Trump's University Compact demonstrates weakness, not strength

The administration would act differently if it were confident

[University by Thomas Rowland, courtesy of the Met]

I’ve a piece in the New York Times today that connects the Trump administration’s proposed University Compact, which tries to leverage federal funding to get universities to comply with ideological oversight with my previous writing on collective action. Putting the two together suggests that we ought to see the compact as a sign of weakness rather than strength. If you want to see the most straightforward version of the argument, with proper editing and all, read the piece itself. Here, I’m just going to explain the underlying assumptions and complications.

The underlying idea of the piece is that we ought to understand the Trump administration’s push towards a kind of electoral authoritarianism in which elections happen but Republicans somehow always win, as as a massive collective action game If the key actors in civil society see themselves as trapped in a "prisoner’s dilemma,” the Trump administration will probably win. If, instead, they see themselves as playing a “coordination game,” the Trump administration will probably lose. Like all very simple frameworks, this leaves out a whole lot of valuable detail, but I think it still captures some pretty important dynamics.

The organizing idea (adapted from Russell Hardin, David Hume, Margaret Levi and others) is this. Authoritarian rule depends on shared expectations that the ruler is too strong for anyone to challenge. Even the most terrifying dictator relies on others - army and police - to do the enforcement (and dictators have to worry about what might happen to them if their security services become unhappy). Even the most efficient security state is far too small to prevail if all the citizens rise up against it. Hence, authoritarians want to ensure that everyone believes that Resistance is Useless. Even criticism of the rulers may be tolerated, as long as it reinforces the sense that they are going to prevail. An old Alasdair Gray short story explains this logic by conveying the sardonic enthusiasm of an imperial censor for a polemic against his boss.

Consider the weight this poem gives to our immortal emperor! He is not described or analysed, he is presented as a final, competent, all-embracing force, as unarguable as the weather, as inevitable as death. This is how all governments should appear to people who are not in them.

But aspiring rulers who merely want to be as unarguable as the weather face a big problem, especially if they are trying to consolidate authority in a democratic system. How do they reshape everyone’s expectations, so that everyone complies because they expect everyone else to comply too? Most people probably aren’t going to want that, and the rulers have yet to establish the facts on the ground that they want.

Stated a little more abstractly, what incipient authoritarians want to do is to turn a coordination game where everyone refuses to comply with the regime because everyone else refuses to comply, into a prisoner’s dilemma, where everyone expects everyone else to defect and side with the regime.

A coordination game is one where everyone is likely to choose a particular cooperative strategy because they know that everyone else is choosing the same approach: the classic example is coordinating on driving on the left or the right side of the road. If everyone knows that everyone else will protest the regime, they are likely to protest too. There is a lot of safety in numbers, because the regime is not going to be able to punish everyone. A prisoner’s dilemma is where everyone decides to defect because defecting is the ‘dominant’ strategy - no matter what other people do, I am better off behaving selfishly and not displaying solidarity. If people see their situation as one where coordinating against the regime is cheap and safe, they will be likely to hold out. If they see themselves as trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma, they will be more likely do what they need to do to protect their selfish interests. One way that authoritarian wannabes can shift the logic from coordination to prisoner’s dilemma is by breaking civil society: the sphere of independent activity in which citizens, organizations and businesses can freely engage with each other without direct government control.

There’s a lot of complications lurking behind the term ‘civil society’ - I’ll get into some of them in my next post. For now, it’s useful to think of civil society as the political, economic and social space in which citizens and private actors interact. It is murkier in practice than in theory, and its various sectors and organizations have their own internal politics and power dynamics. The CEOs and boards of news corporations, trustees of universities etc will have politics and interests that differ from those, say, of reporters and students, and the extent of that difference will vary from organization to organization.

Even despite these differences, civil society is key. It provides crucial channels through which a broader public’s interests can be articulated and expressed. That means that if the ruler can break the will of independent actors such as media (which shapes how people think other people are thinking) law firms (which can help citizens challenge government assertions of sweeping authority), non-profits (which can help citizens organize) and universities (which shape collective ideas), it will have made great progress towards reshaping citizens’ beliefs in the ways it wants.

Breaking the will of civil society again is about turning coordination games into prisoner’s dilemmas. If all the major law firms refuse to comply with outrageous and legally dubious demands, then the administration will have a hard time breaking them. If, however, it succeeds in getting some law firms to comply, then there is a chance that the others will rush to comply too, for fear that they will lose out on any benefits of compliance, and be brutally punished for their intransigence. The more law firms that have already complied, the stronger the pressure will be on the holdouts, possibly creating a self-reinforcing dynamic.

The regime will find it easier to attack sectors of civil society that (a) are concentrated so that you only have to subdue a few key entities, (b) have important internal constituencies that are willing to go along with the regime, perhaps even welcoming its intervention, and (c) are vulnerable to government action. It will have a tougher job when (a) there are many entities, (b) those entities are relatively unified in opposition, and and (c) are less vulnerable to government action, or at least cross-pressured, so that they have to worry about other people with different priorities than the regime’s.

That gets us to the administration’s strategy for universities. The Trump administration wants to force US universities to accept a general system of ideological oversight. Academic institutions would be expected to get rid of departments with the wrong ideology and squash politically inconvenient forms of student voice.

The administration has succeeded in crushing Columbia University. It has gotten real financial concessions from Brown and from Penn. But it has not succeeded in creating the sauve qui peut dynamic of prisoner’s dilemma expectations that it wants to achieve. Most universities have not made deals. Some are negotiating - most prominently Harvard - but not so far conceding. And even if Harvard does concede without completely caving, it is not clear that others will necessarily rush after.

This is why the Trump administration is shifting strategy. As Joseph Fishkin argues (we came to the same conclusions independently), it has moved from targeting universities one by one, in an effort to get them to agree to bespoke conditions, to targeting a group of universities that it suspects to be more internally divided, and perhaps more willing to give in. It is now pushing for a broad framework for a standardized deal that can be extended to other universities too. Fishkin is able to go into much more detail than I could in a short op-ed. In his description:

To gain the leverage it wants, the administration desperately needs multiple universities to say yes. It would be a disaster for May Mailman and her team if no one joined this thing, the way no news organization took the Pentagon up on its similar “offer” of continued access to the Pentagon if and only if reporters would agree to say only what the Pentagon approves. To roll up the sector, the administration needs the agreeing universities to be ones that other universities would feel comfortable joining. It’s no good if you get, say, Liberty University to join. That would actually help those in academia who hope to persuade their schools to refuse to sign this or any similar “compact” by arguing that if you do, you are Liberty University.

Similarly, if small, defenseless institutions such as community colleges joined, that would not be an especially persuasive starting point for rolling up the whole sector. You can see this calculation in the set of schools the Trump administration in fact chose to approach this week—Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Penn, USC, Texas, Vanderbilt, and UVA. These clearly represent an effort to find the intersection on the Venn diagram between schools with a good amount of prestige and schools that might be softer targets, sometimes because their strong leaders have already been deposed as a result of right-wing activism and replaced with figures who are weaker, more beholden to conservative donors or politicians, or both. Or so the government hopes.

The administration clearly hopes that this group of universities is sufficiently divided that they will accept its offer, or something close to it. Weak leaders will be pressed by boards of trustees and others into compliance. Then, perhaps other universities will feel pressure to sign on (or be left out) and other ones will follow those again, perhaps creating a self reinforcing dynamic as described above. In a prisoner’s dilemma, where people believe that the academic compact is a done deal that everyone will accept, no university will want to hold out.

However, the crucial point is that this hope is partly belied by what the administration is doing. If the Trump administration had been in a strong bargaining position, it would not have adopted this strategy. Instead, it would have looked to roll these universities up in private negotiations and then made a big public announcement that several major universities had signed onto a compact.

That could possibly have caused panic in other universities, although it would still have been a gamble, given the enormous diversity of interests and pressure points across third level education. The fact that they didn’t do this, or something like it, strongly suggests that they couldn’t. They are negotiating from weakness rather than strength, and they are taking an enormous risk. They are providing other public constituencies, who do not want to see universities knuckle under, with an opportunity to organize against them, creating the possibility of another Jimmy Kimmel moment. As I put it in the NYT piece, any wavering provides:

a big opportunity for the opposing coalition and encourages the public to get involved on the other side. Alumni will get organized, pressing university leaders not to sign a compact that could well permanently ruin their reputations. Students demonstrating against the imposition of ideological controls will likely win broad support and sympathy, even from those who have opposed recent campus protests. Some academics are condemning the compact and threatening boycotts, while Dartmouth College’s president has responded by saying she will always defend her university’s “fierce independence.” California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has threatened to pull state funding from any institution that signs. U.T. Austin’s academic superstars might well have begun to get emails from other institutions, asking if they are interested in moving.

External and internal pressure along these lines will plausibly help ensure that the coordination game remains a coordination game, in which the dominant strategy remains protecting the institution’s independence and refusing to give in.

This has lessons for other fights. Obviously, the battle will be harder in more concentrated sectors than the academy, where institutions are less cross-conflicted, and more vulnerable to government attack, or enthusiastic to share the spoils. But wins can be self-reinforcing: showing that winning is possible, and beneficial makes everyone less likely to give in. More generally, the way to keep winning is through building broad coalitions, with mutual support, and focusing on the successes. When Ezra Levin of Indivisible says:

A defining feature of an emerging authoritarian regime is that it makes the opposition feel like shit on a daily basis. Every day, there is some new atrocity committed; some new institution attacked; some new democratic norm demolished. Some of it -- much of it -- we have little ability to stop in the moment.

But that’s not how to measure the health of an anti-authoritarian movement. Instead, we should measure it this way:

• Are we more unified than we were before?

• Are we bigger than we were before?

• Are our tactics proliferating?

• Is the regime’s popularity falling?

Every single month since the election last November, I’ve answered yes to each of those measures of movement health. Let’s keep it up with this week’s action items.

he is identifying the importance of collective expectations in ensuring that the movement wins, not the regime. There are other ways to think usefully about the battle that we are in, but the dynamics of collective action are very, very important.