President Trump announced on Saturday that he would soon sign an executive order threatening to cut off federal research money to colleges that fail to support free speech.
He made the announcement at a gathering outside Washington, D.C., of the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC.
“Today I’m proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research grants,” he said.
The crowd, including young people wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats, erupted in applause. Within an hour, the CPAC post of his announcement had been retweeted and liked thousands of times.
The president said he would sign the order “very soon” but gave no further details.
The announcement was red meat for an audience that has traditionally been among the president’s fiercest supporters. And it’s likely to appeal to conservative lawmakers who have increasingly sought to intervene in campus matters, particularly after free-speech skirmishes break out.
The Pew Research Center found last year that 79 percent of Republicans said they were unhappy with professors who inject their political and social opinions into class discussions, and 75 percent said colleges were too worried about protecting students from views that might offend them.
Before making the announcement, President Trump brought to the stage a conservative activist who was punched in the face last month at the University of California at Berkeley.
The activist, Hayden Williams, had been helping the university’s chapter of the conservative group Turning Point USA.
Williams told the crowd that students like himself face “discrimination, harassment, and worse if they dare to speak up on campus.”
The president told Williams that he has a great lawyer and suggested that he sue the university, and possibly the State of California.
“Ladies and gentlemen — he took a punch for all of us. … Here’s the good news: He’s going to be a very wealthy young man. Go get ’em, Hayden.”
The president’s latest threat echoes one he made in 2017 against Berkeley. He said he would cut off federal support for the university after unrest over the visit of a right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, turned violent.
Among those who fired back then were U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat whose district includes the Berkeley campus. She tweeted: “President Trump doesn’t have a license to blackmail universities. He’s the president, not a dictator, and his empty threats are an abuse of power.”
Trump himself later seemed to express doubts about his views, saying at a Turning Point USA event last year that the “vast majority” of people on campuses “want free speech” and that the campus free-speech crisis is “highly overblown.”
Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said in an interview on Saturday that the threatened order “is a solution in search of a problem.”
“Free speech is a core value of research universities because it is intimately connected to academic freedom,” he said.
The threat, Hartle said, is based on a single incident at Berkeley in which neither the assailant nor the victim was a Berkeley student, and “it’s not clear what the president believes Berkeley should have done differently.”
If the order is enforced, private, faith-based institutions would have to accept speakers whose views are antithetical to their own or risk losing all federal support, he said. And a “federal regulatory apparatus” would have to be set up to evaluate how colleges handle free-speech controversies.
“Such an executive order is likely to further weaponize freedom of speech as all sides seek to generate controversy,” Hartle said.
He added that it was ironic that the president is insisting on free speech when he has refused to let the government’s own scientists discuss climate change and has attacked the football player Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
