What colleges will do under Trump: How presidents of universities can react.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Anticipating how best to be obedient, they aim to please those at the vanguard of what Mark Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point.” It’s one thing to be reminded that “elections have consequences,” but quite another to insist that the best response to the abuse of authority is to be restrained, demure, neutral. … Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.” And Mill underscored the “need for political devolution and the diffusion of power and initiative within the great entrenched institutions of our society.” Authoritarians, by contrast, have long known that total control will elude them if they don’t eradicate the autonomous support engendered within civil society by cultural, religious, commercial, and educational institutions. The official newspaper of the Soviet communists was, after all, entitled Pravda—“Truth.” Leaders in civil society shouldn’t be “demure” in the face of authoritarian attempts to align all power with a president’s agenda, civil society be damned. Now we face a Trumpian administration intent on demonizing any opposition—either labeling differing views as “crazy,” or attaching labels to them, like “Marxist,” “ideologically corrupt,” or “transgenderist.” This is a classic authoritarian move: create scapegoats and undermine the health of civil society in order to increase the power of the leader and his loyalists.