In God and Man at Yale, the 1951 book that made William F. Buckley famous, American conservatism’s founding father argues that academic freedom is premised on a fiction.

While professors claim that they are merely attempting to equip their students with the tools necessary to comprehend the world and succeed in it, they are in fact engaged in conveying a particular set of truths and values to their students — meaning, at the time, liberal and socialist values. In response, Buckley argues, university trustees and administrators should “banish” favorable discussion of such ideas from the classroom, replacing them with a curriculum that emphasizes the eternal truths of Christianity and capitalism.

In some ways, the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to college campuses directly echoes Buckley’s ideas. They are making transparently ideological demands of universities like Harvard and Columbia, and threatening to withhold funding if they don’t comply. They have also adopted what looks a lot like a systematic policy of deporting foreign students who participate in pro-Palestinian activism.

The Trump administration goes even further than Buckley in two critical respects.

First, Buckley explicitly rejected government interference in the affairs of private universities — the sort of thing that Trump has been doing throughout his second term. “I should bitterly contest a preemption by the state of the duties and privileges of the alumni of the private institutions themselves to guide the destinies of the schools they support,” Buckley wrote.

Second, Trump has added a layer of ideological hypocrisy.

Buckley explicitly rejected the idea of campuses as free speech zones, but the president has long claimed to be defending exactly this principle — saying in 2019 that “taxpayer dollars should not subsidize anti-First Amendment institutions.” Indeed, the notion that there is a free speech crisis on campus that must be addressed has become a mainstream conservative position in the era of “wokeness” and “cancel culture.”

Yet, Trump’s current approach to universities........

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