Former President Barack Obama urged universities to resist attacks from the federal government that violate their academic freedom in a campus speech on Thursday.
He also said schools and students should engage in self-reflection about speech environments on their campuses.
“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right?,” he said during a conversation at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?”
“If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.”
Mr. Obama’s comments came as the Trump administration has threatened universities with major cuts. It took away $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University in March. It later suspended $175 million to the University of Pennsylvania, and said this week that it was reviewing about $9 billion in arrangements with Harvard and its affiliates.
At Harvard, where the university has made efforts to respond to Republican criticism and concerns from Jewish students and faculty, more than 800 faculty members have signed a letter urging their leadership to more forcefully resist the administration and defend higher education more broadly.
Universities have received critiques from all sides, including those outside of leadership, saying they should do more. But the stakes are high, and large portions of endowments are often earmarked for specific causes that make dipping into them as a rainy-day fund difficult. Johns Hopkins, for example, has a significant endowment, but still laid off 2,000 workers in the wake of federal cuts.
Many universities have seemed to be at a loss about what to do. But some presidents, including those at Brown and Princeton, which have also been told they will have millions in federal grants canceled, have said that they would fight back against the administration, sometimes framing it as a fight for academic freedom.
Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, called the targeting of Columbia University “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”
Mr. Obama’s advice to lean on the endowment in the face of threats and stand on principle was also endorsed by his former Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, in a guest essay this week in The Times. “Believe me, a former president of Harvard,” Mr. Summers wrote, “when I say that ways can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been earmarked by their donors for other uses.”
To many on the right, and even some on the left, one reason Mr. Trump is attacking higher education is because universities have become politically weakened, partly because they haven’t taken the free-expression concerns of conservatives seriously.
In his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Obama also called on law firms, which have also faced threats from the Trump administration, to stand for their principles, even if they risked losing business.
Mr. Obama told the crowd, which included college students, that everyone should stand up for the rights of others to say wrong and hurtful things.
“The idea of canceling a speaker who comes to your campus, trying to shout them down and not letting them speak,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript on his Medium account, “even if I find their ideas obnoxious, well, not only is that not what universities should be about, that’s not what America should be about.”
He added, to applause, “You let them speak, and then you tell them why they’re wrong. That’s how you win the argument.”