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Opinion
The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Abraham Flaxman is a professor at the University of Washington who studies diseases and how they affect global health. He’s a bit uneasy, he says, with military talk.
But such are the times that when I ask him the meaning of a movement he’s brought to UW, he answers with this:
“An attack on one is an attack on all,” he says, quoting the core premise of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance that formed in the aftermath of World War II. “That’s what this is — a NATO for higher education.”
Flaxman is the sponsor of a resolution that passed the Faculty Senate last week, calling for UW to join a “mutual defense compact” of Big Ten universities. It passed 38 to 17.
Except unlike NATO, which was formed to guard against the threat of a hostile foreign power (the Soviet Union), this one has formed to guard against the threat of our own government.
President Donald Trump has been going after major universities, for their diversity programs as well as last year’s protests against the war in Gaza. The administration has tried to pull federal funding from seven schools while threatening dozens more. It has also upended the visas of nearly 2,000 international students.
The resolution calls on the schools to band together. If any one gets its funding or academic independence threatened, then all will rally a “vigorous defense” that could include legal counsel, lobbying, experts and other resources.
The resolution reads: “The federal government has signaled a willingness to target individual institutions with legal, financial, and political incursion designed to undermine their public mission, silence dissenting voices, and/or exert improper control over academic inquiry.”
What strained times. That a little “NATO” is deemed necessary inside our own country, to protect one part of it from another, is only one of the local news items this week that hinted our grand national experiment could be headed for a crackup.
In Olympia, Democrats put forward a bill that bars other states from sending their National Guard units here without permission. It’s born of fears that some red states, emboldened by Trump’s vow to use the military to round up migrants, will send in their own National Guard units.
Republicans correctly countered that the bill, like UW’s NATO pact, is mostly symbolic. Trump can likely get around it by declaring an emergency and federalizing the National Guard.
That we’re even talking about states effectively invading other states is … well, it was enough to get one state senator to invoke the last time such a thing happened.
“A state sending their National Guard into another state … this has never happened before,” said state Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, before catching himself. “Only once — in the Civil War.”
He was talking about times a state’s National Guard had been sent into another state with a hostile posture (the units go frequently when asked). There have also been times like the 1950s, when President Dwight Eisenhower commandeered the Arkansas National Guard to help Black students integrate a Little Rock school.
But these examples refer to periods of extraordinary national duress. Are we there?
“With today’s tensions in the United States, and each state, this bill should be put down, if for nothing else to ease the tensions,” Wilson said during the legislative debate earlier this month. “No civil war — please put this bill down.”
Democrats did not put it down — they passed it, and Gov. Bob Ferguson signed it.
“We just cannot allow as a state to have armed forces come into our home and enforce policies that are against our core values,” Ferguson said.
The talk of civil war, and of NATO-style defense pacts — it all may seem hyperbolic. But it reflects a very real instability in the land right now. There’s an uneasiness that the center — the separation of powers, due process, the Constitution — this time may not hold.
The saying goes that “it can’t happen here.” But every day there are more signs that it might.
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