If we are lucky, if we get through this period with our democracy intact rather than sliding into a Hungary-like competitive authoritarianism (or worse), my hope is we will look back on the recent spate of capitulations of elite higher education institutions to the authoritarian regime with some mixture of disbelief and shame. I hope that individuals who I could but will not name, but who are easily identifiable as being central to these capitulations, are viewed harshly as people who failed to hold to important principles at a crucial time.
The alternative, that these people are either viewed as pragmatists or, more likely, forgotten, means we will have fallen so far from our ideals of a free nation built on free inquiry that whatever continues to exist will be unrecognizable as compared