I'm an Alum of Columbia and Paul, Weiss. There's an Uncomfortable Lesson in Trump's Tactics.

New York Times

01-04-2025

'Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,' wrote Bertolt Brecht in 'Life of Galileo.'
I am a proud alumnus of both Columbia University and the Paul, Weiss law firm — I'm also a conservative, though an anti-Trump, Republican. Like many others, I am distressed to see both these great institutions submit unheroically to the coercion of a heavy-handed government.
But the main lesson I take from their decisions to accommodate the Trump administration is that Brecht was right: Heroic resistance by large institutions to the demands of the United States government may be impossible and should be unnecessary. If there is a need for heroism, it reflects a deeper malady.
The only real solution is to lessen the government's power to coerce.
By now you probably know the story: In March, the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million in federal grants to and contracts with Columbia. The school quickly agreed to make policy changes that the administration demanded, presumably to get the money back. President Trump also signed executive orders aimed at several law firms, including Paul, Weiss. In its case, Mr. Trump ordered measures to suspend security clearances for anyone at the firm and to terminate government contracts with it. The president agreed with Paul, Weiss to drop the executive order in exchange for $40 million in pro bono legal work for some of his favorite causes and other commitments.
Whether Columbia and Paul, Weiss caved or prudently compromised has been the subject of much debate, but it's obvious both institutions took painful steps to get the government off their backs. I find the administration's actions offensive — in fact, oppressive — and I wish Columbia and Paul, Weiss hadn't yielded to them. But I'm not joining those who condemn the leaders of the university and the law firm, because I'm not convinced they could have done anything other than what they did. It's easier to encourage other people to defy the government than to do it yourself.
We should remember that something similar happened before: In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the heroes of the civil rights movement — and they were heroes indeed — had largely achieved their original aim, the elimination of the Jim Crow regime in the South. But they, as heroes often do, looked for new worlds to conquer, and many of them and their successors went on to call for racial preferences in hiring, contracting and academic admissions, under the euphemism of affirmative action, to remedy the effects of past discrimination.
Soon they had a sympathetic federal government on their side. Among other things, executive orders by Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and federal laws like Section 8(a) of the Small Business Act served directly or indirectly to establish minority preferences. Taking race into account in university admissions was for decades common practice, until the Supreme Court banned it in 2023.
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