevalence of far-left ideas among his faculty and students. Given that the federal government has historically provided funding for the university’s budget, through an annual allocation, Johnson had a difficult choice to make. He could respond to representatives’ questions with a defense of the free exchange of ideas (and risk them holding up the allocation) or take the safer path of conceding their criticisms and promising to work to insure that the thinking on campus better aligned with putatively American values.

Johnson’s dilemma will be familiar to anyone who has observed higher education in this country during the harrowing academic year that is now coming to a close. Spring is typically a joyous time on campus, when graduating students celebrate having overcome whatever challenges they may have faced along the way. This month, administrators and faculty are likely equally relieved to have made it through. That, in fact, has been the prevailing sentiment since December of 2023, when Republicans in the House of Representatives—citing harassment and, in some cases, even the physical assault of Jewish students on campuses, in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel—began summoning university presidents to appear before committees, where they were berated and belittled. Those appearances prefaced the subsequent resignations of the leaders of Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania, all of them women. Johnson’s appearance, however, occurred not in the current wave of federal overreach but in May of 1935, amid a feverish preoccupation with communism in academia. The hearings of these presidents are separated by nearly a century of history, yet their quandaries are strikingly similar.

In March, the Trump Administration threatened to cancel fifty-one million dollars in federal grants to Columbia. Days later, that amount was increased to four hundred million, and the university received a letter demanding a series of changes to internal operations as a prerequisite for discussions about restoring the funding. The university, which also saw four of its students targeted by the Administration for their political views—one, Mahmoud Khalil, remains in detention—has largely complied. But, on Thursday, the Administration declared that Columbia had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward the harassment of Jewish students, violating civil-rights law.

In April, an even more stringent letter was sent to Harvard, which responded by suing over its demands in federal court. The Administration halted 2.2 billion dollars in grants to the university, then another four hundred and fifty million, and has threatened to rescind the school’s tax-exempt status. Last Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security took the extraordinary step of terminating Harvard’s certification to enroll international students; Harvard is suing the D.H.S., and a federal judge has halted the department’s effort. The Administration had also announced that it would investigate sixty institutions and initiated seemingly arbitrary cuts at schools such as Johns Hopkins, which had eight hundred million dollars in grants rescinded. A resource-sharing pact among the eighteen universities of the Big Ten Conference has been proposed, in order to provide mutual support should any of them be targeted.

The Administration has relied on two pretexts to justify these incursions. It has used the language of rooting out antisemitism to rationalize actions that at best have tangential connections to that cause. The rescinded grants have been clustered in areas that include climate-change research or that use terms such as “diversity” in proposals. It further strains credulity to argue that curtailing a university’s ability to conduct cancer or Alzheimer’s research is an appropriate strategy to correct alleged religious bias. Meanwhile, NPR reported last month that three officials in the government have “close ties to antisemitic extremists.” This news dovetails with previous events, such as Trump welcoming the prominent antisemites Nick Fuentes and Kanye West to his home for dinner.

The incursions also take place amid a conservative insistence on greater “viewpoint diversity.” This push comes just as measures enacted to protect other kinds of diversity are being overturned. The Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision invalidated racial quotas at the University of California, but held that affirmative action was constitutional, and experts have long since acknowledged that racial diversity fosters a wider range of viewpoints. The threats to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status represent a similar inversion of history: the government first used the tactic decades ago against institutions such as Bob Jones University, a conservative Christian school that banned interracial couples on campus. The biggest mistake that some universities have made in responding to the White House has been to presume that it is operating in good faith. It is not. Efforts to engage with it have yielded escalating punishments and leadership turnover but little by way of concession.

Mordecai Johnson was a Black man leading an academic institution during Jim Crow when representatives from an almost entirely white Congress asked him whether professors with radical sympathies should be allowed to teach at Howard. Yet he firmly said that he would sooner shut down his university than allow anyone to dictate what its students could or could not learn. The principle at play—that without free inquiry there is no basis for a university to exist—still applies. ♦