BY SILKE-MARIA WEINECK
The following is reposted with permission from the Michigan Daily.
A few months ago, University [of Michigan] Provost Laurie McCauley banned diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements, the argument went, imposed inappropriate ideological litmus tests. And a few days ago, University President Santa Ono told the audience at an event hosted by the Anti-Defamation League, “We have to intentionally diversify our faculty to have a broad set of ideologies.” In other words, our president wants to hire faculty not based on the quality of their research and teaching but on the basis of their ideological commitments. The question becomes: Which ones, exactly?
Like University Regent Sarah Hubbard (R), who has made “viewpoint diversity” one of her most strident demands, Ono does not tell us which “ideologies” are under-represented at the University — all we know is that our new colleagues will be housed at the yet to be established Institute for Civil Discourse. The entity, according to President Ono, will not be devoted to strengthening civil society or defending the civil service but to teaching students to confront different arguments and perspectives — as if a university were a debating club rather than a truth-seeking enterprise, as if “discoursing civilly” were an academic discipline rather than a secondary virtue.
It is certainly true that University faculty skew heavily liberal, probably because Republicans and conservatives oppose so many well-supported theories about the world and human societies: that climate change is real and threatens our survival, that racism has significantly impeded the economic success and well-being of those it targets and continues to do so, that it is wrong to force women to stay pregnant against their will, that vaccines save lives, that neither sex nor gender are binary and so on. Most of us believe these things not because we are liberals — rather, we are liberals because the best data, the most cogent arguments and the best historical evidence tell us they are true.
We already passed an institutional neutrality bylaw to prevent anybody who wields institutional power here on campus to take a public stance “on political or social issues and events not directly related to its internal governance,” an odd directive seeing that decisions on University policy demands such a stance every day: we either allow our community members to choose their pronouns or we don’t; we either pursue carbon-neutral campus or we don’t; we either offer transgender care and abortions at our hospitals and clinics or we don’t; we either pursue admissions and hiring policies that seek to address past injustice or we don’t; we either arrest students protesting the war in Gaza and support their criminal prosecution or we don’t. A policy that prevents the University from articulating the very values and convictions that guide its policies creates a campus world resembling the TV show “Severance,” a bleak workplace allegory that splits the consciousness of workers into “innies” and “outies,” creating a neurological disconnect between the work they do and the world they inhabit.
The full absurdity of institutional neutrality is emerging now that MAGA politics most decisively are directly related to our internal operations. A vandalist government in Washington D.C. is dictating hiring and admissions decisions as well as free speech rights on campus, and we have yet to hear a single critical word about this demolition of all we hold dear here from the president, the provost or the University Board of Regents, confirming what critics of institutional neutrality warned against when the bylaw was hastily written and passed without consulting either elected student or faculty governance: that neutrality is a policy designed to shield the right-wing from the critique of one of the most powerful institutions in American life — the home of expert researchers and rigorous thinkers.
While every email we receive from the central administration signals both vague reassurances about “our values” (whatever they are, we no longer dare say) and secret meetings of powerful people from whose discussions the campus community must apparently be shielded, Ono appeared at the ADL event to promise the powerful lobbying organization that he will submit to their wishes. The ugliest moment of his performance came when moderator Dan Senor, a Republican, claimed that U-M staff is antisemitic.
“The one thing I heard over and over is the discomfort many students feel in the classroom with professors who are hostile to Israel and, as you articulated, hostile to Jews,” Senor said.
Surely, when an ideologue claims that your faculty is teeming with antisemites, you angrily demand proof and, absent of such proof, an immediate retraction of the slander. Instead, Ono boasts of the firing of Rachel Dawson, the former director of the University’s Office of Academic and Multicultural Initiatives, whose career was sacrificed after a shoddy investigation I wrote about in “The Chronicle of Higher Education.”
Ono was then asked how he would deal with tenured faculty. Rather than defending them, their academic freedom and their First Amendment rights, as integrity and good leadership would demand, he responded that “there is a process with tenured faculty as well.” It is difficult to imagine a more craven or more ominous response.
In the time between Ono’s ADL performance and the publication of this essay, the MAGA administration has announced that is has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding to Columbia University, with even steeper cuts to follow the administration’s news release titled, “Members of the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism take swift action to protect Jewish students in response to inaction by Columbia University.” The cynicism is breathtaking: Columbia has bent over backwards to accommodate the ludicrous right-wing narrative of rampant campus antisemitism. 23 percent of Columbia’s undergraduates are Jewish, and those cuts will harm their education, probably irreversibly. And on March 9, 2025, ICE agents pushed their way into Columbia-owned university housing and arrested Mahmoud Khalil in front of his wife, who is eight months pregnant. He’s a permanent resident of the United States, who had led pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia.
Tricia McLaughlin, the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, asserted that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” In other words, not even his jailers deny that he was arrested and slated for deportation because of his political beliefs, which are protected by the First Amendment. Shockingly and unsurprisingly, the ADL cheered: “We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.”
In the meantime, New York Times reporting suggests that the University of Michigan has survived round one of the academic hunger games. We are not on the list of nine institutions targeted for demolition next, though that list sounds like pretty good company: Harvard University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California (Los Angeles), the University of California (Berkeley), the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California. Did all that eager obeisance pay off? Alas, no, the University of Michigan made it onto yet another list, this one put out by professional wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, who moonlights as Trump’s secretary of education.
To recap: We are institutionally neutral on a U.S. administration that targets our very existence and whose hooligan in chief, Elon Musk, disgraced the nation by performing a Hitler salute at the presidential inauguration (or, as the ADL called it, “an awkward gesture” which met the precise definition of a Hitler salute purely by accident). But we are openly collaborating with an organization that defames our students, staff and faculty as antisemites and defends authoritarian police practices, and we are explicitly calling for hiring faculty based on ideological criteria. Wired recently reported that one of the teenagers at Elon Musk’s lawless “Department of Government Efficiency” enterprise operates online under the pseudonym “Big Balls.” If the University continues on this path, perhaps we should go by “No Balls U” from now on.
Silke-Maria Weineck is Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at the University of Michigan.
