On July 15, the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute published a “statement on higher education” that condemns American universities for everything from moving “society toward a new kind of tyranny” to waging “war on millions of Americans who simply want to live, work, worship, and raise families in peace.” The Manhattan Statement declares: “We call on the President of the United States to draft a new contract with the universities, which should be written into every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit.”
The signatories — who include right-wing media stars like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson — evidently believe that Donald Trump should have the unilateral power to “renegotiate the terms of the compact with the universities” and function as judge, jury and executioner if he decides that they are failing to meet these terms.
The statement recites conservative cultural grievances about universities being too left-wing; diversity, equity and inclusiveness initiatives; and campus radicalism. These are the same bugaboos used by the Trump administration to justify its assault on American higher education, including massive, unilateral funding cuts, halting enrollment for international students and attempting to impose ideological control over programs, operations and departments.
One institution that supports this brazen call for government control over American higher education is a young university that has built its brand on “fearless” nonpartisan truth-seeking — the University of Austin (UATX) in Texas. Many signatories of the Manhattan Statement are affiliated with UATX, such as the philosophers Alex Priou (associate professor of philosophy) and Peter Boghossian (founding faculty adviser), as well as historian Niall Ferguson and Hoover Institution fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, members of the Board of Trustees and the Board of Advisors, respectively.
UATX’s president, Carlos Carvalho, declared in a recent statement: “Universities have replaced truth-seeking with ideological activism. Academic rigor is almost nonexistent. Self-censorship is the norm. Equality under the law has been corrupted by DEI bureaucrats.” Carvalho concluded that the Manhattan Statement “points the way” toward fixing these problems and invited other universities to join him in embracing it. (I reached out to UATX several times for comment but received no response.)
UATX, founded in 2021 by Ferguson; the journalist Bari Weiss; Joe Lonsdale, the venture capitalist and co-founder of Palantir; and academic Pano Kanelos, claims its “rigorous curriculum champions civil discourse and intellectual risk-taking.” The university’s genesis was inspired as a reaction to wokeness, left-wing orthodoxy and DEI, which its founders believe have thoroughly corrupted American higher education. UATX’s dean, Ben Crocker, said the school’s mission is nothing less than “trying to instigate a revolution in American higher education,” and its donors include billionaire trader Jeff Yass, real estate mogul and conservative activist Harlan Crow and investor Len Blavatnik, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
UATX’s social media accounts regularly attack other universities for allegedly failing to live up to their stated principles. But the Trump administration has displayed contempt for some of the principles UATX claims to embrace — and UATX’s president just endorsed a statement that asks President Donald Trump to be the enforcer of “grants, payments, loans, eligibility, and accreditation.”
The administration used the elimination of federal funding as a weapon to force Columbia University to implement what the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) describes as a “restrictive speech code that punishes disfavored or dissenting viewpoints.” The administration has demanded that entire departments be placed under academic receivership and attempted to police admissions and disciplinary procedures.
Last week, Columbia agreed to pay a $200 million fine to restore funding that was cut by the Trump administration. Trump celebrated the settlement, while Education Secretary Linda McMahon described it as a “monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time.”
In a letter to Harvard in April, the Trump administration ordered the university to refuse admission to international students who are “hostile to American values” — those are the administration’s words, and it’s an entirely subjective standard that is wide open to abuse. It demanded that any international student guilty of a “conduct violation” be reported to federal authorities. Such “violations” apparently include protected speech, such as pro-Palestine protests or op-eds — the “violations” that led to the arrest of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk.
In an April 14 response to the Trump administration’s letter, Harvard stated that its demands are in “contravention of the First Amendment” and “invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.” The response concluded that “Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
The Free Press, founded and edited by Weiss, published an article by Christopher Rufo — the right-wing activist who has had significant influence on the Trump administration’s war on American universities — which introduced and then republished the Manhattan Statement in its entirety. Rufo lauded the statement because, he says, it “calls on Trump to advance six principles for reform: truth over ideology, institutional neutrality, color-blind equality, free speech, civil discourse, and administrative transparency.”
But neither Rufo nor the Manhattan Statement suggest any form of adjudication or review beyond Trump’s personal discretion.
Rufo claimed in the Free Press article that “we all have a common interest in seeing the universities succeed.” But in other interviews, he has said he wants universities to experience “existential terror” and would like to throw the “university sector as a whole into a significant recession.” He has claimed that conservatives must “entrench our ideas in the public sphere.” When he led a campaign to get then–Harvard President Claudine Gay fired, he was transparent about his motives and methods: “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”
Rufo isn’t just concerned about viewpoint discrimination and antisemitism on campus — he also believes conservatives must “fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere.”
One reason FIRE describes the Trump administration’s attacks on universities as a “hostile federal takeover” and “flatly unconstitutional” is that institutions must “receive notice, a hearing, and an opportunity to come into compliance voluntarily before the government can terminate funding.” If the authors of the Manhattan Statement were serious about academic freedom, they could have suggested mechanisms for institutional reform that go beyond the whims of the president.
FIRE also condemned the Trump administration’s use of “federal anti-discrimination law as a battering ram against institutional autonomy … to seize for itself power to control permissible speech and instruction on our campuses.” This is the MAGA ideological project UATX’s leaders have signed onto, not the Manhattan Statement’s high-minded rhetorical smokescreen about “pursuing truth, sustaining our highest traditions, and educating the future guardians of our republic.”
One of UATX’s founding values is its stated resistance to censorship and coercion in higher education. Indeed, on UATX’s homepage, it reads, “At UATX, students, faculty, and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution.”
Other universities are being subjected to a campaign of intimidation and ideological control backed by state power. Billions of dollars in scientific research funding have been cut.
This would be the perfect opportunity for UATX’s faculty and leadership to show that they’re motivated by more than just a loathing of “wokeness” and actually speak up on behalf of academic freedom. But the university’s endorsement of the Manhattan Statement suggests that this won’t happen any time soon.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
