Higher Ed Takes a Backseat in Condemning Trump

A few weeks before the election, I wrote a short piece for The Review that warned, “higher education needs to develop a plan for what to do if the results of the election are challenged, overridden, or provoke civic unrest. This is not a drill.” While Election Day was remarkably peaceful, the violence that many of us feared took place on Wednesday, when an armed insurrection gripped the U.S. Capitol while Congress was meeting to certify the results of the Electoral College vote. We now face the heightened prospect of a violent or disrupted inauguration on January 20.

College presidents, union and association leaders, and many faculty members have condemned the rioters. But they must take an additional step and call for the removal of President Trump from office, by impeachment or invocation of the 25th Amendment, following the lead of hundreds of political scientists. An open letter states that Trump “has rejected the peaceful transfer of power, encouraged state legislators to overturn election results in their states, pressured a state official to change election results, and now incited a violent mob that shut down the counting of electoral votes and stormed the U.S. Capitol.”

Colleges and universities have thrived in the United States under both Democratic and Republican presidents, but they will not survive under an authoritarian government that seizes power in a coup. Since President Trump played a key role in organizing this insurrection, he has to go. As guardians of moral principles and reason, colleges must draw a line in the sand.

Higher ed can’t allow its moral leadership to be superseded by the National Association of Manufacturers, which called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, or Axe Body Spray, whose condemnation of “acts of violence and hate at the Capitol” probably reached more students via social media than did those of college presidents.

In the months and years ahead, colleges and universities will face decisions on whether to host former members of the Trump administration as guest lecturers, visiting scholars, or even professors. While it is against the instincts of the academy to prevent a diversity of voices from being heard, anyone who held a political appointment in the Trump administration should be excluded from such roles, with the possible exception of those who subsequently took the step of testifying before Congress to denounce the administration’s defiance of democratic norms and values, such as Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official.

Colleges depend on the openness uniquely afforded by a democratic society and cannot offer a platform to values that will ultimately undermine that openness. As bearers of the distinct cultural values of the Enlightenment, colleges must stand up for reason and democracy. And after what transpired at the Capitol on Wednesday, it’s clear that the defense of democracy requires the removal of President Trump from office.