Petards. Hoisting.

There are some benefits that come with watching the years slip past. One obtains a perspective, and time seems to dilate and expand until the years fold back on themselves and it seems like yesterday that M.A.S.H. was on the television and young men were returning from Vietnam. If one pays attention there are patterns to see, cause and effect, and this causes one to sometimes feel like Casandra, who was fated by Apollo to speak true prophesies but never be believed. This is not to say I see the future, because I most certainly do not, but rather to say anyone my age who has been watching has seen some stories play out and can often spot one that will not end well.

The story today regarding the Trump administration’s efforts to de-Wokeify the university system is such a story. We’re in the final act now, and we didn’t arrive here in a vacuum. The story began decades ago.

Trump now threatens to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from colleges like Columbia and Harvard because (in the administration’s opinion) they are not doing enough to combat antisemitism and engage in racist admission policies. To hear the story told in the media today one might believe Trump just invented this ability out of whole cloth, that Trump simply took it upon himself to use the threat of withholding money as a cudgel to beat the universities into ideological conformity.

But that isn’t how it happened. It started some time back at a tiny, conservative Christian school in Pennsylvania called Grove City College. The progressives chose Grove City, exactly because it is a small conservative Christian school, as the test case.

Way back in the late 70s the Carter administration required the college to file an assurance of compliance stating that it was following the Title IX regulations prohibiting discriminating on the basis of gender. The government’s argument was that even though Grove City took no direct federal funding, some 140 of the 2,500 or so students in attendance received Pell Grants. The school refused to comply on the grounds that it received no federal funding and was therefore not subject to government oversight. A hearing was held in which an administrative law judge decided that because the college received federal assistance in the form of Pell Grants that enabled students to attend, it was required under Title IX to file an assurance of compliance report. The college’s refusal was sufficient grounds for the department to prohibit its grants to the students. Grove City sued.

As Grove City’s case was winding through the courts Reagan was elected (and the Democrats claimed he was just like Hitler. Shocking, I know.). In 1984 Grove City’s case reached the Supreme Court and it was decided that yes, accepting the Pell Grants made the college accountable to government Title IX regulation, but only so far as the department that benefited from the grants, in Grove City’s case, the financial aid department.

This is where it gets interesting. This ruling did not please the progressives in the Democratic Party who believed that taking any federal money should require a college to conform to the government’s standards completely. They went to work and in 1987 Congress enacted the so-called Civil Rights Restoration Act (championed by Sen. Edward Kennedy) which allowed all of an institution’s federal funds to be withheld, including loans made available to students. Reagan vetoed the bill. Congress then overrode Reagan’s veto, and the bill was passed.

You see where this is heading, right? It was a massive failure of imagination. The Democrats in Congress simply could not imagine a day when the government might use the tools that they had crafted to compel universities in ways they would not like. They set the table in such a way that the federal government can completely defund, hamstring, institutions that don’t fall in line with its vision of what the social order should be. What could possibly go wrong?

And the progressives USED this tool extensively. In 2011 the Obama Department of Education issued the “Dear Colleague” letter informing colleges and universities that they must overhaul their policies regarding sexual harassment cases, as the administration saw fit, or face the total loss of federal funding. In 2016, Obama’s DoE informed schools that they would interpret Title IX as covering gender identity, advising schools that transgender students must be allowed to use facilities and participate in programs consistent with their gender identity or else lose all funding.

The game today is to pretend that Trump is riding roughshod and engaged in unprecedented overreach. This is simply not true. He is exercising powers that were crafted by Democrats and placed in the executive’s hands. It is disingenuous and silly to think otherwise. One might not like what Trump is doing with these tools, but nothing he is doing is unprecedented or “destroying democracy” or in any way illegal.

Many said (me among them) when Obama spoke of his now famous phone and pen that Democrats would rue the day they celebrated when a President they did not like discovered he, too, had a phone and a pen. The brouhaha around federal money in colleges is exactly the same. Well intentioned (but shortsighted) activists created executive powers ad hoc and imagined they would evaporate the moment they do not hold power. They do not. They never have and they never will. They live on.

This puts Columbia and Harvard and all colleges and universities in a tough spot. Fall in line or lose federal funding. Progressives should have read the fine print. It never read “fall in line when you agree”. It said, “fall in line you backward Christian bigots, whatever you might believe to be right” and the progressives never imagined for a moment that such a hefty tool might cut in more ways than one.

Being old has its advantages. I could have told them. Be careful what you wish for.