Who designs a federal policy that pressures America’s leading universities to reshape speech, hiring, and institutional culture — without ever mentioning the Constitution?
In this episode of Justice ReDesigned, I take a closer look at May Mailman, the former deputy assistant to the president and senior policy strategist who played a central role in shaping the Trump administration’s approach to higher education, including the so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence.”
Mailman is not a pundit on the sidelines. She was a policy architect — negotiating directly with universities, helping craft settlement agreements, and applying federal leverage behind closed doors. Yet in her extensive public defense of the administration’s strategy, one thing is conspicuously absent: any acknowledgment of the First Amendment limits on government power.
This episode explores that silence.
We examine how cultural frustration with universities became a justification for federal coercion, why conditioning funding on ideological compliance violates long-settled constitutional doctrine, and how academic freedom — often misunderstood as partisan — is in fact a structural protection designed to shield all viewpoints from government control.
If you want to understand the legal blind spot at the heart of the administration’s university strategy — and why so many institutions rejected it outright — this episode provides the missing context.
Listen now and decide for yourself what happens when policy is built without the Constitution in mind.
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