Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is ‘Start Making Sense.’  I’m Jon Wiener.

Later in the show: Trump is not the worst president when it comes to constitutional rights and civil liberties; Woodrow Wilson was worse.  Adam Hochschild explains why – starting with Wilson jailing thousands of people whose only crime was speaking out against the president.  Adam’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.

But first: Harvard is taking the lead in the universities’ resistance to Trump.  Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan, will explain – in a minute.
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J.D. Vance said it most clearly: for the Trump people, “The university is the enemy.” That’s why Trump is cutting billions of federal funding and making impossible demands that threaten dozens of universities. But universities have begun to resist. For comment, we turn to Michael Roth. He’s president of Wesleyan University, author of many books most recently, The Student: A Short History, and Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech and Political Correctness on College Campuses. His articles have appeared recently in The New York Times, Time Magazine, US News, and The Washington Post. He’s been everywhere in the media lately: CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New Yorker – that’s because he was the first university president to speak out against Trump’s attack on universities and colleges. Michael Roth, thank you for that – and welcome to the program.

Michael Roth: Thanks, Jon. Very nice to be with you.

JW: You were a lonely voice for a while there. Columbia was submitting to Trump, or trying to; then the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, faced with $210 million in cuts of federal support, declared that Princeton would “vigorously defend academic freedom and the due process rights of this university.” Harvard at that point was negotiating with Trump over his demands, its faculty was pressing the president and overseers to take a stand. Then the Trump administration made a long series of new demands of Harvard that were totally unacceptable, and Harvard’s president Alan Garber said, “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
Trump then announced $2 billion in cuts of grants to Harvard. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported Trump would cut another $1 billion from Harvard Health research grants.
But after Harvard, Stanford and MIT declared they would not submit, and now Columbia, which has a new president who seems to have been inspired by Harvard, and by you, the new president of Columbia has declared it will move away from submission. Of course, submitting to Trump was not getting Columbia any promises that he would restore the funds he had cut. Were you surprised by that?

MR: Not really. I mean, it’s the classic appeasement dilemma – you hope that that’s all they’ll ask for and you give them the outrageous thing they’ve asked for. Sometimes they say, okay, that’s all I need, but there’s no reason to trust them. And other times like in this case, they didn’t even do that. I mean, it’s a protection racket and you know they’re going to come back for more. And the only way we stop this from happening is through collective action of not just colleges and universities, but lots of other people who have vested interest in the freedoms of civil society, saying that this is not the kind of government we want to have.
And the administration’s attitude to universities is to some extent ideologically motivated. Certainly, as you quoted the vice president is ideologically motivated. In the president’s case, it’s hard to know whether it’s just a question of personal pique or vindictiveness, and he wants these fancy places to kiss the ring, but I think they’ve gone too far here. They demanded things that no university could really provide and still be a university. And if the administration wants to wreck this extraordinarily successful sector of the American culture and economy, it’s moving in that direction.
But I am hopeful, well, at least I have some hope that we can turn them away from that project.

JW: Yeah, you’re right that the demands that Harvard faced in that second letter were completely unacceptable. It seemed at the time that this was a deliberate attempt to force Harvard into opposition so that they could take this to the Supreme Court. But then came that even bigger surprise, the Trump administration said that sending that letter had been a mistake, and then Trump said they were sticking by it anyway and they were going to go ahead and punish Harvard for refusing to comply with the letter that they said had been sent by mistake.
What do you make of this back and forth on the part of the Trump people?

MR: The only consistency is incompetence here. I mean, they’re just chaotic and then nasty when their own incompetence is revealed, whether it’s on the Signal app with the clownish Secretary of Defense or whether it’s in their treatment at Harvard that somehow Harvard’s lawyer should have known that this was not a real letter, that it was too idiotic to have come from the government shows you that’s such a low bar that it probably didn’t occur to them that it wasn’t a real letter. But that Trump will now stick by is like sticking by keeping this poor man in El Salvador.
Because even though their own Justice Department lawyers admitted it was an administrative error, they do not backtrack, at least they do not backtrack very easily. And so, I think Harvard is in a position that it can resist these efforts, but only for a certain amount of time and only if the courts agree. Administrations do have the right to impose conditions on the use of funding that they provide to universities. And any reasonable person should acknowledge that. The Obama administration said that if you don’t change your Title IX rules to make women safer on campus, we’re going to pull all your funding. I mean, that was what they said.
They didn’t do it. They didn’t pull the funding. They worked with schools, so they changed their Title IX rules. Some people think they changed them in ways that made them worse. Some think they made them better.  But they did use the leverage. In this case, they’re exploiting the leverage first, almost like the shock and awe tactic. And then, I don’t know if the word is ‘negotiate,’ or just try to pick up the pieces.  And they don’t have to do it that way.
I mean, Trump did win the election and he can insist on a civil rights law being observed, let’s say, in a colorblind way rather than in what we used to call the anti-racist way. He does have, I think, the legitimate power to do that. I don’t like that fact, but there it is. He won. My candidate lost.
But this egregious overreach is a massive distraction from other things. Perhaps that’s the technique. If there’s a technique as you know to distract from other issues that they’re screwing up on, whether it’s NASA, security, or the economy.

JW: I want to stick with the legalities of this. The official legal pretext for cutting Harvard’s funding by $2 billion is to punish Harvard for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism, which they say is a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Now last week on this show, David Cole, former legal director of the ACLU, explained that there were legal requirements to enforcing Title VI. You have to conduct an investigation. You have to identify specific violations. The punishment has to address the specifics.
You have been outspoken, not so much on the legalities, but in arguing that, as you put it in The New York Times, ‘Trump’s crusade against anti-Semitism is extremely bad for the Jews.’ Please explain that.

MR: Yeah. Well, that’s an old Jewish joke. They think everybody, we look through every issue, is it good for the Jews or not? So I was playing with that idea that this is very bad for the Jews, because I’m amazed to see what I would’ve thought otherwise intelligent Jewish people supporting the Trump administration because he claims to defend Jews from anti-Semitism or because he will defend Netanyahu’s barbaric policies no matter how gruesome they become. And so they throw their allot in with this administration. And I just wanted to point out a couple of things in that New York Times piece.
One is that the associates of the Trump administration are all too happy to hang out with Nazis. They’re all too happy to support Christian nationalism. They’re all too ready to support policies that would eradicate Jewish culture in this country, and we forget that at our peril. And then the other dimension is that Jews are best served, like other minoritized groups are best served, by the rule of law. And when you have a powerful executive who seems unbounded by law or mores, that is not going to be good for minoritized communities and it’s never good for the Jews in the long run.
Because they will run out of trans athletes to persecute, they’ll run out of Ivy League schools to persecute and the Jews, they’ll get to them eventually. The three presidents that The Times listed as providing some opposition to the administration, Eisgruber, Garber and Roth. It sounds like an orthodontist office. I mean, if these three Jews who say anti-Semitism, can you deal with that in the West Wing? I mean, we could deal with that in Middletown or Princeton or Cambridge. So I think that it’s a cynical use anti-anti-Semitism to gain control over these powerful cultural forces.
Now, I understand they want to make changes in the way we teach history or the way we hire faculty, but these are guys who can’t actually use social media or Signal chat effectively. You do not want them doing cancer research. You do not want them messing around with quantum mechanics. And I don’t want to be doing that from the president’s chair at my university. I want the real experts in those fields to do it. And it’s much better for America, it’s much better for the world, if professors with expertise in their areas have the funding to do the research that will solve problems that will make a difference for this country.

JW: There’s that other front of Trump’s attack on the university, the demand for power over international student admissions procedures. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sent Harvard a letter demanding detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders and their political activities. She set April 30th as the deadline, that’s in, what, nine days from when we’re speaking here, or “face immediate loss of student and exchange visitor program certification.” What does that mean and what’s going on here?

MR: Again, it’s another leverage point. I don’t think there’s any evidence that the international students at Harvard are more radical or more of a threat to anything than students from Boston, New York or Austin or Los Angeles. But it is a point of leverage for the administration because there is a certification process for universities to admit people with student visas. But we have not seen an ideological filter put on that certification process before. And it is extraordinarily dangerous.
We get great people from around the world who want to come and study in this country because they could do so in an atmosphere of freedom, and they go on to start businesses and they go on to solve problems and create opportunities and all the other good things. And they actually help the rest of us learn about the rest of the world by sitting side by side with us in our classes and in the lunchroom. And the idea that you would use this heavy-handed tactic to demand to know something about their political views as if the political views of people coming from Mumbai to study in Cambridge are relevant to the director of Homeland Security.
She should be looking at the Proud Boys. She doesn’t have to look at a computer scientist from Mumbai who’s coming to Cambridge. She should be looking at the domestic terrorists that have been pardoned after January 6th. This is just an attempt to squeeze the university where it hurts and it does hurt because most of the international students, I take it, at Harvard, certainly at MIT are graduate students. They’re doing incredible work. They support the research of their professors. At many other schools, undergraduate international students pay full tuition.
And the schools depend on that to balance their budget and to meet their general educational requirements. And so, this is a leverage point for the government, but to use it with an ideological filter is anti-American and it’ll come back to haunt us.

JW: Of course, there’s another front of Trump’s attacks on the university, specifically on Harvard, and that is he says he’s going to move to deny Harvard’s tax exemption. Now the people who study this tell me there is one school in American history that has lost its tax exemption because of federal action. Bob Jones University in 1983 had its tax-exempt status revoked because it violated the Civil Rights Act by banning interracial dating, and the Supreme Court vote there was eight to one. That’s the only precedent.
The Trump administration would have to argue to the Supreme Court that Harvard was violating the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Jewish students by failing to protect them against anti-Semitism as the basis for denying their tax exemption. What do you think about that?

MR: Again, it’s a ridiculous pretext for trying to just gain control of the university or to have Harvard’s governing boards knuckle under to the administration. There have been no Jews seriously injured because of anti-Semitism at Harvard in recent memory. There have been anti-Semitic moments on campus as there have been in the halls of Congress in recent years. It happens. It’s a bad thing. They should squash it. Alan Garber, I’m sure, would be the first among us to want to squash that.
And if the government was really concerned that, they would do an investigation of anti-Semitic activity at Harvard and see who was really to blame and how best to reduce it or eradicate it. But there’s been no such investigation. There’s been no plan. And so, this is just trying to come up with a vehicle for pushing the university around. There are very strict laws against the political use of tax-exempt status. People who violate those laws can go to jail. Now, the president has immunity for many things, almost all things now thanks to the Supreme Court.
But it’s very clear that the federal government realizes that in tyrannical situations, leaders use the tax department as a vehicle for their own either enrichment or to persecute enemies. And the federal government of the United States has created restrictions on that use. And so, I think that Harvard would be able to fight that successfully in court. I don’t know if it would get to the Supreme Court or not, but I think that that is an example of the great overreach of the White House in regard to the university.
If they want to improve the lives of Jews at the university, they might meet with Jewish students there to see what they could use. But I don’t think that such meetings have happened.

JW: So Harvard has to go to court because everything that Trump is doing is a violation of federal laws and the requirements of Title VI. And Trump seems to want to get this case to the Supreme Court. Last week on this show, David Cole said he thought Harvard would win a Title VI case if it went to the Supreme Court. He thought nine to nothing. He said, this is one of the clearest cases there’s ever been of federal violation, of the requirements of Title VI. Of course, that will take a while. What do you think of the legal situation that Harvard faces?

MR: Well, I’m not a lawyer, and so I’ve spent a lot more time with lawyers since I’ve been president of Wesleyan than I had the rest of my life put together. And I would never count two of those Supreme Court justices as sure votes against Trump on anything. But I do understand from people who know these laws and this history of litigation, this domain that the university would have a very strong case to make, and it could take a while. And I think there are now many, many cases throughout the land challenging various things that Trump administration has proposed doing against universities.
And so, the lawyers will do fine. They will get paid, although Trump has them doing pro bono work. I’m hoping that we can get the same firms that made with Trump to do pro bono work for him, they should do pro bono work for the universities now too. We’ll see how that goes. But I do think it’ll establish some precedent to, I hope, convince future presidents that a violation of both the constitution and the norms that protect civil society is really unwise and not just counterproductive, but it’ll be declared illegal.
And then of course, we’ll see if the administration listens to the courts, see if they provoke an even deeper constitutional crisis by refusing the courts. I hope that doesn’t happen, of course. I really do think that collective political action will be important to stop the administration. But legal action will also be very important in keeping the administration within the lanes that the executive branch is supposed to remain in.

JW: Michael Roth – he’s president of Wesleyan University, and he was the first university president to speak out against Trump’s attacks on American universities. Michael, thanks for your leadership on this, and thanks for talking with us today.

MR: Thanks for having me.
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Jon Wiener: Isn’t Trump the worst president we’ve ever had, in terms of threatening constitutional rights? Actually, he isn’t. That’s what Adam Hochschild says. Woodrow Wilson was worse. A lot worse. Adam is an award-winning historian and author. We’ve often talked with him about his books here. My favorite, I’ve said it before, is Bury the Chains – about how a small group of people started the movement that ended slavery in the British Empire, and eventually everywhere. His most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. He’s a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, and he writes for The New York Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation. Adam, welcome back.

Adam Hochschild: Always good to be with you, Jon.

JW: In high school, they taught us that Woodrow Wilson had been a history professor and a college president – certainly a good start. And as President of the United States, he wanted to end all wars. He founded and tried to get the United States to join the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN. He also signed the law giving women the right to vote. He signed laws that prohibited child labor and mandated an eight-hour workday.
Then, in college, in college, they taught us that Wilson was deeply racist, that he introduced segregation into the federal workforce.
But what did Woodrow Wilson do that made him worse than Trump?

AH: I have to say I don’t think he’s worse than Trump overall, because—

JW: Right.

AH: I think that Trump wins the grand prize.

JW: Okay.

AH: No question about that. But I think there are some ways in which, in Wilson’s second term in office, civil liberties in the United States vanished far more than they have done, so far anyway.
Here’s what happened. Wilson was a progressive on many issues. The ones that you mentioned.  But when he made the decision to take the United States into the First World War – in April 1917, he asked Congress to declare war and Congress did. Six senators, 50 members of the House voted against the Declaration of War. Wilson was deeply worried about this. He pushed the Espionage Act through Congress very quickly, which vested enormous powers in the government to basically lock up anybody for saying anything they didn’t like.

JW: They had the power to lock people up. Did they lock people up?

AH: They absolutely did lock people up. I want to just say one more thing first, which was something that heightened the aspect, the atmosphere of hysteria was the Russian Revolution later that year in 1917, which people in this country’s establishment were very afraid would spread to the United States, and that, combined with the mass hysteria that was set off entering World War I, led to several things.

They did lock people up under the Espionage Act and under copycat legislation, which many states passed, and even some localities. Berkeley, California, my hometown, passed a law enabling these kinds of arrests and detentions. Between 1917 and 1921, roughly a thousand Americans spent a year or more in jail.

JW: And what exactly was the crime that would get you a year in jail?

AH: This was solely for things that they wrote or said. Opposing the First World War, strongly supporting the Russian Revolution, but dissent against the First World War was the main thing. A much larger number went to jail, again, state, local, and federal prisons for shorter periods of time, but roughly a thousand were there for a year or more.
The most famous of them was Eugene Debs, many times socialist candidate for president. He’d won 6% of the popular vote in 1912. He did not run in 1916, taking Wilson at his word that Wilson was going to do his best to keep the US out of the First World War. But Debs, like most socialists, was deeply dismayed when the US entered the war.
A lot of people, mostly but not entirely on the left in the United States, felt that we should not be going to be joining in this European quarrel. We had not been attacked. In 1918, the summer of 1918, Debs gave an anti-war speech from a park bandstand in Canton, Ohio. He was immediately seized, sentenced under the Espionage Act to 10 years in jail.

JW: Who would be a parallel figure today?

AH: Maybe Bernie Sanders.

JW: So this would be a little bit like putting Bernie – giving Bernie a 10-year jail sentence for speaking at these anti-Trump rallies.

AH: Absolutely. That’s a good – it’s a good comparison. And Debs, even though he was sent to jail for opposing the war, he was still in jail two years after the war ended when, in the presidential elections of November 1920, he received more than 900,000 votes for president from his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

JW: That’s the people who were jailed. What about the media? What about the newspapers?

AH: Well, the Espionage Act that Wilson pushed through Congress gave to the Postmaster General of the United States, the power to declare a publication unmailed. And in those days before radio and TV, before email, before the internet, that was the only way that a national publication, newspaper or magazine, had to reach its readers through the US mail.
Using that power, the government shut down roughly 75 newspapers and magazines, and it censored 3 or 400 specific issues that came from many others as well. The most famous case of censorship under the act was a magazine called The Masses, which published Walter Lippmann, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sherwood Anderson, John Reed.
It was left leaning but not doctrinaire. It had art, poetry, fiction, as well as reportage. In many ways, in those respects, sort of a precursor to The New Yorker. It lasted only until August 1917 when the censor banned it from the mail. One of the things that he didn’t like was a cartoon that showed the Liberty Bell crumbling.

JW: The people who were charged with enforcing the Espionage Act were not just the FBI or Homeland Security.

AH: Right. It was a government-sanctioned vigilante group. Something called the American Protective League, which catered to men usually beyond military age, who still wanted to feel they were doing something to defend their country against subversives in this great fight that was going on.
By the end of 1917, it had 250,000 members. If you were a member, you got to wear a badge on your breast that was a shield, sort of like a police officer or firefighter wears. It said ‘American Protective League.’ It said your rank, and in the middle of the shield, it said ‘Auxiliary to the US Department of Justice’ — because this organization was chartered by the Justice Department.
What did they do? They beat people up at anti-war rallies, and they staged what they called ‘slacker raids,’ where they would fan out through a town or city and seize hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, young men who didn’t have their draft exemption papers with them or who looked like they hadn’t registered for the draft.
They would lock them up for hours, sometimes for days, until their desperate families could reach them with the necessary paperwork. One percent or so were found to have actually evaded the draft, and they were immediately shipped off to the army. The rest were let go with a stern warning to carry their papers with them from now on.

JW: And how many members did the American Protective League have?

AH: 250,000.

JW: And then the war ended, but the repression didn’t end for another couple of years. Why was that?

AH: Well, Wilson was distracted. He actually sent a note to Postmaster General Burleson saying, “Well, now that the war is over, I think we can stop the censorship.” Burleson paid no attention to that. Went on banning publications he didn’t like from the mail. Continued to do that up to the last day of the Wilson Administration in March 1921.
Wilson was distracted by trying to remake the world of the Conference of Versailles, where he spent almost six months in 1919, and then in the summer of 1919, he had a severe stroke, which basically knocked him out of commission for the rest of his presidency. So the censorship continued. The vigilante group, the American Protective League, was officially dissolved by the Justice Department at the end of the war.
But the men who were in it had so enjoyed their role of intimidating dissenters that, in most cities, they just renamed themselves into the Minneapolis Protective League or the Omaha Protective League or something like that and just kept on beating up left-wingers. Many of them also found work as strikebreakers, and the political prisoners we spoke about remained in jail. Debs was still there, as I said, in November 1920.

JW: What did it take to get Debs out of jail?

AH: Well, in March of 1921, Wilson’s second term came to an end, and he left the White House. Warren Harding took over – definitely not one of our most distinguished presidents, but in some respects, he was a decent guy. He had been a newspaper publisher before he went into politics, small newspaper in Ohio. He had no use for censorship, and he ordered it stopped. He also began letting political prisoners out of jail somewhat slowly. The process didn’t finish until under his successor, Calvin Coolidge. He let Debs out of jail finally Christmas of 1921, and he even invited Debs to stop in and visit him at the White House on his way home.
And when Debs left the White House, he said to reporters, “I’ve run for the White House five times, but this is the first time I’ve ever gotten here.” And Harding, also off the record, told a friend, it didn’t surface until years later. He said, “Debs was completely right about that war. We never should have gotten into it.”

JW: Warren Harding – live like him!

AH: Yeah.

JW: Of course, we’re interested in what lessons we can learn for the resistance to Trump today from the very grim history of the World War I era. I know you’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

AH: In some respects, we’re better off now. One thing that made things so sinister between 1917 and 1921 is that all three branches of government moved completely in lockstep. Congress backed Wilson. There were dissenters who spoke out, but they were far outvoted. The Supreme Court twice upheld the Espionage Act.
The first time, early 1919, unanimously. The second time, later in that year, one Justice on the Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., was brave enough to change his mind, and Justice Louis Brandeis joined him in that dissent, and they dissented.
So it was only upheld seven to two the second time round, but so the Court, Congress, and the President basically moved in lockstep. We don’t have that complete lockstep yet. I can’t say much that’s nice about our current Supreme Court, but they have issued some rulings against the administration so far.

JW: All the rulings that have come before them have gone against Trump, some nine to nothing. There’ve been three, I think.

AH: And I hope that will continue. But I think we have a better court system today. I think we also have a more widespread appreciation of the Bill of Rights today than existed a hundred years ago. So that’s one positive difference. Another is that even though much of the media landscape is terrible, a fire hose of lies and distortions from Fox News and One American Network and all of these other producers of trash out there, we still have some major media organizations that do tell us what’s going on in the world, honestly, that do a lot more investigative journalism than was done a hundred years ago.
So that gives me faith. Another thing is that, unlike a hundred years ago, these states did not move in lockstep with the federal government. We’re lucky to be a country with strong state governments. Sometimes, like in places like Texas and Florida, states can do terrible things that those of us who count as ourselves as progressives don’t like. But there are other cases where states go a completely different direction. The governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker explicitly in his State of the State Address some weeks ago compared Trump to Hitler.
One of the things that Hitler did, by the way, was to shut down all German state legislatures within weeks of coming to power. Trump can’t do that. State of California, where you and I live, is following a completely different strategy on renewable energy than Trump. We now, in California, get 64% of our energy from renewable sources, and that percentage goes up every year. This is very different from Trump’s enthusiasm for coal, oil, and gas. So, strong state governments may be an important part of the resistance that develops in the months ahead.

JW: And we’ve also had some immense national protests that hundreds of thousands, millions of people have joined just in the last couple of weeks.

AH: Absolutely. And most fascinating to me is when you look at these things online, there are crowds of thousands, tens of thousands of people, not just in places like New York and Berkeley where you’d expect it, but in Idaho. Bernie Sanders and AOC got 13,000 people in Idaho the other day. On April 5th, there were huge crowds in Asheville, North Carolina, Salt Lake City, unexpected places like that.
So let’s take every opportunity to make our voices here heard joining in demonstrations like that. A hundred years ago, you could have gotten beaten up for taking part in a demonstration like that. Many countries in the world today, you could get beaten up for even trying to do something like that. So far, we can still make ourselves heard in this country, and it’s really important that we do.

JW: “We can still make ourselves heard” – Adam Hochschild.  He wrote about how Wilson was worse, in some ways, than Donald Trump is today. That piece appeared at The Washington Post op-ed page. Adam, it’s always great to talk to you about Woodrow Wilson. Hope we can do it again soon.

AH: Always ready, Jon.