The University in Exile

I feel like we are witnessing a charade.

Federal agencies have frozen billions of dollars in grants and contracts that had previously been awarded to research universities, on the grounds that the latter have been insufficiently responsive to antisemitic harassment on campus. University leaders have accepted this rationale at face value and have responded with long lists of steps being taken to address the stated concerns.

But the plans being implemented by federal authorities today were conceived at least four years ago, long before any encampments, building occupations, or classroom disruptions entered the national spotlight. Even before he was elected to the Senate from the state of Ohio, JD Vance made clear that in his view, conservatism in America could not thrive unless some of our elite universities were taken over or destroyed. Those were his words, and they ought to be taken seriously.¹

The strategy was put to the test on a small scale with an attempt to transform New College in Florida into a Hillsdale of the South. Six hand-picked new trustees were appointed by the Governor in January 2023, and by the start of the fall semester the school had changed beyond recognition. This was months before the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, and charges of antisemitic harassment played no role in these developments.

All of this is to say that even if American universities were to adopt expansive definitions of antisemitism and stamp out all traces of speech and conduct that fall under this broad umbrella, the pressure on them is unlikely to ease.

So what’s the endgame here? A colleague asked me this question with respect to Columbia a few weeks ago, and I responded by saying that funding would be restored once Elise Stefanik had been installed as university president. It could be some other outspoken loyalist, of course, but you get the point.

If this comes to pass, we will see some departments shuttered entirely while others face hiring and salary freezes. It will be difficult to admit, hire, or promote outspoken critics of the administration. Tenure will be revoked for a few, and may well be phased out entirely over time. More generally, institutional autonomy over routine internal decisions will be lost.

I suspect that most members of the faculty, regardless of departmental affiliation, will find this situation intolerable. They will then be up for grabs in the global marketplace for scholars. And joining them will be large and growing cohorts of international students and aspiring researchers.

That is, we will see the end of America’s decades-long global dominance in the field of higher education.

Nils Gilman has been predicting this outcome for several months now.² In a relatively recent post, he expands on his earlier arguments as follows:

In 1933, German research universities were by every measure the greatest in the world. This intellectual power was in turn a cornerstone of German industrial and ultimately military might. In a few short years, however, the Nazis destroyed them… And nearly a century on, German universities have still not recovered, despite many proposed efforts—and neither has Germany’s prestige or power.

The purge of Jewish and left-wing faculty from German universities in the 1930s has been described as Hitler’s gift to the allies. Albert Einstein, Max Born, Erwin Schrodinger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Krebs, John von Neumann, and Albert Hirschman were among those who fled, and many of them toiled to find academic positions for others.³

This was not always easy—many American universities had openly antisemitic practices in place at the time. In her biography of John Nash, Sylvia Nasar describes how MIT rose to become one of the leading research universities in the world by recruiting brilliant faculty and students who had been rejected by the Ivies simply because they were Jewish. Norbert Wiener in mathematics and Paul Samuelson in economics, for example, formed the core around which stellar departments were built.

One institution that took extraordinary steps to build a home for displaced scholars was the New School for Social Research, which was led at the time by Alvin Johnson. His creation (housed within the school itself) was briefly called the University in Exile. It would later come to be known as the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. By one count, Johnson managed to secure visas and employment for 182 people who had been expelled from German universities.⁴

In a grainy photograph published by the New York Times on October 4, 1933, Johnson is seated second from left, flanked by Emil Lederer on one side and Frieda Wunderlich on the other. Standing behind him, also second from the left, is Max Wertheimer, a founder of Gestalt psychology:

Among the economists who left Europe for the University in Exile was Jacob Marschak, who would later make pioneering contributions to the theory of teams. One of Marschak’s earliest doctoral students at the Graduate Faculty was Franco Modigliani, who fled Italy after the passage of the race laws in 1938, and whose contributions to economics and finance have been enormously influential.

These examples illustrate that the rise of the United States as the undisputed global leader in higher education was in no small part due to Hitler’s gift. But we may now be in the process of surrendering this dominance to others.

David Pozen of Columbia Law School has recently asked whether we are “at the point where universities across the country must have presidents who are agreeable to President Trump or else risk calamitous cuts to their federal funding.” If the question is rhetorical, it doesn’t go far enough. Loss of funding is just one of many calamitous prospects in sight. We also face the possibility of targeted denials of visas, the use of the accreditation process to force curricular changes, civil rights cases leading to hefty fines or settlements, and substantial increases in the rate at which endowment income is taxed.

This will be a prolonged battle for survival, and we are still in its early stages. The federal government has only just begun to bare its teeth.

Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, has recently joined a growing chorus of voices arguing for resistance to the “arbitrary application of government power.” He would like to see legal challenges to clearly unlawful federal actions, and the drawing down of endowments to cover funding shortfalls. He faults Columbia for having moved to meet federal demands, on the grounds that “each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely.”

I suspect that we will indeed see increased resistance and unity from universities. But given the immense power of the federal government and the willingness to use it without restraint, the outcome is far from certain. I’m more optimistic than Gilman is about the ability of American universities to withstand the onslaught with missions largely intact. But if he turns out to be right, and we are about to surrender our dominance at the top of the global higher education hierarchy, who might rise to take our place?

I addressed this question towards the end of a recent conversation with Glenn Loury.⁵ It would have to be a country (or region) with a credible commitment to academic freedom, the resources to recruit and equip scholars across the full range of disciplines, and the capacity to accommodate a large influx of undergraduate and graduate students. I can think of just one possibility.

The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund currently has a value of about 18 trillion Krone, or 1.7 trillion dollars at current exchange rates. One-tenth of this fund could seed a dozen campuses across Scandinavia, with each of them having an endowment equal to that of Columbia today. There are already a number of outstanding research universities in the region, for example in Aarhus, Bergen, Copenhagen, Gothenberg, Helsinki, Lund, Oslo, Stockholm, and Uppsala. And unlike some other regions with significant capital reserves, Scandinavian countries can make a credible commitment to academic freedom. It’s cold in the winters, to be sure, but a warm enough embrace might be enough to compensate.

In an interview about a month ago, former Columbia president Lee Bollinger stated that “our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions.” This post will strike some people as being excessively imaginative, perhaps even fanciful. But imagining and articulating a worst-case scenario may be the best way to avoid it. When dramatic changes are made to our economic policies, stock and bond markets react rapidly and this feedback can lead to reconsideration and reversal. There is no such instantaneous thermometer reading when it comes to higher education policies. All we can offer in response are words.

Universities, for their part, need to do two things. First, it is important to make the case that they provide enormous economic benefits, not just through basic research in science and engineering, but also through the development of cultural products that have a global market and even the aesthetics and design of physical goods. And just as importantly, they need to engage in some serious introspection to understand why public confidence in them has fallen so sharply across partisan lines. Commitments to free expression cannot be applied selectively, depending on who faces distress when words or images wound. Admissions policies have to be transparent and defensible in plain language. And life outcomes for graduates need to be tracked systematically to ensure that selection and instruction are aligned with mission.

All of these changes are worth making in their own right, and would make our institutions healthier and stronger. Some of them will appear to be concessions to federal demands, but this cannot itself be a barrier to implementation. If all blame for our predicament is placed on others, the consequences for us, and indeed for the country, will be dire.

1. Vance’s exact words, transcribed in an earlier post, were as follows: “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we're willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That's the universities… Unless we're willing to de-institutionalize the left in those institutions—or destroy the institutions absent that—we are going to continue to make the most powerful academic actors in our society actively aligned against us. The only way to work is to actually take some of these institutions over.” This was in September 2021. Similar sentiments were expressed in a more formal setting a couple of months later.

2. A very prescient thread from July of last year has been deleted on X, but its content was transcribed in an earlier post and screenshots have been posted on Bluesky.

3. I have written extensively (and spoken on one occasion) about the remarkable life and breathtakingly original work of Albert Hirschman.

4. In a letter to Edwin Seligman for distribution to potential donors, Johnson asked for “help in a matter which deeply concerns both of us… I refer to the case of the German university professors who have been ruthlessly dismissed in the mad anti-Semitic rage of the present German government… It is still incredible to me that any government, however fanatic, would cashier men like these whom all the world regards as among the ablest and most creative scholars anywhere to be found.”

5. The entire episode is now available on all the usual streaming platforms.