The nation's leading universities are locked in an unprecedented battle with a president and an administration that have chosen to withhold billions of dollars in vital federal research funding in order to take control of institutions for which freedom of thought and expression are among their most essential values. For many, including me, this has eerie echoes of the MAGA-admired campaign by Hungarian President Viktor Orban to rid his country of the Central European University. The school had been founded specifically to help revitalize civil society and its values, including academic freedom, in the region's transition from dictatorship to democracy after decades of Nazi and then Communist control. Silencing and capturing universities and the free press'both of them crucial sources of knowledge essential to democratic self-governance and more'have long been at the top of the authoritarian to-do list. But the roots of American higher education, and the essential role of our...
learn more
