Yale University President Surrenders to Trump Regime Demands

Interview with Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy and chairman of American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, conducted by Scott Harris

yale president surrenders to trump

Jason Stanley discusses Trump’s very open escalation of threats against the November midterm election, rising violence from masked ICE agents, the building of concentration camps nationwide—as the regime criminalizes and targets voting rights groups, journalists, progressive dissidents, universities and perceived enemies. Stanley is author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

SCOTT HARRIS: We begin our program this evening by welcoming to our program, Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy and chairman of American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. And if you follow our interviews with the professor during these last several years, you’ll know he left the United States in his job at Yale University with his family to go to Canada because of the threat of authoritarianism here in the U.S. Jason is the author of seven books. His latest titles are Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Professor Stanley, thank you so much for making time to be on our Counterpoint program tonight.

JASON STANLEY: Thank you. It’s always great to be in conversation with you, Scott, in these existential times.

SCOTT HARRIS: Oh God, yes. And your voice is needed now more than ever. So yeah, much appreciation to speak with our audience tonight. I just wanted to get a quick word in about the important work that you’re doing up in Canada at the University of Toronto at the Munk Center. I know you’re working with your former Yale University colleagues, Professor Timothy Snyder and Professor Marci Shore, who also left Yale, and you’re studying and sending the alarm about the rising international threat of fascism. So say a word about the Munk School and what you’re doing there.
JASON STANLEY: Yeah, so I mean, we’re trying to create a center to sort of bring together people working on fascist attacks on democratic institutions across the world, because these people work together. I just returned from three weeks in Germany doing work against the Alternative for Deutschland, Germany’s fascist party. And everything we see in the United States is being done there and then some. And they’re obviously working together. I mean, it’s public record that they’re working together. The language of remigration comes from Austria and Germany via the Alternative for Deutschland, the Germany’s far right party now leading in the polls, use it essentially as a campaign slogan. And their new party program talks a lot about the themes of my book, Erasing History, about changing the German education system to focus on the 19th century, not the 20th century for obvious reasons. And the school program, the attacks on schools and universities are really front and center for the far right party in Germany, Alternative for Deutschland, just as they are in the United States, as well as of course the whole Germany First program, which the world is familiar with from the past.
So these movements, these far right movements that are really winning across the world are working with each other. They have a joint program to bring universities to heel, school systems to heel, to change the education systems, to change the immigration systems, to close the borders, to take over courts, to take over all the institutions that might support democracy and democratic thinking and culture. And so what we want to do with the Munk School and with our initiative that I’m building up is to bring people together so that they can see these international structures. We want to bring journalists to talk about the attack on media, academics, people working with say, the American Association of University Professors to talk about the attacks on universities and strategize together just like the far right is strategizing together.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Professor Stanley, we’ve been tracking the battle that’s going on at Yale University, your former workplace. And we’ve had Professor HoSang here as well as some other alumni and students to talk about opposition to behind closed door negotiations between the president of the university at Yale and the Justice Department where they are threatening the university with a severe cutback of billions of dollars in money, funds for federal funds for university research projects. And there’s a lot of concern that President Maurie McInnis at Yale may cave in and create some kind of deal that would affect curriculum, affect admissions policy, impact foreign students and the like. And just tonight, a news story broke that you brought to my attention before we went on the air that there’s a new letter from the Trump administration calling on universities all across the United States to publicly respond to a series of questions about admissions policies, foreign influence, affordability and campus protests.
The letter to all university presidents and board members from the head of the U.S. Department of Education, Trump’s Department of Education, asked institutions to answer the inquiry in their own words and to post their responses in a public statement online. Professor Stanley, you’ve been following this and something I hadn’t seen that you brought to my attention as well, which is President McInnis’ response to this new demand by the Trump regime.
JASON STANLEY: So, Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, has issued a letter to ask universities to prominently post on their websites how they’re addressing the crisis of higher education and statements of principle to be posted prominently on institutional websites. They’re manifestly completely incoherent. They call for intellectual pluralism, which here is of course calling essentially to hire conservatives. It calls for depoliticizing academia, but at the very same time, it says that American universities must put Americans and American interests first and orient the research enterprise to support the country’s economic insecurity needs and putting American societal success out of global commitments. So this is very similar to…
I mean, I just want to say that this is what far right movements, including the Nazis said universities were for, to promote national interests. So authoritarians regularly call on universities to promote national interests above, say, interests of truth, knowledge, freedom, human rights. So this is very clear, clearly a politicization of the university. It’s calling on the universities to serve in American security interests. So the interests of American empire, so for example, presumably the interests of Israel, the current Israeli government and whoever else the United States is saying is an American security interest. So this is a clear call for the politicization of the university. And President McInnis sent a letter taking this very seriously and saying, “Oh, well, let’s have a university-wide discussion of how we can meet this,” when this is a very clear call to politicize the university, to stack the university with people with certain political viewpoints, so bypassing experts.

And McInnis’ cover letter has no critique of this at all. It’s a complete whitewashing. It’s basically saying Yale is going to support and stand in line with this. There’s no critique of this obvious political document. Furthermore, the Trump regime, Linda McMahon has given two examples, which are really the Trump regime’s now signature documents that the Trump regime is using as its flagship statements for its higher education policy. So McMahon writes, “In May, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education boldly acknowledged that the dilution of academic standards and domineering monoculture have badly eroded public trust.” And then they also list the charge from the presidents of Vanderbilt and Washington University, unfortunately a committee of scholars, four of whom are analytic philosophers as I am, which describe the politicization of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. So history’s going to remember the two documents that really stand for the Trump administration’s policies and views of higher education as Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education and this committee on what we’re calling the Boghossian Report in philosophy.

So Yale really looks like it’s really trying to angle to be the face of the Trump regime’s remaking of higher education. And I know that many people who were involved in the Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education didn’t want to go down in history this way, but unfortunately it was easily foreseeable that this would happen, that the whole premise here was that the premise is that the public has lost trust in higher education. Now, certain elements of that are legitimate. The admissions policies that favor legacy admissions or wealthy donors, Ivy League sports admissions, the high tuition, those are all legitimate. But the Yale’s Committees on Trust in Higher Education and McInnis repeatedly emphasized this idea of a monoculture that there isn’t enough intellectual diversity, that people have lost faith in the university because of these political reasons when there was a political attack on the university beginning in 2015.

And I spoke to President McInnis about this, and she essentially denied it. In 2015, the major media organizations, the Atlantic, funded by Kochs started attacking universities and saying that they were filled with snowflakes and taken over by leftist radicals. And this was a funded attack by the Kochs. It was sort of a planned attack that was rolled out nationwide, and it had a huge effect. It was essentially a propaganda attack on universities. The Heritage Foundation was involved, the Manhattan Institute.

As you might recall, it had to do with critical race theory and then DEI. But even before that, it was this idea that universities were taken over by leftists and the students were too radical, and all of that was a propaganda attack. And it wasn’t something that came from the ground up. It was something that people like Jonathan Haidt made money off of. It was a propaganda attack on universities. And now those very people who led the propaganda attack to try to force universities to hire conservatives. And we’re talking about, let’s be clear, the math department at Yale University has almost no registered Republicans. The physics department has almost no registered Republicans. We’re talking about 3 percent, 2 percent, 1 percent of these hard science departments have registered Republicans. This is nothing to do with …

This is because for some reason there’s an anti-intellectual element to today’s Republican party that is not producing top mathematicians. And so obviously this authoritarian government is trying to take over the university as any authoritarian government would do and stock it with their stock math departments and physics departments and every other department with their followers and create institutions where they can pack their followers in. And it looks like, at least from this document, the Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education is really being lifted up by the Trump regime as really the signature of their view of higher education. And it looks like, unfortunately, the administration at Yale seems to be proud of their role in this attack on freedom of inquiry.

SCOTT HARRIS: Is there any chance that the organizing of faculty, staff, students will have some impact, have some positive effect on President McInnis and the board of trustees and how all these negotiations or what may be, as you describe, capitulations will turn out?

JASON STANLEY: Well, Professor HoSang has been heroic, and so have others, Dara Strolovich, Naftali Kaminski. A bunch of professors at Yale University have really stood up in this moment. Students as well to really save Yale’s reputation because this is really almost an existential threat to Yale, right? I mean, it’s almost if Harvard and Yale were at war, Yale is not winning. It is that Linda McMahon is lifting up Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education saying it boldly acknowledged the university monoculture. In history, we’ll see Yale as the Trump university. And I do think that there is significant faculty pushback at Yale. The Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors has been particularly loud and heroic. And it really is about saving Yale, an institution that I love. I mean, it’s about saving Yale. I don’t like to see the Yale’s Committee on Trust and Higher Education plastered all across the Trump regime’s justiciation—being used to justify the Trump regime’s attack on American higher education and American freedom of inquiry, being used to justify transforming America’s institutions into just a way of promoting American empire, America’s security interests.

The fact that McInnis didn’t decry this, the fact that McInnis didn’t note that Yale should not be a vehicle for American security interests. Yale is a very old institution. It’s a world-renowned institution. It’s not just there to promote America’s military empire and war in Iran. It’s there to serve the higher goals of knowledge, freedom, universal human rights, inquiry, and justice and knowledge. And so really the faculty at Yale who are fighting to remove Yale as the standard bearer of the Trump regime, they’re really the ones who are fighting for Yale. And I really hope they succeed because I spent the institution I’ve been associated with the longest.

And I don’t want my grandkids to be reading in a 100 years about the Yale’s Committee on Trust and Higher Education and how much the Trump regime praised it and used it and say, “Wait, daddy taught there. I mean, granddaddy talked there.” I don’t want that to happen. And so I really, really am rooting for the Yale faculty who are fighting this and really fighting for Yale.

SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Professor Stanley. And I know we’re going to try to have some other folks from Yale on in the coming weeks to talk about this, especially since this McMahon letter came out this evening. I wanted to ask you about the elections coming up. I know you’re giving a lot of thought to the problem, the threat, and possibly how to prepare for it. Donald Trump, since he took office in a second term in January 2025, his administration has been relentless in issuing executive orders, making threats against state election officials, promoting false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump, lies about the massive voter fraud that he says took place then and will take place again. And recently he did a speech about Chinese interference in the election, not backed up by any facts or evidence. He’s advocating Congress to pass the Save America Act that would likely disenfranchise some 20 million voters and threats to use ICE agents and the U.S. military to intimidate voters, maybe seize ballots, or declare a national emergency to subvert the outcome of the elections.

I’ve got half a dozen other things that he’s done and that’s not even a complete list. So I guess the question is, Professor Stanley, what do you think can be done now to mitigate all these multiple threats from the Trump regime to the November election to prevent the kind of interference and to really stop what may be in the works here for the first time in American history to derail a free and fair election?

JASON STANLEY: So it is utterly obvious that Trump is not trying in any way to broaden his popular support. I was on TV the other day with Joe Walsh, the former Republican congressperson, and I said, “Yeah, Trump is very clearly not attempting at all to … his intention has always been to lock down power by bypassing elections. I mean, it’s obvious. It’s been obvious. I’ve been writing about this for a year now. It’s just totally obvious. He’s not trying to broaden this popular support. So everyone has to realize they’re going to try to steal the elections. Does that mean they will succeed? No, it does not mean they will succeed. Trump tried to stay in the first time and he did not succeed. Of course, now if I were to bet on him succeeding, I would say that the chances are this machine will succeed in American democracy.

There’s a much higher chance that, well, whatever democracy we had is no longer existent on the federal level. But it’s not in any means—these guys are not very competent. And so there are large pockets of resistance. There’s large pockets of pushback. Everybody’s got to remember that we are not dealing with a bunch of hyper-competent people here. And so we’re going to need Yale Law School to step up and provide lots of lawyers to defend against the charges that they’re going to bring across the country, against election officials, against people protecting the polls. We’re going to need essentially a mass mobilization of legal experts to defend the polls. We’re going to need police officers to enforce local laws and make sure that ICE is not doing things that violate the law. So whenever you have a paramilitary force like ICE that is working for an authoritarian leader, you’re going to need ordinary legal systems—the police, the lawyers, the judges to weigh in on the side of the law.

That’s problematic because the United States has already been deeply problematic. The police are obviously compromised in various ways in the United States, but now we need the police to protect voters, for instance, against what ICE may do. And everyone needs to make sure everyone’s registered to vote, gets out to the polls, that ICE does not intimidate voters from the polls, and that will require a community support of voters. And everyone should figure out one thing that they can do to help the election. One way they can bring their skillset to bear on helping the election and then devote themselves to that.

SCOTT HARRIS: Good advice. And yeah, I’ve heard before a great quote or description of Donald Trump and his administration officials—that is malevolence tempered by incompetence. So as you said, we have a situation where –

JASON STANLEY: Everyone has to remember this. The authoritarians are always going to represent themselves as more confident than they are. These are not competent people and there’s still a lot of things that Americans can do working together to protect these upcoming elections.

SCOTT HARRIS: One question I’d like to ask you about the elections and all the threats. There is a threat that Trump could order the U.S. military to intervene in many different ways in this election: seizing ballots or closing down polling places. I think there’s a –

JASON STANLEY: Yeah, he’s going to do all of that.

SCOTT HARRIS: There’s a failure of imagination if we don’t imagine the worst case scenario. So my question is, do you feel that the upper echelon or the rank and file soldiers in our military will obey or disobey direct orders that violate the Constitution and our democracy?

JASON STANLEY: Well, Trump has been on that from the very beginning. He knows the military, he needs to take over the military and use it to shut down elections, and that’s what he’s going to do. But we know that’s going to happen, and we know he’s been trying to take over the military, and we know that he fired all the JAGs (Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps). I mean, he knows basic tactics of authoritarianism and you need to take over the military. Well, that’s obvious. And he’s been trying to do it. So of course it’s not the worst possible scenario. All of that will happen. I mean, that’s just obvious. We’ve got to stop saying it’s the worst. I mean, those things will happen. He will attempt to use the military to do that. And then the question is, how successful has he been in doing what any authoritarian needs to do and take over the military?

He’s been trying, so we don’t know. They’re going to try all of this and we have to stop him.

They’re going to do everything and we have to stop them. And they’ve been preparing to do everything. They’ve been taking over the military, they’ve been attacking the press. They’re toppling the universities. They’re using the courts to give draconian sentences to ICE protesters. They’re creating a private army. They’re doing everything. They’re doing all the things that if I were advising as an authoritarian to do, if those were my values, I would advise. And so yes, they will try to use the military that way. And neither you nor I knows what the military will do, how successful they’ve been, but everyone’s got to stop them.

SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. And well, there’s a lot facing this country and I’m glad you’re out there in a free society able to say what you need to say about what’s going on in America today, Professor Stanley. Thanks so much.

JASON STANLEY: Thank you. And thank you for keeping up your brave and important work, Scott.

SCOTT HARRIS: All right. Well, stay in touch and good luck to you and your family in your new home in Canada. Thank you.

JASON STANLEY: Thank you.

SCOTT HARRIS: Goodnight. That’s Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy and chairman of American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

 

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