Many left-wing university faculty members (a redundancy if there ever was one) are rebelling against the Trump administration’s threat to cut federal funding to universities that tolerate antisemitic actions against their Jewish students. They condemned the acting president of Columbia for accepting some of the administration’s conditions for restoring the $400 million that it threatened to cut, and she was forced to resign.
The faculty members are making the absolutist claim that it is always a denial of academic freedom for governments to pressure universities with a cut-off of funding. In making this broad claim, they ignore the lessons of history and the single standard of morality.
