The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security. They are magnets for outstanding talent from throughout the country and around the world.

The Trump administration’s recent attack on Columbia University puts all of that at risk, presenting the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Every American should be concerned.

The rise of the American research university in the 20th century depended on many factors, including two crucial turning points. The first, at the start of the century, was the development of strong principles of academic freedom that allowed people and ideas to be judged by scholarly standards, not according to the whims or interests of powerful trustees, donors, or political officials. Stanford’s dismissal in 1900 of Edward Ross—an economics professor who had incited controversy with his remarks about, among other topics, Asian immigrants and the labor practices of a railroad run by the university’s founders—catalyzed a movement to protect the rights of faculty members to pursue, publish, and teach controversial ideas. Significant governance reforms took place in the same period, shifting control of professorial appointments from boards of trustees to presidents and faculties.

Clay Risen: When America persecutes its teachers

The second turning point came during World War II, when Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, created the modern partnership between the federal government and the country’s research universities. Bush recognized that by sponsoring research at universities, the United States could lead the world in discoveries and innovations. Over time, American universities became responsible for a large portion of the government’s scientific programs, accepting tens of billions of dollars a year to perform research that would make the country stronger and improve the lives of its citizens.

These two developments had an important connection. The government’s successful collaboration with American universities depended on its respect for academic freedom, which, for decades, presidents and legislators from both political parties largely observed. That freedom attracted the world’s finest scholars and facilitated the unfettered pursuit of knowledge.

Robust federal funding helped make American universities the world’s best, but it also created a huge risk. Universities had acquired a public patron more powerful than any private donor; their budgets became heavily dependent on that single source. If the United States government ever repudiated the principle of academic freedom, it could bully universities by threatening to withdraw funding unless they changed their curricula, research programs, and personnel decisions.

That’s what the Trump administration did this month when it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia without the legally required due process. The government told Columbia that the money would be restored only if the university met various conditions, which included placing its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department “under academic receivership” and making unspecified but “comprehensive” reforms to its student admissions and international-recruiting practices.

Recent events have raised legitimate concerns about anti-Semitism at Columbia. The government can respond to those concerns without infringing on academic freedom. The principles of that freedom do not give faculty or students the right to disrupt university operations or violate campus rules. Nor does this freedom allow faculty to violate the scholarly standards of their discipline or compel students into political activity. To the extent that the government has grounds to investigate, it should use the processes required by law to do so, and it should allow Columbia to defend itself. Instead, the government is using grants that apply to Columbia science departments as a cudgel to force changes to a completely unrelated department that the government apparently regards as objectionable.

Nobody should suppose that this will stop at Columbia or with the specific academic programs targeted by the government’s letter. Precisely because great research universities are centers of independent, creative thought, they generate arguments and ideas that challenge political power across fields as varied as international relations, biology, economics, and history. If government officials think that stifling such criticism is politically acceptable and legally permissible, some people in authority will inevitably yield to the temptation to do so.

Franklin Foer: Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem

Nor should those who might revile the views expressed by some Columbia faculty members, or who dislike the university’s admission policies, take any comfort from this assault on academic freedom. Universities are now under attack from the right; in the future, left-leaning politicians may demand that universities do their bidding. Under such circumstances, the safest appointments may be the blandest ones—and brilliant scholars, those whom the world most needs, are rarely bland.

The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research. Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.

The universities cannot, however, prevail alone. Strong, independent academic institutions produce new technologies and insights that catalyze economic growth, save lives, improve well-being, and overcome injustices. Every citizen and officeholder who cares about the strength of our country must also care about free speech, self-governing thought, and the untrammeled quest for knowledge. They, too, should demand a stop to the government’s unwarranted intrusion on academic freedom at Columbia.