Dem
47
GOP
53
For a president who prides himself on being a master of "the art of the deal," Donald Trump is... really bad at deals. (Z) has literally taught courses on negotiation, and so can say, without any doubt, that the first rule of negotiating is "Make sure that whatever each party is getting, they value that more than whatever they are giving up."
The "deal" that the White House offered to nine well-known universities was absurd on its face. What those schools were expected to give up was... the right to govern themselves. They would be required to handle admissions and hiring according to the Trump administration's dictates, to avoid nearly anything that comes within a country mile of embracing diversity, and to effectively give special protections to conservative students and professors. In exchange for these massive concessions, the reward is... hand-wave, mumble, hand-wave, mumble.
It is nearly inconceivable that ANY concession would persuade universities to accept these conditions. Faculty would revolt. Students would revolt. Donors would revolt. In Democratic-controlled states, such as California, the schools might even lose state funding. But in exchange for basically NO specific concessions, and from an administration led by a person who can't be trusted to keep his word? No way, José.
The only surprise is that it's taken so long for the schools to say "Hell, no." Maybe they are trying to make it look polite, like they actually considered the deal. Maybe their lawyers are preparing lawsuits and legal briefs before their schools break the news to The Donald. We don't know.
In any event, as we wrote earlier this week, MIT was the first school to say "no." Since then, three more schools have joined the list: Brown, USC and Penn. That leaves only five schools that have yet to RSVP: Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, UT Austin, Arizona and Virginia. As we wrote on Monday, UT Austin might take the deal, because Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) might step in and order them to do it. But even that's a maybe, and so, the administration's best outcome would seem to be a .111 batting average here.
We obviously know a fair bit about universities, by virtue of our profession, but we can come up with no explanation as to why those nine were the ones to receive this "generous" offer. They aren't all football schools, they aren't all at the top of the federal-research-funds-received list, they aren't all right-leaning, they aren't all located in states with Republican governors, they aren't all private schools. The only real commonality we can come up with is that they're big schools that are basically virgin targets. That is to say, the administration has already gone after Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Wisconsin, etc., and established the "terms" of those disputes. Maybe Team Trump was experimenting with a different approach for group #2. Though the administration actually did go after Penn already, and also Dartmouth and Brown, a little. So even that explanation doesn't work all that well.
We also remain confused, as we were on Monday, as to what exactly the administration was thinking here. Did Trump & Co. really think that they were going to get a bunch of "yes" responses? Really? That's hard to believe, even for someone who is as poor a dealmaker as Trump generally is.
It would have been better if these schools had all said "no" at once, so as to put up a unified front. Still, the more times that a university, or a judge, or a business, or a law firm, or a general, or a government official stands up to Trump, the harder it becomes for him to succeed in his next attempt at bullying. Four schools have drawn the line here, and a bunch of others have drawn the line in THEIR disputes with Trump. That is a good thing for freedom in general, and for academic freedom in particular, and it's a bad thing for authoritarianism. (Z)