Down Goes Brown

Yesterday, Brown University became the third Ivy League institution to sign a settlement agreement with the Trump administration. Its deal is quite similar to the one Columbia entered. Like Columbia's, Brown's agreement asserts that it does not permit the government to "dictate" the university's "curriculum or the content of academic speech." But also like the Columbia deal, the Brown deal commits to the Trump administration's extremely tendentious view of Title IX's requirements as they apply to transgender persons.

In one respect, the Brown agreement goes further along the anti-trans dimension. It includes this paragraph that has no parallel in the Columbia agreement:

The University will not perform gender reassignment surgery or prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child's appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.

One might think that the purpose of gender-affirming care is to align a patient's appearance with the sex as they experience it, not with an identity that differs from that sex. If so, then the paragraph would not actually bar gender-affirming care. However, the agreement also commits Brown to the administration's anti-trans definitions as set forth in an executive order Trump signed on day 1 of his second term. Thus, the paragraph acts as a ban.

It's worth pausing over that. Last month, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors against an equal protection challenge. Skrmetti means that states are permitted to ban such care. But no Justice or, as far as I'm aware, any reputable lawyer or legal scholar, thinks that federal law in any way requires any entity, including recipients of federal funds like Brown, to ban such care. And although a majority of states currently ban such care, Rhode Island (where Brown is located) does not. Because hospitals and medical centers run by or affiliated with Brown provide a significant portion of the medical care, especially gender-affirming care, in Rhode Island, that one paragraph could act as something like a de facto ban--imposed by the federal executive branch without any apparent legal authority to do so but simply via extortion.

There are other differences with the Columbia agreement. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government. Brown agreed to pay $50 million to "state workforce development organizations" over a ten-year period. Why the different sized ransom payments? Columbia's endowment is about twice the size of Brown's, so that could account for a higher payment but not a payment four times the size. Nor is it clear why Brown's money stays in Rhode Island while Columbia's money ends up in the federal treasury--presumably to help fund the tax cuts in the monstrous legislation Congress recently passed.

Perhaps the differences are explained by the relative skill of the negotiating teams for Columbia and Brown, the perception that Brown's leadership responded to incidents and allegations of antisemitism on campus somewhat more effectively than Columbia's did, and/or Trump's longstanding vendetta against Columbia for failing to purchase real estate from him. Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania, which was the first Ivy to bend the knee, didn't agree to pay any money to anybody, perhaps because Trump has some residual affection for his alma mater.

There are other differences among the agreements thus far entered, but the larger meaning is found in their similarities and in the emerging pattern of capitulation. As I noted above, the agreements with Brown and Columbia contain language nominally preserving their control over curriculum and academic speech, even while also including substantive terms that undercut those assertions. Whether Columbia, Brown, and whatever universities are the next dominoes to fall in fact retain sufficient autonomy to remain recognizable as academic institutions will not be determined by hortatory language in an agreement with an administration led by a mercurial tyrant.

Indeed, already we know that the administration views such agreements as a form of dominance over the campus zeitgeist. Education Secretary Linda McMahon (she who believes that the secret sauce for learning is steak sauce) reacted to the announcement of the Brown deal in nearly identical terms to her reaction to the Columbia one. As quoted in The New York Times, McMahon said: "The Trump administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions."

As Professor Buchanan has argued repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere, conservative politicians and commentators have come to use the term "woke" as an all-purpose signifier for things they don't like (such as calling transgender and non-binary persons by their preferred pronouns or acknowledging the persistence of systemic racism). To the extent that there is an identifiable core to the complaints about wokeness, I would describe it (as I did describe it in the course description of the seminar I co-taught with my colleague Professor Nelson Tebbe in the fall 2024 semester) as "a somewhat catchall phrase apparently meant to convey a judgmental attitude on the part of progressives." Put differently, anti-woke conservatives don't like that woke liberals tell them what is and isn't permissible to say.

Even if the denunciation of what used to be decried by the right as "political correctness" is only part of the anti-woke agenda, it is surely a very substantial part. And central to the anti-woke grievance is the complaint that the woke mob has been silencing anti-woke perspectives.

I do not wish to deny that social pressure--whether online or in person--can chill speech or have other serious consequences. Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed was published a decade ago, and the phenomena he described there have only gotten worse since then. Thus, in my own classes, I implore students to disagree with one another and with me respectfully and to avoid ad hominem accusations.

But however much of a problem social pressure is for students, faculty, and others who identify as conservative, surely it is worse for the federal government to exert actual legal and financial pressure to reshape American universities to align them more closely with the Trumpist view of the world. In the name of free speech, the administration is using all the levers of government power to direct the viewpoint of academic institutions that have heretofore been central to the pursuit of knowledge.

Calling out the hypocrisy of the Trump administration is, of course, too easy. After all, we have a president supported by actual Nazis who uses the claim that he is fighting antisemitism as a pretext to bully universities. In noting that the anti-woke warriors in and aligned with the Trump administration are doing more to damage free speech than wokeness ever was, my main point is not to observe irony or decry hypocrisy. My point is to be clear about the threat.

I said and then wrote last week in response to the Columbia agreement that "the problem with paying ransom is that it incentivizes the taking of more hostages." Each academic institution that bends the knee to Trump's extortion campaign increases the risk of extortion against other such institutions. And with each agreement, the Trump administration comes closer to its ultimate aim.

What is that aim? Trump is transactional, but the movement he leads and does not always control is ideological. With respect to academia, J.D. Vance spoke for the movement when he said that to accomplish its aims, it must "aggressively attack the universities." The goal of the Trump administration in its pressure campaign against American academia is not reform but destruction. Today it is one step closer to reaching that goal.