A few weeks ago, several universities and firms of prominent American lawyers found themselves in what seemed to be the dilemma of a classic prisoner, courtesy of President Trump.
Their compensation campaign against law firms that represented or oppose political opponents, and against universities that were involved in “aroused” or allegedly promoted anti -semitism policies, forced them to make a sock.
Apparently, those who capitulated and reached an early agreement with the White House could save the sausage of the wrath of Mr. Trump, but at the cost of endangering their independence. Defend the president risked the equally harder punishment, particularly if other institutions remained silent.
Columbia University reached an agreement with the Administration. So did some of the largest law firms in the country. Recent changes, however, suggest that the dilemma is beginning to look very different.
Last month, Harvard became the first university to announce that he would not meet the demands of the administration, which he called “illegal.” Other universities went from collective silence to the unified opposition: “We talked with one voice against the overreach of the unprecedented government and the political interference that now endangers American education Highher,” said more than 400 university leaders in a statement A.
Several major law firms demanded to block executive orders aimed at them, winning temporary cautious. Hundreds of other companies signed in support of the effort. And on Thursday, Microsoft dropped a law firm that reached an agreement with the White House and hired one of the dissident companies to represent it in a high profile case.
The previous dynamic is no longer true. So what changed?
“We had been thinking about this as the dilemma of the prisoners, but we were wrong,” said Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell University.
An unreliable jailer
In the famous mental experiment of prisoner dilemma, two “prisoners” players, unable to communicate with each other, must decide whether to cooperate for mutual benefit or betray us to obtain individual profits. If Neith confesses a crime, both receive light sentences. If one confesses, that prisoner is released while the other receives a long sentence. And if both confess, both serve medium length sentences.
He only thought that cooperation with each other, silence instead of Conesion, leads to the greatest collective benefits, the most rational individual decision is to take the sacrifice of the jailer and confess.
But Cruialy, an assumption in the prisoner’s dilemma is that the jailer is reliable. There is an explicit promise to confess will allow prisoners to avoid the longest sentence.
However, in the real world, instead of rewarding those who capitulated early, the Trump administration pressed them even more.
The University of Columbia, for example, agreed to concessions that included imposing a new supervision on its Department of Studies of the Middle East and create a security force empowered to issue judgments. But that was not enough to restore the more than $ 400 million in subsidies that the Trump administration had canceled, or to prevent the administration from making even more demands.
Law firms like Paul Weiss, who although they had a punishment escaped by accepting a pro bonus for little controversial causes, discovered that Trump saw their agreements as a blank check for them to do their tender.
As my creamagas reported, the law firm discovered that they had agreed to try that “they did little to isolate them from their whims.” An expert at Yale’s Law School said that “the administration seems to think that they submitted these companies to an inactive service.”
Elizabeth Saunders, Professor of Political Science in Columbia, compared the position of the Trump administration with a famous Darth Vader line in “The Empire Strikes Back”: “I’m altering the deal. Ore, I don’t alter it.”
“Capitulation has a history,” said Mrs. Saunders, “and it’s not pretty.”
THE GAME OF EXPECTATIONS
The story shows that when the risk-benefit calculation of collective action changes, the consequences can be seismic.
In the famous academic document “Now Out of Never”, Timur Kuran, a political scientist and economist from the University of Duke, asked how the 1989 revolutions that brought communist regimes of Dow in Eastern Europe managed to take almost once.
The answer, Hey, argued, was that the revolutions were the result of the assignment of the governments themselves unexpectedly. His response to protesters was less hard than he had anticipated and feared, which made people reassess the costs of participating in the opposition. And because there was a big deposit or a silent discontent with the status quo, the uprisings grew very quickly when people stopped hiding their true feelings.
Similarly, when the “agreement” on sacrifice in exchange for capitulating the authority worsens, collective action begins to seem a better option.
In Poland, the prodemocratic movement and the Catholic Church made an implicit bargain: the Church would support the movement, in exchange for women to renounce some of the reproductive freedoms they had under communism. But year later, when the law of the extreme right and the government of justice arrived, the agreement changed, delayed democracy and also increased abortion restrictions to an almost total prohibition.
As a result, people who could once tolerate the government reached the streets in protest, in the greatest demonstrations in Poland since the fall of communism.
Street lawyers
Some law and universities firms seemed to be making an equally fast change in their risk reward calculation in recent weeks.
On May 1, some 1,500 protesters, many of them lawyers in commercial clothing, protested outside the Manhattan Federal Justice Palace as part of the National Law Day, one of the 50 similar actions throughout the country.
The costs of remaining silent in the hope of avoiding the anger of the administration may also have been growing. In “Now of Never Never”, Kuran wrote about the personal cost of what he calls “falsification of preference”, suppressing what one really believes or chickens for reasons of self -interest or self -preservation.
“The suppression of one’s chickens implies a loss of personal autonomy, a personal sacrifice or integrity,” he wrote. “Therefore, it generates lasting inconvenience, the more the lie will be.”
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said she has observed “Burgeonon moral anguish” among her membership in recent months. “Campus leaders feel that they are being coerced to make decisions that believe they are not nenetic, but feel they have no other option,” he said. “In many cases, this moral anguish has become a moral injury that results from the continuous erosion of a moral compass.”
And at the same time, opposition rewards have become clearer.
“Harvard’s brand has never been stronger in the 25 years I have been here at this time,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who co -author who co -author to an opinion article in March that asks Harvard and other universities to public freedoms.
“They worried that their brand was in so many problems that if they talked, Trump would win the political battle,” he added. “But it’s the leg otherwise.”
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