Treated Like a Liar

 When Trump first started revoking grant money to major universities—as part of his sweeping attack on the American mind, ranging from the arts and sciences to higher education and public health services—I confess the selfish part of me was relieved at first to see that my own alma mater was not immediately in his crosshairs. They weren't even on the full list of 60 schools the administration plans to eventually target. 

But as the administration started to go down the list of prominent schools, eventually reaching even Northwestern—my feeling of relief began to graduate into something more like FOMO. It felt insulting not to be included. I'm reminded of Brecht's poem about an exiled author who sees a list of proscribed works to be destroyed in a book-burning rally, and is incensed not to see his oeuvre included. 

"Haven't I always told the truth?" the author (an obvious stand-in for Brecht himself) asks. "And here you are, treating me like a liar? Burn me!" So too, to see them target one university after another around the country based on the First Amendment–protected speech of their leadership or student body, I suddenly felt that my own alma mater was being treated as a liar, if they were escaping this persecution. 

Part of me fears this escape may be due to the widespread misconception that the University of Chicago is a "conservative" institution. Such a view, however, is a gross distortion of history. The school played host to several of the founding members of the civil rights and antiwar movements. In the 1950s, it was accused of being a hotbed of lefty radicalism, because it had a student-led "Communist Club." 

Several commentators have compared the recent attacks on universities to the Red Scare of the '40s and '50s—which similarly made the intelligentsia into a convenient political scapegoat. "The spirit of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well in the Trump administration," as a leader of CAIR put it in a recent statement, "pursuing witch hunts into American colleges, and threatening the free speech rights of immigrants."

If the comparison is apt (and it is), then UChicago should feel even more obliged by its history to stand up to the administration. One of the university's proudest moments was when its leader at the time—Robert Maynard Hutchins—stood up for the free speech rights of students and faculty, in the face of calls for ideological purges, saying the university did not believe in the "doctrine of guilt by association." 

The current administration's purges obviously do proceed on the basis of "guilt by association"—arguing that universities can be stripped of funds based on the political views or protest activities of students. If the university still agrees with what Hutchins said, they should stand up again today. They may draw Trump's ire in the process. But—in moments of repression such as this—that should be seen as a badge of honor. 

What will be ignominious in the eyes of history will be to slink by in this era with a tail between one's legs—avoiding immediate retaliation and persecution, managing to live another day—but doing so only in order to "inherit positions without dignity," as the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era) once put it. It is to be "treated like a liar." So shouldn't we tell the truth?