A few weeks ago, several prominent American universities and law firms were in what a classic dilemma of the prisonerThanks to President Trump.
His campaign of retaliation against law firms who represented or rented his political opponents, and against universities that dealt with “wake” policy or promoted so -called anti -Semitism, forced them to make an unattractive choice.
Those who capitulated and closed an early deal with the White House, it seemed, perhaps to save are the worst of the wrath of Mr. Trump, but at the expense of endanger their independence. The rising of the President still risked strict punishment, especially if other institutions are silent.
Columbia University concluded a deal with the administration. Some of the largest law firms in the country did that too. Recent changes, however, suggest that the dilemma starts to look very different.
Last month Harvard became the first university to announce it would not be satisfactory With the requirements of the administration, which called it ‘illegally’. Other universities have moved from collective silence to uniform opposition: “We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overall and political interference that now endangers American higher education,” said more than 400 university leaders in one rack.
Several large law firms complained to block the executive orders that focus on them, so that temporary orders were won. Hundreds of other companies have registered to support the effort. And on Thursday Microsoft dropped a law firm that closed a deal with the White House and hired one of the different companies to represent it in a high -profile case.
The previous dynamics no longer keeps true. So what has changed?
“We had thought about this as the dilemma of the prisoners, but we were wrong,” said Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell University.
An unreliable prison guardian
In the dilemma of the famous prisoner, the experiment, two “prisoners” players – were unable to communicate with each other – have to decide whether they should work together for mutual benefit, or betray each other for individual profit. If neither of them confesses to a crime, both are released. If one confesses, that prisoner gets a reduced punishment, while the other gets a long one. And if both confessing, both mid-length sentences serve.
Although cooperation with each other – silence instead of confession – leads to the greatest potential benefits, the most rational individual decision is to take and prison the offer of the prison guard.
But crucial is that an assumption in the dilemma of the prisoner is that the prison guard is reliable. There is an explicit promise that confessions will enable prisoners to avoid the longest punishment.
In the real world, however, instead of rewarding those who asked capitulated, the Trump government has put them under even more pressure.
Columbia University, for example, agreed to concessions, including the imposition of new supervision of the Midden -Eastern studies department and creating a security force that is able to perform arrests. But that was not enough to restore the more than $ 400 million in subsidies that the Trump administration had canceled, or to prevent the administration from placing even more requirements.
Law firms such as Paul Weiss, who thought they had escaped punishment by agreeing to do pro bono work for non -controversial causes, discovers That Mr. Trump saw their similarities as a blank check for them to make his bids.
As my colleagues reported, the law firms discovered that they had agreed with deals that “did little to insulate them from his whims.” An expert at the Yale Law School said that the “administration seems to think that they have subjected these companies to contractary service.”
Elizabeth Saunders, a professor in the political sciences in Columbia, compared the position of the Trump government with A famous line by Darth Vader In “The Empire Strikes Back”: “I change the deal. Pray that I will not change it further.”
“Capitulation has a track record,” said Mrs. Saunders, “and it’s not beautiful.”
The expectations
History shows that when the risk-benefit calculus changes with collective action, the consequences can be seismic.
In the famous Academic Paper “Never now‘Timur Kuran, a political scientist and economist at Duke University, asked how the 1989 revolutions that lower communist regimes in Eastern Europe succeeded in betraying almost everyone, including the revolutionaries themselves.
The answer, he argued, was that the revolutions were the result of the governments themselves that behaved unexpectedly. Their response to protesters was less hard than expected and feared, so that people re -assessed the costs of participating in the opposition. And because there was already a large reservoir of silent dissatisfaction with the status quo, the uprising grew very quickly when people stopped hiding their true feelings.
Similarly, when the “deal” offered in exchange for capitulation to authority gets considerably worse, collective action starts to look like a better option.
In Poland, the pro-democracy movement and the Catholic Church made one implicit bargain: The church would support the movement, in exchange for women who give up some reproductive freedoms they had under communism. But years later, when the extreme right -wing rights and the justice government came in, it changed the deal, rolled it back from democracy and also raised the limitations to an almost total prohibition.
As a result, people who have ever reluctantly tolerated the government flocked into the street in protest, in the greatest demonstrations In Poland since the fall of communism.
Lawyers on the street
Some law firms and universities seemed to make a similar fast shift in their risk claims calculus in recent weeks.
On May 1, about 1500 protesters, many of them lawyers in business clothing, protested outside the federal court building of Manhattan As part of the National Law Day of Action – one of the approximately 50 comparable actions in the entire nation.
The costs to remain silent in the hope that the anger of the administration will be avoided can also have grown. In “Now Out of Never”, Kuran wrote about the personal costs of what he calls “preferred distribution”-oppressed what people really believe or wants for reasons of self-interest or self-preservation.
“The oppression of someone’s wishes entails a loss of personal autonomy, a sacrifice of personal integrity,” he wrote. “So it generates permanent discomfort, the more the lie bigger.”
Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said that she has noticed ‘budding moral need’ in her membership in recent months. “Campus leaders feel that they are being forced to make decisions that they think are unethical, but they feel they have no choice,” she said. “In many cases, that moral need has turned into a moral injury that is the result of the constant erosion of a moral compass.”
And at the same time the benefits of opposition have become clearer.
“Harvard’s brand has never been stronger in the 25 years that I have been here than now,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist in Harvard who has a on In March Harvard and other universities called on to publicly defend democratic freedoms.
“They were worried that their brand had so many problems that if they pronounced themselves, Trump would win the battle politically,” he added. “But it has been the opposite.”
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