WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON HERE?

THE TRUMP SPEECH POLICE: COMING TO A UNIVERSITY (NEWSPAPER, NEWS NETWORK, OR SOCIAL MEDIA FEED) NEAR YOU! A QUICK WORD ON WHY HARVARD FIGHTS, AND WHY YOU SHOULD REREAD OUR BILL OF RIGHTS.

The following quoted paragraph is an example of just one of the many prescriptive changes in university management, hiring, admissions, classroom discussion and other educational practices stipulated in an unprecedented demand letter sent April 11, 2025, to the President of Harvard University by three ‘unelected federal bureaucrats’ required to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government” as well as, according to President Trump, its tax exempt status.

This excerpt more than any other of the highly intrusive demands reveals that the government’s interest is not all or even in major part about countering antisemitism. Instead, it is an attempt to use federal appropriations as a cudgel (directly forbidden by the Supreme Court in the case of Medicaid expansion in its initial Obamacare ruling) to put speech in all its educational expressions at Harvard under direct governmental supervision in open violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Trump Administration evident belief that the Amendment’s provision that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech “ does not apply to enforcement of Executive Orders of an allegedly all-powerful President means that, if it works at Harvard, official censorship may extend far beyond higher education to other heretofore independent institutional sources of information that are touched by federal dollars or tax status.

“Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring. By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate. The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025. Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests. Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity. If the review finds that the existing faculty in the relevant department or field are not capable of hiring for viewpoint diversity, or that the relevant teaching unit is not capable of admitting a critical mass of students with diverse viewpoints, hiring or admissions within that department, field, or teaching unit shall be transferred to the closest cognate department, field, or teaching unit that is capable of achieving viewpoint diversity. This audit shall be performed and the same steps taken to establish viewpoint diversity every year during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028. “

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/14/us/trump-harvard-demands.html

Other demands in the Administration’s letter would simultaneously require Harvard to adhere strictly to the government’s criteria for solely “merit-based” hiring and admissions, and to immediately, demonstrably and permanently “shutter all diversity” efforts at the University “under whatever name.” The letter’s paragraph quoted above, however, would impose blatantly contradictory faculty hiring and student admissions initiatives designed solely to achieve the government’s definition of a “critical mass” of “viewpoint diversity” in every “teaching unit” at Harvard.

The required extraordinary hiring and admissions solely “for diversity” that would achieve a comprehensive “critical mass” of viewpoints (that Harvard and the government would next “translate” into specifics) suggests a form of creeping ideological quota system totally inconsistent with the “merit-based” processes that the Administration seeks to impose simultaneously on Harvard’s faculty and student intake!

Unless the Trump officials are surprisingly conceding for the very first time that diversity itself has its merits, their demand letter is at war with itself. Nonetheless, the Administration’s overriding intent is clear: to establish at the highest level a template for federal controls on personal and institutional speech and imposition of ideological censorship in hjgher education, under the guise of enforcing existing civil rights laws through financial coercion, and dare the Supreme Court to enforce the First Amendment against that effort during a time of when so-called elite institutions like Harvard are particularly disfavored and distrusted by the President’s “MAGA” political base.

As the lawyers say: res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself .

Time for everyone to speak up for free speech as the Constitution means it, not as the government of the day deems it acceptable. What university — or any U. S. institution in receipt of federal money, tax exemptions, licenses or other forms of official permits like admitting or hiring foreign persons — could accept the Trump diktat to annually “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse” and retain its integrity? https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/harvard-trump-dhs-international-students-enrollment-e4bc3ea6?mod=djemalertNEWS

No words or phrases in Article II of the Constitutional defining presidential powers give that office the authority to commission a federal Speech Police Force, even in a “national emergency.” Speech is not good that can be tariffed to force compliance with Presidential ideology, unless the First Amendment is a dead letter.

And while we are considering Trump’s assertion of unprecedented police powers, let’s reread the one-sentence but very powerful Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.“

By all accounts, the now infamous El Salvador “not so nice” prison now housing migrants from the U.S. without due process and potentially according to the Administration American citizens as well is the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.

“Incarcerated Salvadorans are packed into grossly overcrowded cells, beaten regularly by prison personnel and denied medicines even when they are available. Inmates are frequently subjected to punishments including food deprivation and electric shocks. Indeed, a U.S. State Department’s 2023 country report on El Salvador noted the ‘harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.’

“The human rights organization Cristosal estimates that hundreds have died from malnutrition, blunt force trauma, strangulation and lack of lifesaving medical treatment. Often, their bodies are buried by government workers in mass graves without notifying families.

“Although El Salvador is a signatory to the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture, Amnesty International concluded after multiple missions to the country and interviews with victims and their families that there is ‘systemic use of torture’ in Salvadoran prisons.”

https://theconversation.com/beatings-overcrowding-and-food-deprivation-us-deportees-face-distressing-human-rights-conditions-in-el-salvadors-mega-prison-250739

The Supreme Court has shown a willingness to hold even lesser examples of cruel and inhumane treatments of prisoners in the case of American jails, including in California.

“In Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97 (1976) , the Supreme Court established that the Eighth Amendment may be violated due to factors related to a prisoner's confinement. A prison guard's deliberate indifference to a prisoner's serious illness or injury would constitute cruel and unusual punishment which would violate the Eighth Amendment.

In Brown v. Plata, 131 S.Ct. 1910 (2011) , the Court held that prison overcrowding in California was unconstitutional because the living conditions resulted in medical care violations. The Court reasoned that prisoners would suffer and could die if they did not receive adequate medical care.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/cruel_and_unusual_punishment#:~:text=Using%20this%20standard%2C%20the%20Supreme,taunted%2C%20and%20denied%20bathroom%20breaks.

No person in America should ever again be remitted by the Administration to the jails of President Bukele of El Salvador; our Supreme Court must hold that that our Constitution means what it plainly says.