ICYMI: Josh Barro: Universities Are Not On The Level.
Universities are deeply financially vulnerable and highly dependent on federal funding and federal policy. The government has many levers it can use to defund universities—Federal Student Loans, Pell Grants, taxation, federal research funding from the NIH, NSF, or DARPA, control over student visas, Department of Education regulations, and civil rights investigations, and laws creating private rights of actions and litigation threats. These are not idle hypotheticals—the federal government has in fact already used many of these levers in the past, and high-level elected officials have made serious proposals to use others in the future.
The last time universities tangled with the federal government over moral issues, and Congress responded by threatening to cut funding, universities were forced to back down.
That was over the campus ROTC ban.