Obama painted a picture of a postwar political environment in which disagreements happened within a shared respect for certain rules and norms, such as free speech and an independent judiciary, which he said was now eroding. “It is up to all of us to fix this,” he said, including “the citizen, the ordinary person who says, no, that’s not right.”
The former president said that he disagreed with some of Trump’s economic policies such as widespread new tariffs, but that he is “more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech.”
Obama called for universities to be prepared to lose government funding to defend academic freedom and other core values, or dip into their endowments — though endowments are sometimes funded with restrictions from donors on how that money can be spent.
“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?” he said. “If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.”
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