Which brings us to the most important thing to be said about what is happening here: These schools do not believe in anything. A fuller way to say this is that, like many institutions that come to thrive under capitalism, these schools do not have any ideological values other than their own flourishing. In the case of private corporations, this quality is taken for granted—they exist to serve their own interests. But in the case of universities, this conclusion is obscured by a thicket of declarations about the timeless nature of education and learning and knowledge and serving the values of mankind. Still, the actions of the schools tell the full story. They define their own survival as the highest inherent good. Therefore they will pay whatever price is necessary to punch their own ticket to the future. They will throw as many people overboard as necessary in order to ensure that the ship itself continues sailing. If you are trying to figure out the ideological beliefs of America’s most respected institutes of higher education, you will come closest to the truth by concluding that they do not have any ideology at all.

This is why it is certain that the Trump administration will crush them as much as it chooses to. The schools are non-ideological contestants in an ideological battle. They are hollow shells facing iron wrecking balls. Their opponents may be bigoted, deranged, power-mad, and dishonest, but they believe in something. The schools believe only in self-perpetuation. It is easy to understand how this dynamic inevitably causes the schools to acquiesce to increasingly outrageous demands. They have no ideological firewall blocking their own retreat. They have no philosophical reason to say to themselves, “Stop giving in at this point.” They will always give in, sell out, accede to whatever they think is necessary to preserve what they can of what they have. You can see in university presidents the same quality that you see in many business CEOs: They envision their own task not as vision and leadership towards a higher goal, but as one of balancing the competing demands of various stakeholders in the least damaging way possible. When there is a stakeholder—in this case, the US government—that is ideologically driven to go beyond reasonableness, institutions that do not have any equal and opposite ideological drive of their own find themselves pushed backwards. That is what we see in higher education, right now.