Trump, UC Berkeley, and the Federal Funding Whip

A President may not find it simple or straightforward to use direct executive orders to cut off funds to universities that tolerate disruption of speech or exclude speakers based on the content of their speech. (That’s this morning’s Presidential tweet story, if you slept in.) But the power that the Department of Education and allied agencies have gathered to themselves over university life has steadily mounted, often against feeble resistance from the universities themselves, as in the Title IX instance. That gives an administration plenty of handles to make its will known, a process previewed in October, as to Trump, by Chronicle of Higher Education correspondent Steve Kolowich, who also spoke to me for the story. He quotes Alexander Holt, an education‐​policy analyst at New America, saying: “I could see a Trump administration going crazy on these ‘Dear Colleague’ letters.”


Two years ago I cited several examples of rule by Dear Colleague letter, as I called it, in this area. (More here.) And I noted one big problem with invoking judicial oversight to check the federal government’s power:

It may be difficult to persuade a college to serve as a test case, given the annihilating possibility of a federal funds cutoff as the penalty of its presumption.

University administrators have submitted meekly for years now to rule by federal “Dear Colleague” letter. Now it will be Trump appointees writing those letters. If the administrators wish to retain some measure of independence from control by Washington, D.C., they may need to grasp that the hour is growing late — and that it wasn’t such a good idea to grow dependent on the federal dollar in the first place. (adapted from Overlawyered).