A massacre on St. Valentine's Day of Academic Freedom (opinion opinion)

On February 14, the office for civil rights of the Ministry of Education issued an extraordinary colleague from the dear colleague, in which all public and private universities and schools were ordered, the federal funds received to implement massive changes and repression of freedom of speech within 14 days. As the letter repeatedly warned and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency published, “can have institutions that do not adhere to a loss of federal financing”.

The letter from February 14 is a full attack on positive measures and diversity, justice and inclusion. It is also one of the worst attacks on the government's academic freedom in the history of American university education. This is a colossal federal rush that suppress all colleges, public and private colleges, and the language on a massive scale using a total ban on federal financing.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay on the grounds that supporters of academic freedom should pay attention to the left and right not to come to the conclusion that Campus are today “worse than McCarthyism”, which are based on incorrect comparisons of self -censorship or terrible laws that have been adopted in just a few states. The extreme actions of the Trump administration suggest that it is time to give up this scientific caution. If the government's plans to suppress academic freedom, immediately resisted and lifted, they will be far worse than the government's measures during the McCarthy era.

The US government has never tried to fully control so many aspects of what the universities do: “Approval, financial aid, attitude, training and other institutional programs” as well as student activities, administrative work, events and apparently even the curriculum and the content of the lesson if the current administration no longer likes the expressions.

Some of the goals for oppression are expressly named: “Universities promote the separation through breed at closing ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.” Black student centers and all similar areas according to the federal regulations would certainly be banned. In the approval, the letter prohibits the “personal essays of applicants, participation in extracurricular deductions or refer to others” who refer the breed. In order to be safe before the federal retaliation, the universities may have to make all applications from a “racing track” in order to lay all references to breed or racism before the exam. The letter is so extreme that it even announces a new racial crime in America and reduces the emphasis on the SAT or GRE: “For example, it would be illegal to remove standardized tests for an educational institution in order to achieve a desired breed balance or increase the variety of races.”

The letter accuses universities of “smuggling from racial stereotypes and explicit racial awareness to daily training, programming and discipline. But after a banner, discrimination was and is illegal due to breed, color or national origin. “This certainly indicates that all universities immediately ban all DEI programs and have to carry out all employees for the variety of races. However, it goes further when it comes to prohibiting a mention of breed or racism in any “training” or “programming”. This seems to be a ban on all extra -curricular programs, events and speakers who have “racial awareness”, which certainly someone who is consciously enough to see that Donald Trump is a racist.

The letter makes it clear that the prohibition of criticism of racism can go much further and extend into the classroom. It claims that DEI programs “teach the students that certain groups of racial groups bear unique moral stress that others do not do. Such programs stigmatize students who belong to certain racial groups based on gross racial stereotypes. As a result, they refuse the students the ability to fully participate in a school. “If it is now a thought to inform the students about white privileges or systemic racism in voluntary extra -curricular programs, this violation of the rights of oppressed white people would apply even more for courses on campus in which an instructor expresses a faith or expressed a necessary reading on the continuing existence of racism in America in America.

The explicit demands for control and censorship in the letter of February 14 are bad enough to exploit alarms across the country. Of course, it is possible that, like some other examples of gross incompetence and roofing by the Trump administration, the most extreme elements of this decreed, which prohibits lessons or activities about breed and racism, are quietly ignored. But even if this happens, this letter will still be the most extensive and repressive introduction of government's ideological control over universities in American history. The Trump administration calls for unprecedented interventions in the approvals and settings and a total ban on the DEI programs in all universities.

The repressive effects of the Trump government's demands after censorship could even exceed their wildest ambitions if the universities fear that the formation of the Ministry of Education fears with its authority to cut off all federal funds at universities that are considered disobedience to a measure. Trump and his henchmen are willing to not only abuse government rules, but also to break the law on purpose and to oppose the constitution: When Trump announced: “Whoever saves his country does not violate a law.” The threat of cutting federal funds for universities is no longer a paranoid imagination. It is just another weapon for a government that is willing to wage university formation and all other perceived enemies of the President War.

After the bidges administration, the pressure from title VI investigations against anti -Semitism encouraged the universities across the country to encourage the worst violations of the rights of proper process rights in the American locations than nobody presented an actual threat to federal funds. The Trump government has already promised to impose even more action on the criticism of Israel, but in this new letter suggests a radical redefinition of the anti -discriminatory right to suppress diversity and discussion about racism. If Colleges follow the commands of the Trump government to react to Pro-Diversity lawyers with even more repression than the universities have already focused on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, this will be a disaster for academic freedom.

It is not surprising that Donald Trump, a white supremacist and bigot, wants to prohibit any educator to mention the obvious fact that racism still exists in the country that has been elected as a racist president. As the enemy of the state, the beliefs of which are now banned by the Ministry of Education in all universities and schools in America, I hope that the millions of other new thoughts will become criminals with me in the art of the arrangement and resistance of our dear leader and his dear colleague.

Some groups for bourgeois freedoms have not managed to keep this threat to violently enough. While the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression denounced the Dear CollaGue letter from the Obama government in 2011 and claimed that it “proper procedural rights”, so much more serious, far-reaching and threatened collegine letter from the Trump administration, hardly earned any accusation because the fire made the education department available easily.

In contrast, Pen America immediately sentenced the letter as an “effort to ask ideological conformity by schools and universities”, and the American Association of University Professors (who already sued the Trump administration because of its previous anti-dei-Executive commands and won an injunction, the key parts of the letter “Wild Broad Over control ”.

In terms of government penetration into the universities, this is much worse than McCarthyism. Whether the actual repression on campus exceeds the suffocating atmosphere of the McCarthy era largely depends on how the campus react to the demands of the Trump government for massive censorship.

The universities have to refuse to follow these illegal commands. Sue to protect your rights and rights of your student faculty and the staff against a oppressive government; publicly denounce the unconstitutional censors' acts of the Trump government; Connect to oppose the nationwide repression; And take on clear and consistent guidelines to protect freedom of speech for everyone on campus.