When Supporting Your Boss Becomes a Federal Crime: Trump DOJ Investigates Faculty for Backing Their President

Free Speech

from the academic-freedom-is-being-stomped-on dept

The Trump administration’s war on higher education has reached new levels of authoritarian absurdity. Not content with merely investigating George Mason University and its president Gregory Washington for his diversity efforts, the Department of Justice has now decided to investigate the faculty members who dared to support him.

Yes, you read that correctly. Federal agents are now demanding drafts of faculty resolutions, private communications between professors, and correspondence with the president’s office—all because the Faculty Senate had the audacity to pass a resolution supporting their university’s leadership.

Welcome to the Trump administration’s version of “protecting free speech,” which involves… attacking free speech.

Here’s what happened: When the DOJ opened its investigation into George Mason over alleged discrimination in diversity programs, faculty members did what faculty members do—they discussed the situation and passed a resolution supporting their president and the university’s diversity efforts. The resolution was non-binding, carried no legal force, and would typically attract little notice beyond the campus newspaper.

But these aren’t normal times for higher education, and the Trump administration apparently views faculty solidarity as a federal offense.

In a Friday letter to the university’s Board of Visitors, Harmeet Dhillon from the Justice Department’s civil rights division announced the government would be demanding:

• Drafts of the faculty resolution
• All written communications among Faculty Senate members who drafted it
• All communications between those faculty members and President Washington’s office

The justification? The resolution praised Washington’s efforts to ensure faculty demographics mirror student demographics—language that, as Faculty Senate President Solon Simmons pointed out, was actually a direct quote from a strategic document adopted by the university’s own Board of Visitors.

Solon Simmons, a sociologist who is president of the Faculty Senate, called the government’s inquiry “flabbergasting.”

“None of us has any idea why the Department of Justice is so interested in a matter of local academic shared governance,” Dr. Simmons wrote in an email.

Dr. Simmons said Ms. Dhillon’s letter was inaccurate. The language the Justice Department took exception to was not used to praise Dr. Washington’s efforts, he said. Rather, it was a direct quote from a strategic document adopted by the Board of Visitors.

“An outcome the Board committed to was to ‘faculty and staff demographics that mirror student demographics,’” Dr. Simmons said. “It is not our language, it is theirs.”

So the federal government is investigating faculty members for quoting the university’s board-approved strategic plan in support of their president. Let that sink in.

The hypocrisy here is suffocating. This is the same administration whose supporters spent years screaming about “cancel culture” and the supposed suppression of conservative voices on campus. The same crowd that claims to be the true defenders of free speech and academic freedom.

Where are they now? Where are the usual suspects who rage about faculty being silenced or pressured for their political views?

Apparently, free speech only matters when it’s speech they agree with. When faculty exercise their academic freedom to support diversity efforts or defend their university leadership, suddenly that becomes grounds for federal investigation.

This has absolutely nothing to do with enforcing civil rights law—it’s about intimidation. The message is clear: if you’re a faculty member who supports diversity initiatives or even stands up to defend colleagues under attack, the federal government might come for you next.

There is no free speech and certainly no academic freedom when this is the way the US government is reacting.

Of course, the DOJ knows it doesn’t have the power to simply ban faculty from expressing certain views, so instead it’s weaponizing federal investigations to make supporting those views professionally and personally costly.

It’s all about the chilling effects, which are very real.

This isn’t happening in isolation. Two other Virginia university presidents who supported diversity efforts have already lost their jobs this year under similar pressure. James E. Ryan resigned from the University of Virginia, and Cedric T. Wins was pushed out of Virginia Military Institute.

All this seems to have emboldened Trump’s cronies to go on the attack against any university they deem not to be toeing the MAGA ideological line.

The pattern is becoming clear: identify university leaders who support diversity initiatives, gin up investigations and pressure campaigns, then use the resulting chaos to justify their removal. Faculty who dare to support these leaders get swept up in the dragnet for the crime of supporting their university presidents.

What’s particularly galling is how this turns basic principles of university governance on their head. Faculty senates exist to provide shared governance and faculty input on university matters. Passing resolutions—even purely symbolic ones—is literally part of their job.

But now the federal government is treating the exercise of shared governance as potential evidence of discrimination. They’re demanding to see the sausage-making process of faculty deliberation, chilling the kind of open discussion that’s essential to academic freedom.

Faculty members said they were concerned that a pileup of investigations would be used to justify toppling him, as happened with Dr. Ryan.

“We’re worried it’s going to be high noon on Friday,” said Tim Gibson, an associate professor at George Mason and the president of the Virginia state conference of the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group.

The federal government, he said, is rolling out “a new model of how universities are to be governed — it’s much more top-down from the federal government.”

That’s not how American universities are supposed to work. Academic freedom depends on faculty being able to discuss, debate, and yes, even support their institutional leadership without fear of federal retaliation.

For years, we’ve been told that the greatest threat to campus free speech was overzealous administrators and “woke” faculty suppressing conservative voices. That was always a massive exaggeration based on a few stray incidents. But here we have the federal government literally investigating faculty members for expressing support for their university’s leadership and diversity efforts.

This is what actual government censorship looks like. This is what real threats to academic freedom actually are. And it’s telling that many of the loudest voices claiming to defend campus free speech have suddenly gone silent.

Take Bari Weiss and her The Free Press, which built its entire brand around defending campus free speech and academic freedom. Weiss literally started what she calls a “university” (though unaccredited) based on her claims that traditional institutions were failing to protect these values.

Where is The Free Press on this story of actual government investigation into faculty speech? Nowhere to be found. Instead, their front page is dominated by attempts to rehabilitate Tulsi Gabbard’s completely misleading claims about Obama-era intelligence assessments—including Josh Hammer repeating the blatantly false claim that the government pressured Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, something the Twitter Files actually disproved.

When push comes to shove, it turns out the “academic freedom” crowd is awfully selective about which academic freedom they’re willing to defend.

The Trump DOJ’s investigation into George Mason faculty isn’t about civil rights enforcement—it’s about using federal power to intimidate and silence academic voices that don’t align with the administration’s ideological preferences.

And the “academic freedom” and “free speech on campus” people are completely silent on it.

That’s not just an attack on higher education. It’s an attack on the fundamental principles of free speech and academic freedom that these same officials claim to champion.

Obviously, the Trump and MAGA folks are no strangers to blatant hypocrisy. But the way they keep getting away with it is when people let this hypocrisy slide without comment.

Filed Under: academic freedom, doj, free speech, gregory washington
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