In the cold, dark months after the election, when higher education leaders knew something bad was coming, but not yet exactly what, they referred to the year-old congressional hearings the way people name infamous terrorist attacks: the month, the day, and no further explanation necessary. On December 5 (2023), three Ivy Plus presidents walked into a congressional hearing to answer questions about anti-Semitism, protest, and free speech. Only one walked out with her job intact. The long tradition of bipartisan deference to elite higher education authority had been shattered. The pieces are still crackling and crumbling today.
It wasn’t a complete surprise. Ron DeSantis’s plan for rising above national political rivals had involved a combination of suspiciously engineered cowboy boots and the remaking of a defenseless public liberal arts college in his image. Did this do anything to make college more effective, or affordable? Of course not. The point, as always, was projecting strength as dominance through transgression. While DeSantis lost the presidential primary to the Sith Lord of the form, he taught other Republicans that government deference to public university independence was just one more eminently breakable norm.
This came as a new generation of right-wing leaders were doing the one thing that all elected politicians—regardless of talent, temperament, and ideology—tend to be good at: noticing who votes for them, and who doesn’t. The electorate was reorganizing itself around higher education, creating a deep well of working-class people without college degrees ready to cross over to the MAGA tribe. The Biden administration’s wildly expensive student loan forgiveness agenda, which was smart in some ways and not in others, made college feel less like bi-partisan economic opportunity for all and more like a fat payoff to a key Democratic voting bloc.
After Trump’s reelection, the Hill staffers and think tank dudes had a look in their eyes. The debt relief gravy train was over. All the DEI nonsense was through. The elite colleges and universities needed to be punished. Sure, that’s where most of them went to college themselves—all the more reason! They remembered the condescension, the superiority, that time they weren’t invited to the … er, that is, the arrogance! It was time to bring higher education to heel.
Which fit right into the emerging authoritarian revolutionary Gramsci-as-explained-by-ChatGPT wing of the movement full of guys like Chris Rufo, who turned the parlor trick of announcing his devious plans on Twitter ahead of time into roughly 17 deferential profiles in The New York Times, where he explained that, since a full great replacement strategy of converting the liberal academy into a conservative indoctrination machine was logistically impossible, the best alternative was to “adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror.”
“Adjust the formula” turned out to be a genteel way of describing the Trump administration’s campaign of all-out warfare against what were until five minutes ago considered to be irreplaceable jewels in the tarnished crown of American global leadership, our world-class research universities.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has been gutted. The administration has proudly announced billions of dollars in cuts to research on energy, health, defense, agriculture, and more. Despite an obsession with trade deficits, the move to cut off the flow of international students would decimate one of America’s most successful export industries, costing colleges in blue states and red billions more. The Republican-passed budget reconciliation bill killed the federal Grad PLUS loan program, eliminating a major source of revenue for students getting advanced degrees.
As for “existential terror,” there is simply no precedent in American history for the way Trump has turned the full force of the federal government against elite universities. The parallels with Trump man crush Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine strategy are striking: a surprise despite months of clear warning signs only because people couldn’t bring themselves to believe anyone could be so evil; an utter disregard for the law; a bumbling overconfidence that instantly turned to outrage at the first signs of resistance; a decent long-term chance of success nonetheless because there’s no power like the executive leadership of a nuclear state enabled by a servile legislative branch; and massive damage to infrastructure and human potential that will be felt for decades to come.
The massive cuts to university-based research are example number 10 kazillion that material self-interest is a spent force in politics. Everything is culture war now. Billions of dollars in science funding are in jeopardy at research universities in red states, surely resulting in losses of jobs and billions in long-term economic activity.
Trump’s minions come in different flavors. Some, like OMB Director Russell Vought, brought insider savvy to the mission of tearing down the federal government and starving children in other countries to death. The administration’s early move to illegally cut the overhead costs on federal research grants bespoke Vought-like cunning. Normal people don’t know that “overhead” includes building and maintaining the laboratory the research is conducted in. Others clearly benefited from the most powerful affirmative action preference in American society: appointing fantastically unqualified people to positions of government power based solely on their MAGA bona fides. This, presumably, is what led to the administration forcing a high-stakes legal confrontation with Harvard by accidentally hitting “send” on the wrong email.
In the early days of Trump’s war on the academy, higher education leaders like Wesleyan University president Michael Roth distinguished themselves by standing up and denouncing the administration’s actions as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and un-American. As the months went by and one outrage piled upon the next, the list of brave college presidents was … still mostly just Michael Roth, as many leaders chose the path of least resistance, to tyranny. In normal times, colleges compete with one another for students, faculty, grants, and prestige. They’re not practiced in solidarity and collective action.
The exceptions, like Princeton president Chris Eisgruber, were generally long established in their roles. Universities run by some combination of an interim leader and a board of directors have fared much worse. Public university boards are often filled with politically connected donors and loyal alumni, while private boards favor hedge fund wealth. A good president knows how to balance the core scholarly values of the faculty with the tendency of board members to lean toward safety, money, and political power. A university being run behind the scenes right now by Bob, Class of ’98, who founded a successful tech firm and likes to tailgate, is in serious trouble.
Columbia University, which is on a second acting president after its last permanent leader resigned barely a year into the job in 2024, has been desperately trying to wave the white flag to the White House, which responded to each of the university’s various innovations in surrendering with even more punishments and demands. Trump’s message to higher learning is “Submit, or we will ruin you—but we’re going to ruin you regardless.” As if to prove the point, in late July, Brown and Columbia agreed to pay the Trump administration hundreds of millions of dollars in fines while also submitting to unprecedented White House control over their admissions, hiring, and academic practices. After giving in, university leaders insisted that they had preserved their dignity and independence, which is like believing that the gangster who just made you sign a business deal with a gun pointed at your head will definitely act legally and in good faith the next time around.
The parallels with Putin’s Ukraine strategy are striking: an utter disregard for the law; a bumbling overconfidence; a decent long-term chance of success nonetheless; and massive damage to human potential that will be felt for decades.
The massive cuts to university-based research are example number 10 kazillion that material self-interest is a spent force in politics. Everything is culture war now. Billions of dollars in science funding are in jeopardy at research universities in red states, surely resulting in losses of jobs and billions in long-term economic activity. Yet too many of their leaders are silent and their politicians are complicit, or enthusiastic. The University of Virginia has long been one of the nation’s great public universities. Then Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed a Trump-friendly university board. Now UVA is a place where presidents are subjected to ritual humiliation for the crime of trying to make a historically elitist institution a little better at serving students of color, in living memory of massive resistance to racial integration.
Trump’s assault on college increasingly looks like his long-term vision for America in microcosm: dissidents black-bagged by masked government agents; critical government funding bled dry; values like racial justice and religious tolerance perverted and weaponized on behalf of a white, “Christian” power structure; public institutions degraded and diminished except for their capacity to impose ideological control.
Much mainstream commentary has conceded that, yes, Trump’s actions are blatantly illegal and, granted, will destroy American research supremacy that took a century to build, but, also, didn’t higher education have it coming? Because of the, you know, woke DEI, and so forth?
Look. The Washington Monthly bows to no one in arguing that higher education is in need of serious reform. Almost every article we’ve published in 20 years of college guides makes the case that some part of the system is falling short. The whole point of our college rankings is to shift attention away from the wealthy, prestigious, exclusive universities that suck up all the oxygen in the mainstream media and often fall short of their obligations to the public good—the very same universities that Trump is going after now. Campus speech is a complicated issue, and not everyone has gotten it right. The professoriate is definitely more liberal than society at large, and serious people have tried to figure out why.
But the idea that Trump’s jihad against the academy is somehow the natural downstream result of shifting public opinion against radicalized higher education is simply incorrect. The typical college experience involves taking a marketing class taught by an underpaid adjunct with completely normal political views, not being subject to Marxist indoctrination. Colleges remain among the most trusted institutions in a time when trust is in short supply.
More importantly, a basic responsibility of being an adult human being is seeing the distinction between “things people say on social media that really get my goat” and “things that actually matter to real people in the real world.” It’s understanding that “we should make this better” is the opposite of “we should blow this to smithereens.” Very often, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. He’s a terrible person you should not associate with or support in any way.
Trump’s war on American higher education is an attempt to destroy a great and good system of higher learning and replace it with a smaller, weaker set of institutions that offer little more than low-cost job training and state-sponsored propaganda. There are no silver linings here, no painful but necessary corrections, no opportunities for something newer and better to rise from the ashes. There are just ashes, piling up by the day.
