I saw a news item the other day that wasn’t funny, but still made me laugh. “Trump Pauses Dozens of Federal Grants to Princeton,” read the headline: 

The Trump administration moved this week to suspend dozens of federal grants to Princeton University, the fourth Ivy League school that has seen its financial support from Washington reduced or explicitly threatened since March.

Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, told the university community in an email late Tuesday morning that “several dozen” grants had been suspended. …

Mr. Eisgruber said that the university had been told on Monday and Tuesday that it was losing at least some research support from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and NASA.

You don’t see the humor? Let me explain.

For a year and a half now, those of us involved in the divestment movement at Princeton and elsewhere have been demanding that universities disclose their financial connections to the defense industries, and divest from them. The response? A solid year and a half of vilification, defamation, threats, and lies, followed by suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and deportations. Pressed for accountability, the universities have effectively spat in our faces: invoking some equivalent of “institutional neutrality,” they’ve evaded our questions, shot down our proposals, and moved on in the hopes that we would.

We lost the bid for divestment at Princeton, at least ostensibly so. The University couldn’t find “consensus” on the issue, and being unable either to define “consensus” or find what it couldn’t define, the Council of the Princeton University Community decided that it would be too divisive to take a stand against genocide. So the genocide must go on, with Princeton’s quiet, pathetic complicity. 

Along comes the Trump Administration, of all things, to do our work for us. We’d wanted Princeton to divest from the defense industries. Well, the Trump Administration has suspended research support for Princeton from the Department of Defense. Not bad. 

That tells us that our strategy worked, if only in an unintended way. We’d intended to appeal directly to the conscience of the university. We gradually discovered that it lacked a conscience. We’ve now discovered that our activism had the power to generate insane conspiracy theories that did the work that an appeal to conscience might have done. Philosophers call this a “deviant causal chain.” I call it a windfall. 

Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Princeton, April 2024 (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

There’s a lesson here: The louder we are, the more attention we draw to the university. The more attention we draw, the more that the Trump Administration believes (or pretends to believe) that Princeton is a hotbed of Hamas terrorism and Nazi anti-Semitism. The more they “believe” that, the more the Administration punishes Princeton with cuts. The greater the number of cuts, the greater the probability of defense cuts. The lesson? Keep going with the activism. The more we embarrass the university, the more it suffers. The more it suffers, the closer we come to the realization of justice. 

“By diverse means,” Montaigne wrote, “we arrive at the same end.” Correct: by diverse means, the divestment movement and the Trump Administration have managed to take a nice, juicy financial bite out of Princeton University’s budget. I don’t imagine that this fortuitous event will repeat itself very often, but once is better than never. So I’m happy to pocket the win, and hold out hope for as many more victories as we can get.