The New York Times continues its crusade to help the Trump Administration destroy higher education with a puff piece (and that may be too weak to describe this) on May Mailman, the attorney (an HLS grad) behind the administration’s attacks. It is the worst of “view-from-nowhere” journalism that reports an attack as a two-way dispute, destruction as “far-reaching implications.” Even non-neutral words (“intimidated independent institutions and undercut years of medical and scientific research”) suggest this is legitimate activity.
Some telling things in the piece, which (of course) the author does not mention:
• No variants of the words “Jew” or “antisemitism” appear in the story. The mask is off. This is about dictating how universities operate–Penn with respect to trans athletes, Harvard with respect to race in admissions–and has nothing to do with protecting Jewish students and faculty or with insufficient responses to harassment of Jews.
• No discussion of law. It never mentions whether universities have acted unlawfully (the only grounds for stripping funds) or whether the administration has the lawful authority to wield the “seemingly endless” tools “to pressure schools into submission.” For the Times, the administration does things and we see what happens; the law is irrelevant. In fact, the story reports Mailman saying Harvard must be willing to go “beyond existing requirements” in eliminating all mentions of race in admissions. That is, Harvard (and others) has not acted inconsistent with their legal obligations. The administration wants to pressure them to act in a way they are not legally required to act or to refrain from acting in a way they are legally entitled to act. You may wonder where the executive gets such power; the paper of record does not.
• Even the one quotation from FIRE designed to give the story the appearance of balance speaks to the wisdom of Mailman’s efforts–the negative effects of the loss of academic freedom–but not to their legality.
• Mailman describes her views on gender (she did legal work against trans rights before joining the administration) and politics as “a kind of libertarianism that abhors political correctness.” What the fuck does that mean? I guess libertarian (“government keep out and leave us alone”) as long as I like you and what you stand for; otherwise, government can threaten, intimidate, and deny your basic existence. Good to know.
• Here is the capper to the article and the source of the title of the post:
“’We don’t want to run these universities,’” Ms. Mailman added. “’We want some sweeping changes that set things in the right trajectory.’”
So the government wants the universities to run in a particular way–what it considers the “right trajectory” (beyond what law requires) and will intimidate them into doing that. Very libertarian. Very lawyerly, to distinguish running the university from compelling someone else to run it the way the government wants it run. And very New York Times to print it as something that makes the slightest bit of sense.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 11, 2025 at 12:57 PM