The Trump administration has unleashed new attacks on higher education. WNIJ education reporter Peter Medlin spoke with Dr. Steve Macek to give context to these efforts. He's a North Central College professor who just co-wrote the book "Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression."
Peter Medlin, WNIJ education reporter (PM): You just contributed to a book about censorship around the world. Can you talk a little bit about what your sections of that book were focused on?
Steve Macek (SM): We believe that there is a global crisis in freedom of expression and, related to that, a global crisis in academic freedom. That's what my chapter is about.
In Russia today, academic freedom virtually does not exist. In Poland, in Belarus, it's under very serious threat. Famously, it's been completely eroded in a country like Hungary under Viktor Orban, who is the model for what Donald Trump and his allies want to do to higher education in this country and want to do to freedom of the press.
He's sort of a model of what's called, like, "illiberal democracy." He got elected democratically, but now he is using every legal method he can to erode the independence of institutions of higher education and to silence and muzzle and control the press.
I'm sure your listeners realize that Vice President JD Vance said publicly, "universities are the enemy," and everything that the second Trump administration has done from slashing funding for research through NIH and NEH, to freezing funding for particular institutions that they think are not abiding by Trump's ridiculous and illegal executive order on DEI, to these assaults on graduate students and students who have had the temerity to speak out about Palestine, all of those things are designed to destroy the existing system of higher education. That is their aim.
(PM): As you've written so much about this over the past couple years and now watching these first couple months of the Trump administration, all those things that you mentioned, it seems like you're saying you can kind of look to places like Hungary as the playbook?
(SM): Yeah, I think so. But the other thing that that I think we can learn from the case of Hungary and some other countries where this has happened is institutions should not engage in anticipatory obedience to at the end of the day, will be revealed to be unlawful, illegal and unconstitutional executive orders and policies. We should resist until the last right word is written on the last court ruling requiring that we abide by these, what I think are clear violations of the First Amendment.
You take the executive order on DEI that is trying to scare universities from engaging in research on African American Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies, Asian Studies, Disability Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies. It’s very clear. Institutions are going through their course catalogs and going through their programs and trying to purge anything that has anything to do with equity.
That is very clearly viewpoint discrimination. The government cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination. That is a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment, and at the end of the day, I think it'll be found to be that. But institutions are scared. They're afraid of losing their funding. They're afraid of losing grants, and so they're engaging in anticipatory obedience.
I think it's up to faculty and students to speak up and pressure administrations not to do what Columbia did. They agreed to all the terms that the Trump administration laid out, and yet the Trump administration is still going to freeze some of their funding.
So, if you give an inch to a bully, the bully will take a mile. It will just encourage more bullying. I think we should refuse to engage in anticipatory obedience. I think we should engage in very vigorous protest of these policies. We need to call them out for what they are: they're un-American.
Editor’s note: this conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
