Can you feel it in the air tonight? The long hot summer of 2025 isn’t officially over, yet the mercury seemed to drop the instant that the Phillies acquired the electrifying, 103-mph-throwing closer Jhoan Duran from the Minnesota Twins up north. When Duran entered his first game for the Phils on Friday night, to an over-the-top production that dimmed all the lights at Citizens Bank Park for spider graphics and blaring Latin music, it gave an entire city the chills. It felt like October.
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Attending Brown was a dream. Its Trump capitulation? A wake-up call
The first time I ever heard of Brown University, I couldn’t imagine anyone would actually want to go there. I was a sports-crazed middle-schooler in the early 1970s, and my hometown paper ran a weekly college-football column called The Bottom 10. Week after week, Brown — woefully inept and located in Providence, Rhode Island, as I eventually figured out — was the butt of jokes as the worst of the worst.
Fortunately, two things happened. The football team got slightly better, and by high school I came to understand that Brown’s progressive ideas about what made for a world-class education might be a good fit, if they’d have me. I’d like to say it was their brilliant roster of professors that clinched it, but in reality I fell for Brown during a 12th-grade visit on an unseasonably-warm Saturday in March, as Frisbees flew across fresh grass on the Wriston Quad and the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” blasted from someone’s massive speakers.
And, since we’re being honest, also the rejection letter from Harvard that came a month later.
I could probably fill this column with four years worth of boring stories of glory days — our team’s two victories in the all-night trivia contest conducted on the static-ridden campus AM radio station, or defying the campus police as a DJ by playing the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” when they tried to close our out-of-control, strobe-lit Sixties Party. But for everyone’s sake, let’s leave that kind of nostalgia at this paragraph.
I should mention some less sexy and more relevant things that happened to me between September 1977 and May 1981. Now that the haze of 2 a.m. nights putting out the Brown Daily Herald and 4 a.m. jaunts to Haven Brothers has lifted, I understand how much I got out of Brown’s then-New Curriculum (now, the Open Curriculum) that 1969 student activists had fought for, to ensure their successors got a diverse and liberal (in the classical, not political, sense) education.
That’s how a late boomer inspired by the anti-war protesters who’d come before me ended up in a seminar class called “Military Influence in America” taught by a retired colonel, and later in a poli-sci class taught by the former No. 3 man in the CIA. Brown allowed students to take any class pass/fail in those days, to encourage students to broaden their wings. I took courses nicknamed “Econ for Poets” and “Notions of Oceans,” and tiny neurons of knowledge remain decades later when I write about the evils of unfettered capitalism, or the threat of climate change.
I didn’t go to class for my career. That’s what the Herald and summer internships were for. I wanted to read the great books, and develop an appreciation for things I’d known nothing about, like modern art. Learning facts was less important than learning to think — so hopefully I wouldn’t stop thinking once I turned 23. I wasn’t alone. In 1969, a whopping 83% of nationwide incoming college freshmen told UCLA researchers their purpose in going to college was “to develop a meaningful philosophy of life.” At Brown in the 1970s, that number might have been higher.
After I graduated, Brown changed just like the Hemingway-born cliché, gradually and then suddenly. It wasn’t so much the arrival of Eurotrash that Vanity Fair alleged in a notorious 1998 article. The liberal curriculum largely remained, but the spirit of 1969 felt increasingly buried under a mound of money. As an institution, Brown tweaked its focus more toward big-name, big dollar research in programs like a bulked-up School of Engineering. More hedge-fund alums started bringing a Wall Street attitude to the board of trustees. As job prep trumped that whole “meaningful philosophy of life” thing, preprofessionalism and career-trajectory clubs proliferated.
With so much ambition on the line, Brown became too big to fail.
And Donald Trump knew it. Waging war on big-name universities like Brown and its Ivy League cousins, Harvard and Columbia, killed two birds with one stone — playing to the cultural grievances and anger of his working-class MAGA base that sees college as the birthplace of “woke,” while also making sure the buried treasure of critical thinking, which could turn voters against today’s fact-free conservatism, stays underground.
Trump had the leverage; in April, the federal government said it would block $510 million in Brown research grants and contracts. It invented the pretense — a ludicrous claim of “antisemitism,” citing 2024’s pro-Palestinian encampment and a deal in which the university considered, yet rejected, ending investments tied to Israel.
A lot was at stake. The at-risk dollars funded researchers looking to cure cancer and fight other diseases, among other things. Brown’s reaction was almost Springsteen-ian: refusal, and then surrender. In March, university president Christina H. Paxson said Trump’s “demands raise new and previously unthinkable questions about the future of academic freedom…” In July, she and the university did the unthinkable and cut a deal.
Sure, it could have been worse. Unlike Columbia, which agreed to pay the federal government $200 million, Brown is spending $50 million over 10 years on Rhode Island workforce development, a worthy cause. The spigot for worthwhile and maybe lifesaving science suddenly reopened. All Brown had to give up was…
…its mortal soul.
It’s bad that Brown is in far too many ways accepting the Trump regime’s hostile and discriminatory framing of the transgender community and what it has to offer. It’s bad that the university is giving that same autocratic government a window into its admissions process, which will surely lead to pressures to make Brown less diverse and more white. And it’s bad that Team MAGA will have a role in looking for antisemitism on campus, given its bad faith around this issue so far.
And it really doesn’t matter what was preserved in the deal. Academic freedom is kind of like virginity. You don’t lose it just “a little bit,” nor can you get it back when it’s gone — at least not so easily.
Believing it’s OK to do business with a fascist government that disdains everything good about higher education because it keeps the cash flowing is the opposite of everything about morality and civic virtue that my professors on College Hill taught me nearly a half-century ago. “Woke is officially DEAD at Brown,” Trump crowed in a Truth Social post that made me sick to my stomach. Is this really Brown’s teachable moment for its next generation?
Brown is the longtime home to arguably the nation’s top scholar on the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, and thousands of alums once debated whether founder Patrick Henry really proclaimed, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” And yet there can be no debate that Brown just shunned liberty and chose spiritual death, in a future stripped of not just academic freedom but moral integrity, all in service to a wannabe king. That is unconscionable. I thought attending Brown was my American Dream, but I wonder now if it was always just an illusion.
Yo, do this!
Like you, I needed some summer beach-friendly escape on the reading front. My August audiobook has been When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, the autobiography of Spy magazine founder and longtime Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. Although his tome could do with a lot less name-dropping of celebrities and name-checking of seemingly everyone he ever worked with, the central storyline about a lost world of egomaniacal journalistic giants and unlimited expense accounts, as well as a reprise of Spy’s laugh-out-loud 1980s satire, make it a worthwhile read (or listen).
If you think Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is the defining story of our time, you are half-right. The overlapping narrative is the rapid imposition of an artificial-intelligence regime, and what that means for our society. In a must-read New York Times guest essay, British journalist Mary Harrington writes about the rise of AI, and how its already evident negative impact on young people’s ability to learn is going to fall more heavily on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Harrington notes that the vanishing art of reading “rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity toward the analytic left hemisphere and honing our capacity for concentration, linear reasoning and deep thought. The presence of these traits at scale contributed to the emergence of free speech, modern science and liberal democracy, among other things.” Read the entire essay: “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good.”
Ask me anything
Question: Are you seeing as many primary campaigns against incumbent Democrats as you would’ve thought, say, six months ago? — Matt Ortega (@mattortega.com) via Bluesky
Answer: It may be slightly too early to tell, but my early sense is that — despite ongoing anger from the Democratic base that wants a more forceful anti-Trump response — the number of insurgent challenges may be more than usual but also nowhere near the “primary-every-Democrat” uproar right after Trump’s reelection. I’d be surprised if liberal-but-not-radical Dems like those here in Philly’s western suburbs — Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon and Madeleine Dean — faced a serious primary. What you are seeing is a lot of the Democratic gerontocracy — Philly Rep. Dwight Evans (age 71) and Illinois Reps. Jan Schakowsky (81) and Danny Davis (83) — finally retiring. Any new blood can only help a struggling party.
What you’re saying about…
Last week’s question about Josh Shapiro and his 2028 presidential ambitions drew a more-robust-than-usual response, and no one seemed particularly excited about a would-be candidacy. “I do not see him as a serious contender for president, and I am so tired of the Democratic Party trying to do the same-old, same-old instead of being bold, dynamic, and innovative and responding to the actual moment and actual people,” wrote Heather Frost, citing Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani as ones who are actually listening. Martin M. Berliner raised a very different concern. “I would support Josh Shapiro in a heartbeat,” he wrote. “However, the not-so-latent antisemitism in our country, exacerbated by the Israel/Gaza issue, would make it almost impossible for him to be nominated, let alone elected.”
📮 This week’s question: Following up on my Brown University essay above, what’s your opinion on universities like Columbia, Brown, and possibly Harvard cutting deals with the Trump regime? Is it necessary to preserve possibly lifesaving scientific research? Or is U.S. higher ed giving away too much in academic freedom? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “University deals” in the subject line.
Backstory on those so-called ‘Trump accomplishments’
Shortly after Donald Trump hit the six-month mark in his democracy-murdering second term, a new storyline emerged among certain elements in the media, ranging from the barely closeted pro-Trump toadies at Axios to the New York Times’ in-house war-crimes apologist Bret Stephens to the straight-out-of-Philly raging centrist Michael Smerconish at CNN. Why is so much of the lamestream media refusing to acknowledge Trump’s growing lists of accomplishments as 47th president, and why won’t Democrats start working with him in the areas where this GOP POTUS is — in their opinion — getting it right?
“Who among us could deny how consequential Trump 2.0 is turning out to be?” Smerconish said in late June, arguing that his White House was “on a roll.” He repeated parts of this riff last Saturday on CNN, insisting that Democrats were hurting themselves by not admitting this and seeking common ground. Added the NYT’s Stephens, who’s long promoted himself as a conservative critic of Trump: “But if Trump’s opponents want to someday be effective — and let’s face it, we haven’t been — then we have to come to grips with realities that have so far eluded us. Such as: Not everything Trump does is bad.”
There’s two huge problems with this line of thinking. One is that the list of Trump achievements just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Some of the argument is based on the fact that the sky hasn’t fallen… yet. Sure, Wall Street is defying gravity in not buckling so far to the president’s irrational, arbitrary, consumer-unfriendly tariffs, but we learned Friday that the job market is indeed slowing down rapidly. The No. 1 achievement on their list is Trump’s decision to drop the world’s most powerful nonnuclear bombs on Iran, yet there’s no hard proof that aggressive military action in the Persian Gulf has slowed that nation’s nuclear program, and the outcome also emboldened his partner, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, to step up his campaign of mass starvation in Gaza. The regime’s mild flip-flop on Ukraine — freeing up weapons shipments that should never have been frozen in the first place — hasn’t come anywhere close to producing the peace deal Trump promised on Day One. European nations and Canada are spending more money on their defense not out of respect for Trump, but out of fear and terror over America’s decline as a force for good.
The bigger problem, though, is that even if you accept the most positive spin on Trump’s economic and foreign policies, does any of that matter in a nation that becomes less democratic and more dictatorial every single day? Are we really going to talk about Hitler’s gleaming new autobahns in this scenario? It’s taken only six months for the Trump regime to deploy a masked secret police across America and start building concentration camps, to sic the federal criminal-justice apparatus on his political enemies, to relentlessly attack academic freedom and a free press, and begin work on undermining the elections in 2026 and beyond. Sure, he’s brought unauthorized border crossings close to zero, and all he needed to do to get there was impose an American police state, call out the military on U.S. soil, and ignore the problems like climate change that are causing mass migration in the first place.
“We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, one of the few pundits who’s consistently gotten it right, said Monday night. History has a term for what Smerconish wants from the Democrats: Collaborators. Excuse me for not tipping my cap to this new revolution.
What I wrote on this date in 2013
It’s a little hard to believe now, but there was a day — exactly 12 years ago, in fact — when Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos was considered a savior of American journalism, not its potential destroyer. I was, mostly, thrilled by Bezos’ $250 million purchase of the seemingly adrift Washington Post. I did write: “But, and I’m trying really hard not to be cynical, certainly this is a case of what happens when the immovable object (traditional newsrooms) collides with the irresistible force (modern Internet billionaire.) Today, August 5, 2013, no one yet has come up with the idea that will save legacy news orgs — and that includes Jeff Bezos.” Indeed, Bezos would have other ideas. Read the rest: “Bezos saves.”
Recommended Inquirer reading
Only one column this week, as the summer slowdown continues. In that piece, I looked at last week’s big breaking story — the mass shooting at a Midtown Manhattan office tower that killed four people including a New York City police officer — and the truths it exposed about immigration in America. The slain Bangladeshi-American cop, Didarul Islam, was a hero among the American Dreamers of a thriving Bronx community that in no way resembles the lies about immigrants fueling Trump’s immoral mass-deportation campaign.
All news is local, even — or especially — when your country’s president turns out to be a dictator. I was struck by how much last week’s metro Philadelphia coverage in The Inquirer was shaped by the radical changes in Washington. At the city’s core historic sites such as Independence Hall, the regime is seriously considering yanking exhibits that tell unvarnished truths about our past, including discussions of slavery. Down the shore, tourist-dependent communities like Wildwood are seeing a sharp drop in Canadian visitors since Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Adding insult to injury, the government has also dropped the funding to replenish their beaches. The current crisis has greatly reinforced the notion that local journalism is essential to democracy. Keep it going. Subscribe to the foundation-and-not-billionaire-owned Inquirer today.
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