Not only has this check on executive power kept the president from becoming a king — but it has made America the most innovative and dynamic free-enterprise economy in the world. We saw the fiasco of a president imposing tariffs on a whim. But imagine if he is ultimately permitted to go further without the check of the courts: to launch investigations into companies he dislikes. To void contracts to punish rivals. To deport an immigrant business leader for political gain. Or to pull funding from scientists and scholars who challenge convention.
These threads are interconnected. The administration has declared war not only on the courts but also on the universities. And it is no accident. As historian Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Joseph Stalin, strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university. The greatest threat to consolidating power is not resistance — it is alternatives. Vance calls the university the enemy because he knows what lives here: historians, economists, law professors and scientists who threaten him not with force, but with ideas.
Why else propose, as the vice president has, raising the endowment tax from 1.4 percent to 35 percent, if not from a deep fear that the ideas presented in lecture halls might take root in the hearts of a new generation? That young Americans might see a nation not of grievance, but of promise. That is what Trump and Vance fear most: not rebellion, but the birth of new thinking.
If ever there were a moment in our nation’s history for the defense of liberalism — as a defense of free thought and the examined life — it is now. Those who sneer at our universities — who mock thinking, learning and degrees for cheap applause while credentialing themselves — are engaged in rank hypocrisy. They are gatekeepers of privilege, dissuading their fellow citizens from pursuing for their families the very opportunities they seek for their own children.
I hope university presidents will find their voice by remembering leaders such as Yale’s Kingman Brewster Jr., who stood with student protesters even when donors withdrew their support; Harvard’s James Conant, who resisted McCarthyism in the face of pressure from the government and alumni; and the University of Chicago’s Robert Hutchins, who defended the independence of scholarship against the demands of powerful business interests. Their place in history was not secured by the size of the endowment they left behind, but by the ideals they refused to abandon.
Harvard University President Alan Garber has shown courage this week in standing up to the bullies in the White House. I have no doubt that Harvard — with its legacy of liberty predating the founding of our nation — will prevail over the fleeting ignorance of our time.
I hope more college presidents will follow his lead.
And let Brewster, Conant, Hutchins and Garber be examples for all of us. When a student is snatched from campus and denied due process, speak up. When a student protester is harassed for their viewpoint, stand in their defense. When you are told by a potential employer to keep silent about the need for diversity, walk away.
Each of us must ask: What, in this hour, are we willing to risk? What is needed is not the towering courage of a Socrates, nor even of my grandfather, who spent four years in jail as part of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence. What is needed now are the small acts of conscience that together shape the soul of a nation.
In moments of crisis, this nation has often cast aside the old guard and turned to a new generation. That we were blessed to have Abraham Lincoln in our darkest hour is, perhaps, the strongest evidence of providence. The fate of liberal democracy now rests not just with those of us in Congress — it rests with you. It rests on whether you will rise to history’s call.