BY JOHN K. WILSON

The AAUP has issued a new statement, “Against Anticipatory Obedience,” that warns colleges to avoid “acting to comply in advance” before repression is actually required by the Trump administration. The danger of anticipatory obedience applies not just to colleges censoring speech, but also to national organizations seeking to influence Trump’s actions.

One example is a letter to Trump from Heterodox Academy, written by its president, John Tomasi, which declared: “During your first administration and in recent comments on YouTube, you rightly championed free speech on college campuses.” In those comments cited by Tomasi, Trump was not “rightly championing free speech” but instead calling for massive repression and demanding “aggressive prosecution” of anyone involved in identifying misinformation. In his only reference to college campuses, Trump declared, “If any US university is discovered to have engaged in censorship activities or election interferences in the past such as flagging social media content for removal, […] those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years and maybe more.” Flagging social media content for removal is not necessarily a bad thing, and millions of us do it routinely. Cutting off all federal funding because anyone at a university ever requested removal of content from a social media site is bizarre. Trump’s proposal is clearly unconstitutional, unjust, and terrible for free expression. To claim that the advocate of this incredibly repressive idea has “championed free speech” is appalling.

I can understand why Heterodox Academy would want to praise Trump. He is a dangerous, narcissistic lunatic who attacks anyone who criticizes him and is easily manipulated by fawning support. False praise and obsequious subservience are common approaches when dealing with him. But is it a morally just position for an organization committed to speaking the truth to take?

The Heterodox Academy letter is also flawed in the federal solutions it proposes for free speech on campus. It correctly notes that colleges often wrongly restrict free expression but proposes a too-easy cure: “Your administration can fix this once and for all by pushing for Congress to put legislation on your desk that codifies free speech protections on public college campuses and requires private institutions to both disclose their free speech policies and certify that those policies contractually bind them.”

Federal compulsion of policies at public colleges is a dangerous expansion of government power over colleges. By failing to specify exactly what these free speech protections in legislation should be, this letter gives the Trump administration a blank check to engage in censorship in the name of free speech, which is precisely what Trump has already done with DEI policies.

Forced disclosure of free speech policies is an unnecessary regulation when private colleges routinely inform students about their policies. There are many problems with campus free speech, but secret policies protecting free expression are not among them. Making free speech policies contractually binding by order of Congress will only give colleges an easy excuse to remove free speech policies to reduce the risk of litigation.

All these approaches urged by Heterodox Academy ignore the importance of shared governance and persuading people to embrace free speech, rather than the false shortcut of the government dictating what free expression on campus means.

It is highly likely that Trump and the Republican Congress will use federal legislation to impose restrictions on free speech that they prefer, such as enforcing the IHRA definition of antisemitism to ban criticism of Israel (as Trump dictated in his previous administration). Even if this devoted enemy of free speech somehow signed legislation that purely promoted free expression on campus, it would not achieve this goal. Campus speech codes are too complex to be fixed by legislation. It is easy for colleges to invent new repressive provisions or to enforce broad rules in ways that censor dissent. The most likely result of federal intrusion into academia would be a reduction in free speech, where legislature adds the censorship it prefers on top of the censorship inevitably allowed by the discretion of administrators.

One example of this is Heterodox Academy’s proposal to enforce stricter time, place, and manner limits and “insist that institutions use those policies when unprotected conduct creates a hostile environment.”

Time, place, and manner rules are a restraint on colleges requiring careful limits on censorship under only extreme circumstances, and they are already too often misused by administrators. When the government forces colleges to impose stricter time, place, and manner limits, it is almost certain to increase repression based on politics rather than lead to fair enforcement of neutral rules.

As Tomasi’s letter correctly points out, both Title IX and Title VI have been abused by the federal government to pressure colleges to violate due process rights and restrict free speech. The solution to aid free speech should be obvious: Reduce federal control over colleges. Instead, Tomasi’s letter embraces an amorphous expansion of federal power over higher education, an idea that would be alarming under the best presidents but is downright dangerous in the hands of a determined enemy of colleges and free speech such as Donald Trump. Heterodox Academy is correctly devoted to promoting viewpoint diversity, but it fails to see the dangers of using the power of the federal government to achieve this goal

Heterodox Academy’s letter also reflects an inadequate commitment to free speech, such as when it states that colleges have an interest in “preserving libraries as places of study” separate from the section about disruptions. This appears to be an endorsement of Harvard’s ban on non-disruptive silent protests in its libraries, which has been one of the more outrageous campus attacks on the right to protest and a direct repudiation of the Tinker standard under the First Amendment. Campus bans on disruption are already ill-defined and easily abused, but once disruption is abandoned in favor of bans on any indoor protests—including silent ones—it presents a serious threat to free expression.

I know that an honest expression of the truth about Trump’s opposition to free speech would undermine Heterodox Academy’s efforts to influence his administration. But encouraging Donald Trump to enforce free speech on campus is like giving a serial killer a pile of weapons and hoping he’ll only murder bad people. Creating more free speech on campus is a goal I completely agree with. But increased federal control of colleges cannot effectively compel free speech to exist, and it poses the far greater danger of giving a regime with authoritarian desires a green light to impose its repressive will on higher education.

John K. Wilson is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies, Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire, and the forthcoming book The Attack on Academia.