Editors at National Review Online explore recent developments at one of the nation’s elite universities.

The day when the nation’s great universities went with palms outstretched to Washington has long since come and gone. Now, comes the foreseen disaster. The piper must be paid.

In leveraging their receipt of federal research and aid funding to impose terms on the universities, the Trump administration is not writing on a blank slate, but is instead indulging in the Trumpian habit of making loud and explicit what was previously done with more subtlety. The Solomon Amendment long made the modest demand that federally funded universities allow military recruiters on campus, but we have gone much further down the road since the Supreme Court upheld that single condition in 2006. The Obama and Biden administrations were relentless in using federal law to influence or outright dictate how universities were managed. In 2011, the Obama administration discovered, in Title IX, a mandate for universities to police both sexual assault and sexual harassment (including potentially “unwanted” speech) according to federal standards that deprived students of due process. That standard was used to suppress the speech of faculty, such as Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis, who in a Kafkaesque turn was the subject of a legal complaint by students under Title IX for writing an op-ed column criticizing the Obama view of Title IX. The Obama rules were later even weaponized in a lawsuit against Hillsdale College, which takes no federal funds. When Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, repealed the Obama standard, the ACLU sued her to try to preserve the lever. …

… [T]he Trump administration’s demands are extensive, mixing and matching topics such as demanding that Harvard end race and other preferences in admissions and hiring; “reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism”; institute “viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring”; eliminate “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programs; reform disciplines rife with antisemitism; and overhaul university governance, student discipline, whistleblower protections, and transparency.