the Trump Administration’s aggressive efforts to reform and exert control over higher education in the United States

Core Ideology and Strategy

• Conservative Discontent: Republicans viewed the post-2020 landscape as bleak, but saw the “culture wars” and the perceived weaknesses of higher education (soaring costs, debt, useless degrees) as an opportunity for “conservative reforms.”
• The Playbook: The strategy hinges on two main insights:
  1. Financial Dependence: Nearly all universities, even elite ones, depend heavily on federal money (student aid and research funding), which can account for a quarter or more of revenue at top schools.
  2. Leverage: Research funds, in particular, were seen as a tool that could be frozen or canceled almost instantly to pressure universities.
• Three-Part Critique: May Mailman, a key policy deputy, summarized the Administration’s critique:
  1. Universities are too wealthy to deserve endless public funding, given the national debt.
  2. They are failing their mission, producing “indebted students with useless majors who hate our country.”
  3. “Woke” campus culture (D.E.I., transgender athletes, unchecked antisemitism) violates federal laws.

Key Actions and Targets

• Antisemitism and Civil Rights: An executive order and D.O.J. task force were established to fight campus antisemitism following the October 7th attacks. The strategy was to use the threat of immediately freezing or canceling federal contracts, based on alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (barring discrimination based on national origin), to force compliance from elite schools like Columbia and Harvard.
• D.E.I. and Race-Based Programs: Programs focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I.) were dismantled, and investigations were launched into schools across the country (including large public universities) for offering race-specific scholarships or charging in-state tuition to undocumented students.
• Transgender Athletes and Title IX: The Administration used the issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports to target states and university systems.
  • Maine Case Study: The University of Maine system had its federal funding (including NOAA’s Sea Grant and USDA grants) threatened and suspended after Governor Janet Mills refused to comply with an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” The stated justification was a review of Title IX compliance, despite the university having no known transgender athletes on its women’s teams.
• Science Funding Cuts: The Administration targeted scientific research funding with a proposed 40% cut to the NIH budget and grant suspensions at schools under investigation, viewing it as the most valuable leverage.

Structural Reforms and Legal Challenges

• Department of Education Dismantling: The Administration pursued a long-held conservative goal of crippling the Department of Education, implementing layoffs of over 1,400 employees.
• Student Aid and Accreditation: Plans included:
  • Transferring the $1.6 trillion student-loan portfolio (which critics say is impractical).
  • Implementing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which awards funds to low-income students for short-term certificates, limits certain types of loans, and penalizes degree programs whose graduates don’t earn a basic income.
  • Overhauling the accreditation system to control access to federal financial aid.
• Legal Challenges: The Administration’s approach of framing funding cuts as contract disputes rather than drawn-out civil-rights investigations faced immediate pushback.
  • Harvard Victory: A district-court judge ruled in favor of Harvard, concluding the Administration “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault,” violating the First Amendment and Title VI.
  • Other Injunctions: Judges forced the restoration of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to UCLA and deemed the Education Department’s D.E.I. guidance unconstitutionally vague.
  • [via ai, \The New Yorker