"Our founders praised the free press and free academic inquiry as on par with free elections in safeguarding the republic. Some, including Pennsylvania’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, Virginia’s George Wythe and New Jersey’s John Witherspoon, were themselves respected academics and classroom professors. They spoke with passion about protecting universities from federal pressure because they understood that the first act of an autocrat is to exert state control over the production of ideas. What’s unfolding at Harvard represents perhaps their worst nightmare — an American president trampling the intellectual freedom of his own people. As Trump’s pressure campaign against higher education shows, that threat is just as real today as it was when Rush used his academic post at the University of Pennsylvania to promote controversial ideas like the emerging science of vaccination. Prominent academics today are right to wonder whether their universities will stand behind them if their research angers the White House. The result will be a chilling effect that makes our country less intellectually dynamic and more susceptible to Trump’s dangerous illiberalism."