Take, for example, the roiling monthslong debate about President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement agenda. 

Prior to the media uproar over the much-ballyhooed MS-13-tied "Maryland man," the since-deported Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia, there was a similar hullabaloo surrounding the arrest and initiation of removal proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, the green card-holding Hamas sympathizer at Columbia University. Critics said that Khalil never committed an actual black-letter crime -- and perhaps he didn't. But he evinced clear support for at least one State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization and contributed to a hostile campus environment for Columbia's besieged Jewish students. In acting as a subversive fool, Khalil abused the terms of his noncitizen legal permanent residence and forfeited his right to be here.
We might view it this way: Khalil violated his implicit "quid" (comport oneself as a generally decent human being), and accordingly he lost his corresponding "quo" (his remaining here at the behest and beneficence of the sovereign, We the People). Many similar examples abound throughout our legal fabric. Consider also Section 230, the oft-discussed 1990s-era technology law: In exchange for helping to "offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse," as the statute's preambulatory section stipulates, a given social media platform will not be treated as a "publisher" for purposes of defamation law. But Big Tech has repeatedly violated the "quid" (by engaging in politically driven censorship), and now a change to the statutory "quo" is appropriate.

It is only through this prism that we can understand the ongoing, and rapidly escalating, standoff between Trump's administration and Harvard University -- and Trump's ambitious agenda to rein in the fiscal and cultural excesses of elite American higher education, more generally.