From The Contrarian
Bullying universities
The Trump administration’s pressures go beyond bespoke deals and attack all the ways universities are funded.
By Kim Lane Scheppele
Columbia University’s David Pozen called Columbia’s new agreement with the federal government “regulation by deal.” In regulation by deal, the administration forgoes the process of developing general standards enforced by regular processes, under the watchful eyes of courts, and instead bargains directly with institutions, striking a bespoke arrangement with each. This approach permits what Pozen called a “government-enforced restructuring” of an institution that is far more detailed and intrusive than any general regulatory approach would permit. As Pozen put it, “the agreement gives legal force to an extortion scheme.”
In many ways, this regulation-by-deal approach is similar to what President Donald Trump is doing with tariffs, leveraging the United States’s economic power to force particular countries to particular bargaining tables where the United States demands what it wants from each one separately. There is no general policy, only particular extortion agreements. And we can expect that the regulation by deal will not end there. The format is similar across sectors: Trump withholds some benefit that his targets were promised in agreements, and he makes them beg to get those benefits back. It’s a strategy that uses the power of the government outside the development of general rules and therefore outside the law.
Of course, Columbia should have learned by now that making a deal doesn’t mean that the pressure stops. Appeasing a bully only empowers the bully—and he’ll be back for more. Regulation by deal, precisely because it bypasses general lawmaking procedures, leaves open the possibility that any deal can be supplemented with even more demands in the future. It can provide no legal guarantees of security.
But as we learn more about what Trump has done to Columbia, we should also keep in mind a bigger picture that Trump and his allies envision for the future of universities. The Trump administration follows other leaders like Viktor Orbán, who brought Hungary to heel by weaponizing the national budget. (Background: I lived and worked in Hungary’s judicial system for most of the 1990s and have been a critic of Orbán since he came to power—to the point that I am persona non grata there.) Orbán learned that money is the avenue to political control. And the Trump administration has learned that it can force universities to cave by following (and controlling) the money.
Cornell Chapter of the AAUP 