Transcript: Elite Colleges Reject Trump’s Authoritarian “Compact”

So often people haven’t looked at the details of that, but the people that have said, Oh, it doesn’t sound so bad, right? And some people are saying, Oh, some people in Virginia even think this is positive. And I think that shows you how far down this path towards authoritarianism we’ve gone, where we’re essentially congratulating ourselves on holding onto some of our rights, and we’re saying—we’re accepting the fact that we’re negotiating over our rights.

And in a democracy, you do not negotiate over your rights. You don’t negotiate the authoritarian away. That’s not a democracy when we’re doing that. And they did that on the heels of having their president run out by the Trump administration. So they’ve already given up their independence. And now they’re doing that. So that’s a very bad thing.

On the other hand, I think what we’re seeing—and this is what you mentioned—is that a lot of universities have rejected this compact, and they did so somewhat collectively. And something that people like me have been calling for for months is that higher education has to unite as a sector. They have to get together and push back as a sector. And I think one reason that this is important is that a lot of people out there, for a lot of different reasons, don’t care about higher education.

But it’s a clear target of authoritarians. And there’s one piece of evidence that we know Donald Trump is operating as authoritarian is he’s trying to shut down higher education. This is what happened in Hungary. It’s what happened in Turkey. It’s what happened in Nazi Germany, is people have gone after universities. Yet universities in the United States, especially, because we have such a vibrant field of higher education, have a true identity that allows for collective action potential.

I mean, we’re all friends. We all know each other. These university presidents know each other. And they can get together, and they’re not competitive against each other in exactly the same way like businesses who are always trying to look for a leg up. They have some higher principle that unites them, at least in theory. And they can get together and actually be that collective bulwark of civil society that can push back on people like Trump.

And there’s a lot of things that make me worried about that because they haven’t done that super effectively at all times. But one thing we’ve seen, at places like Harvard, for example, is that the scholars in higher education who, normally, we want to spend our time in our books and our computers, are really finding their voice about these things. And it took us a little while to find our feet. But they’ve been really successful, and they’ve really pushed back in a way that is making our leaders accountable.

So these lawsuits, for example, that Harvard won against Trump, one thing that people don’t often recognize about those is those were actually started by Harvard professors. It wasn’t a Harvard administration that sued Trump.

BACON: Oh interesting, OK.

ENOS: Yeah, it was Harvard professors, and then the university itself actually joined. And so this example where if you would have asked me three years ago if a bunch of Harvard professors would get together and say they were going to sue, have enough joint collective action to sue the United States, I would have said there is no way that’s going to happen. But they found their voice. You know, Harvard had an AAUP chapter that, all of a sudden (this is the American Association of University Professors, almost like a labor union for professors) has tried—the reason it was put together at Harvard was to try to protect professors, protect things like the value of higher education, our free speech as professors, our academic freedom. And it’s played a real important role in resistance. And so it’s not just Harvard. There’s places across the country where in some ways, the people that really have a stake in this, who are the faculty and the students, are coming together in a way that I think is providing some counterweights to what’s going on with the Trump administration.

And so I think if we can continue our voice, that that’s going to be a powerful pushback in a way that, frankly, things like corporate America are not really capable of.

BACON: The final thing I want to talk about is, one of my former colleagues at the [Washington] Post wrote this piece about this idea that if you did a survey of faculty in most universities, you’d find the overwhelming majority of faculty voted for Harris instead of Trump. And so this has led this claim that universities need to increase, quote-unquote, viewpoint diversity.

So talk about that idea. I guess I’m uncomfortable with the idea that we’re hinting universities should kind of ask people what their politics are, and then hire them accordingly, and at 50-50. On the other hand, I used to complain when universities or other institutions had 2 percent Black people. So I think there is something. There’s a tricky thing here. It’s like, diversity is good; viewpoint diversity is probably good.

I don’t necessarily want to have us counting who voted for who. So how do we have diversity, quote-unquote, without going into bad methods of that?

ENOS: OK, so Perry, I could talk about this at length. You’ll have to cut me off if I get going, because this is something I’ve thought a lot about. Let me say the first, most important thing, which is that the federal government has zero business in trying to regulate the ideology of university faculty. That is full stop.

BACON: I guess their view is, we give lots of money to universities, so we get to talk about how they implement their—

ENOS: Yeah, sure. But what that is is the government using coercion to put an ideological test on a private entity, or even a public entity. And both of those things have been—a plain reading of the Constitution tells you that’s against the Constitution. But the courts have ruled on this very clearly. And it’s an affront to democracy to say that we’re going to go in and measure the ideology of the people that work somewhere, and then control how much money they have.

And just to put another point on this, which I think is important to talk about, is one reason you know this is authoritarian in some way is that universities actually are very small recipients of federal dollars in the grand scheme of things. So if you want to talk about places that receive a lot of federal dollars, we should look at, for example, our defense industry. All of the biggest recipients of federal dollars are: Boeing, increasingly Elon Musk’s various corporations, places like that.

And nobody’s doing an ideological test in Boeing. Right? You know, if you went and looked at the corporate board of Boeing, what do you think their voting patterns are? And so this is targeted at a certain group. And that’s an affront to democracy. We just can’t do that. That’s full stop. Now, there’s another question, which is a separate question that I think is a very good one, which is, how should universities be if we want to operate to be the best that we can be; if we want to fulfill our mission to educate and to research.

And I actually personally think that having something that approaches closer to ideological balance is really important for that. And if you looked at—often now when I talk about universities, I’m somebody that comes on to talk about how they should be resisting the Trump administration—but if you went back a few years and you looked for things that people quoted me on, it was often about this issue. I would say that universities would be doing a service to ourselves and to our students, and actually improve the public view, if we could find ways to become more ideologically balanced.

And so I really think that’s important. Now, there’s a question of how do we get there. And that’s more complicated because—

BACON: Because that would be, like, it’d be hard for a Black woman in America currently to get hired if the search is for a Republican, because there are very few. That’s kind of where I get nervous.

ENOS: Yeah, exactly. This is the problem, right? It becomes self-reinforcing. So let’s say you’re a smart young person and you’re interested in some kind of pursuit in the sciences, or the social sciences, or even humanities. And you look around, and you say, well, but I’m a conservative. Do I want to go into that? And you can understand why they wouldn’t, right? And so I wouldn’t, if I was going to be an extreme minority and even potentially have my ideas looked down on and mocked.

And that does happen at universities. We have to be honest about that, that we often disparage conservative ideas, right? And so those things can—that’s a true state of the world, and it makes it hard to overcome this problem. As I said, you absolutely cannot overcome that with some kind of government interference. That’s like full stop. That’s the end of the world.

But universities need to take a serious look at this. There’s a really bad taste in our mouth right now to talk about—people throw around this phrase “affirmative action for conservatives.” And at the same time, we’re stripping away race-based affirmative action. That just sounds absurd. And I can understand why people don’t want to go down that path because the idea that those are two things we’d be doing at the same time sound almost like an affront to both ideas, in many ways.

So I think the way we need to think about this as a university is to take a step back from the current moment we’re in where we’re being pressured by an authoritarian and say, what is the way that we would approach this if we had—we’re going to approach it as an intellectual problem, something that’s a long-term problem that we have to solve for the good of our universities and, in many ways, for the good of the place of universities in our society.

And ultimately, we might say that we want to do things where we can think about creating ways to get more conservatives on faculty, to have more conservative voices among our students, and all those things. That would make us stronger in the end. But it’s not an easy problem to solve in the same way that—I don’t like this parallel, but it’s one that people have talked about, and you mentioned it when you first started—about how things like bringing in racial and gender equality at universities.

I want to be clear, this isn’t the same thing. I don’t think of politics as a protected class. But we wanted more racial diversity, and more gender diversity at universities because it made us stronger. Universities were worse off in the 1960s when they were all white men than when they became more diverse—and I think we’d be stronger if we were more politically diverse too. And that was a hard problem to solve then, and we figured it out. And this is a hard problem to solve now. But I think we can figure it out in a way that would make us stronger in the long run.

BACON: But I guess JD Vance would say, We’ve given you time to solve this problem. You’re not solving it, so now we’re going to solve it for you by … This is not a new issue, that academia is considered too left. I guess it wasn’t a new problem in 1960 that academia was very white.

ENOS: No, that’s right. Yeah, I mean, it’s a hard problem. And but you’re not going to solve it by an authoritarian attack. That’s for sure. And one thing that we have to say really clearly here is, unfortunately, the idea of ideological diversity has also been conflated with this idea of things like free speech, for example. And so often, you read this compact on higher education that Donald Trump put forth. And it talked about how they—in the same paragraph, it talked about controlling the ideology of faculty and then said free speech is very important.

And so we have to be very clear that Donald Trump and JD Vance, and people in that circle, they don’t care about free speech, actually, and they don’t care about ideological diversity either. What they want is [for] universities to be more in their image. And we can see this in the way that faculty have been pressured to be punished, have lost their jobs because of things they say. We’ve seen this in a lot of red states now.

And those two issues, ultimately, have to be separated. And if we let people that don’t actually care about ideological diversity and don’t actually care about free speech, but are just using those as fronts in order to shape universities in their image, then we’re going down a very dangerous road. And so those of us that actually care about ideological diversity from the perspective of saying that will make us stronger pedagogically, it will make us stronger researchers, it’ll make us people that hear from more diverse ideas, which always make us smarter, we have to solve it from that perspective of truly caring about it, not from some sort of political mission.

BACON: Let me ask, because we use the term “lasting ideological diversity” and conservatives. We’ve sort of conflated these things. But I went to a Black church when I was a kid. It was working class. People were not super politically engaged. We all probably voted for—most people voted for the Democratic candidate, but [there] was actually a fair amount of disagreement about how should schools work, the police, et cetera.

Versus, when I worked at The Washington Post, in the opinion section, we had a range of from Hillary Clinton to Jeb Bush. I don’t know that that was … We had more partisan diversity. I don’t know that we had more—I guess I’m nervous about the idea that there are two ideologies in America [and] we need to balance those out, as opposed to there being a broad … a lot of Black institutions have plenty of people who think differently.

They might just not have a party—. When we say, I hope we mean, actually, a mix of socialists, libertarians, not just R and D, which I think is very … we have two parties. We shouldn’t reduce everyone’s thinking to that, in my view at least. I just want to talk about that a little bit.

ENOS: Yeah, well, look. I one hundred percent agree with you. And I think this is part of the problem when we try to approach these issues not from a perspective of what are we actually trying to accomplish intellectually, but from the perspective of how are we going to gain political points, or in Trump’s perspective, how are we actually going to try to shut down criticism in the way authoritarians do, and try to shape American institutions in his image? I mean, what he’s trying to do.

And when we respond to that, rather than thinking about it from the perspective of what are we trying to accomplish and what are our goals, then we end up reducing it to these sort of reductionist paradigms like, oh, we just need to balance conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And if you think about institutions in America, institutions aren’t set up that way. Right? You know, the NRA doesn’t have Democrats running around as board.

You know, the ACLU, unfortunately, I think would be better if they did. But in this day and age, they don’t have a ton of Republicans. But it’s not clear, from an intellectual perspective, that institutions should be set up with partisan balance. But what you’re asking, and I think is the way universities should be, which is, should we have something that allows for an exchange of different ideas across different viewpoints?

Now, one important thing to mention is that universities actually—and this is part of the problem because this has become politicized; there’s this caricature of universities, where we’re all somewhere in between socialist and Marxist or something like that. And that’s our ideological—of course, that’s not true. You’re meeting faculty members—

BACON: This school is not full of Marxists, obviously, you know. Yeah.

ENOS: Your median faculty member is kind of a center-left person. And a lot of those, 20 years ago, probably would have been Republicans. Because a lot of them are rich folks that have a lot invested in the system. And it’s just the Republican Party has moved away from them. So now they find themselves as Democrats. And that’s true. There’s some radicals running around here, but that’s diversity, right? Radicals are part of the diversity too.

And so there is that kind of exchange of ideas, and you’re absolutely right. One thing we should be measuring, when we think about this problem, is what is actual ideological diversity? Let’s just not measure everybody and ask who they voted for because there’s a lot of people that disagree, and in one way, because it’s reducing things to a binary.

BACON: Binary, right.

ENOS: Yeah, they all voted for Harris. But there’s a lot of diversity in there, right? And in some ways, you can see this. This all goes on in the backdrop, for example, of what happened in the last couple of years on campuses around the country with the protests and the conflicts over the war in Gaza. People treated this as a bad thing, where we had all these protests on campus, and people talked about this tension on universities.

But to me, in many ways, that was the success of diversity in universities. Look what happened. I mean, we had people wildly—yeah, it was a very touchy subject. And we have people—and many institutions aren’t like this, and this is why they didn’t experience this—we had people with wildly different worldviews. We had people from different parts of the world. We have Jewish Israelis. We have Arab Palestinians. We have people from other parts of those countries. We have people from different religious backgrounds.

We have people who are deeply conservative when it comes to these issues in the Middle East. We have people that are very liberal when it comes to these issues in the Middle East, and we’re all existing in the same community, right? And we’re trying to sort these out. And every once in a while, people get kind of angry and yell at each other, but that’s really rare. And the rest of the time, they’re just making their voices heard. Some of them are protesting one direction, some are protesting another direction.

Sometimes they’re coming in the classroom and having respectful debates about these things, and that’s actually happening almost nowhere else in America. And that’s actually a really amazing thing. And you can choose, you can point to all kinds of other issues that people come here and have diverse viewpoints on and argue about, and that’s actually an amazing success.

BACON: Because that’s not a D and R issue. I hadn’t thought of it that way. The issue is not D and R. It’s more complicated.

ENOS: Yeah, and so one way to frame this whole conversation we’re having—and this is often lost, so I’m glad you’ve given me an opportunity to talk about it—is we talk about these universities being these very single-minded and closed-minded places. And that’s a complete mischaracterization. I would argue that we are some of the most open-minded, wildly diverse-thinking places in the entire country, if not the world.

People come here and they argue about stuff and they have different viewpoints. They come from amazingly diverse backgrounds. I think it’s a problem, and we started the conversation this way to say, that we’re voting 95 percent for one party. And I wish we voted more broadly. But to reduce that to saying that we are an ideologically constrained place, or something like that, or a place that has no disagreement, or has groupthink or something, I think is just absurd.

BACON: Because I guess if you have five parties, like other countries—I guess on the Harvard campus, the most right-wing candidate would probably not get many votes on the Harvard campus. That is a problem [for] that person, but the other four parties might get some.

ENOS: Oh, yeah, they would. And look. If the Republican Party moved back to the center in the United States, of course they would get more votes at places like Harvard. I mean, we can’t expect people to follow the party as it moves one direction, and one way to put this, is one of the things we value in the United States—and actually, I think this is something that, ultimately, hopefully, can get us through this moment—is we have a lot of value in things like civic education and understand the principles of democracy in places, things like that.

And we teach things like that at Harvard; our professors understand that and things like that. And as the Republican Party has moved away from that, especially in the last year, and completely abandoned that, then you can understand why people aren’t willing to put their name behind that. But it doesn’t mean there’s not conservatives on campus. It doesn’t mean there’s not people that, given another situation, would vote for conservative policies, and that’s OK.

We have conservatives and liberals in the world. I’m not a conservative, but there are people that are out there, and they have legitimate ideas. And we can compete in elections to see who wins. But we have to have a party that believes in democracy first, and one of them has moved away from it.

BACON: Brian, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully, the audience has too. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate it.

ENOS: Yeah, thank you. It was great.

BACON: Good to see you.