I want to know what we’re doing to save higher education in America from the Trump Administration. Tell me what you know about.
Here’s what I’ve seen:
The victims of the Trump Administration’s scattershot but relentless campaign against America’s colleges and universities are everywhere: scientists stripped of competitive research grants; professors told their academic freedom doesn’t cover positions or histories the president doesn’t like; administrators seeking to manage large budget cuts while fending off federal extortion; and students facing reduced funding and even worse terms on the loans they take to pay ever-increasing tuition and fees. This list of victims and grievances is woefully incomplete–and that’s part of the challenge in organizing an effective resistance.
Trump and his allies see too many offenses in higher education to ignore:
- Everything in higher ed is too expensive, too complicated, and too bureaucratic.
- Higher education is a massive and expensive part of America’s economy. Universities hire–and sometimes protect–people who conduct research and write books and articles, sometimes promoting unpopular opinions.
- Colleges and universities are supposed to teach students to think critically and demand evidence, which leads to broad acceptance for ideas that vaccines promote public health or that tariffs are taxes on imports that drive up prices.
- The system of higher education in the United States is rife with inequality. Lots of people harbor grudges–it’s too easy to identify someone else who seems to enjoy unfair advantages. A skillful hater can exploit all of this.
- Trump’s support depends upon the poorly educated, so keeping people out of college is a political strategy.
The Administration has responded to these political opportunities with vengeance. Most of the headlines went to attacks on elite universities like Columbia and Harvard, following (and publicizing!) the student protests against the Gaza War. The Administration announced that it was fighting antisemitism, which proved to be the most convenient stick to use in beating up on university life.
Larger numbers will be affected by cuts in Pell Grants, more onerous terms for student loans, and massive cuts in federal research grants and reimbursed indirect costs. College will be more expensive for students who will have to pay off their loans over even longer periods of time–or just skip college altogether. Physical and biological scientists who won competitive grants found their projects summarily canceled without explanations. They fired post-doctoral researchers and lab techs–and tried to provide useful advice to their own students who’d lost jobs elsewhere. The Trump Administration is gleeful in destroying scientific careers–but mostly backs away from explaining the scientific progress that will be lost.
Meanwhile, administrators at research universities are scrambling to figure out ways to compensate for lost “indirect” costs, which can be puzzling even to those of us who live in such places. Let me explain a little:
At the outset of the Cold War, American leaders somehow came to believe that scientific advancement and a broadly educated populace were assets in a global struggle for democracy–and for dominance. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a satellite that came to symbolize a Communist threat and a scientific challenge. The United States worked to expand access to higher education, creating new campuses and many more seats, as well as programs to help students pay for college. Those campuses welcomed, more or less warmly, first generation students, underrepresented minorities, and women. Over time, campuses developed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs to accommodate a broader slice of Americans.
The government also invested in scientific research on those expanding campuses. Spreading research across the country with large grants, the federal government added a negotiated supplement to grants that covered services like trash disposal, accounting, and building maintenance. At the University of California, for example, this negotiated indirect rate is 58% of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Trump Administration has announced a new rate of 15% instead. (My very crude estimate is the University of California, Irvine, will lose $120 million from NIH alone. Real money!)
Most importantly, the attacks on elements of higher education (and there are more) make for a comprehensive campaign against students, scientists, and teachers. Taken together, they’ll make the United States poorer, weaker, and dumber. There’s good reason for resistance.
But the challenges posed by a broad attack on higher education are felt as individual grievances. Students seeking financial aid will focus on the new, more complicated, financial aid form and the terms of loans. Scientists are already focusing on interference in their work and funding. And most administrators are neglecting a larger war on higher ed to try to protect their own campuses. There are pockets of resistance everywhere, but nothing like the comprehensive, patriotic, campaign for higher education that is needed.
In the next post, I’ll outline some of the disparate resistance efforts I’ve seen. Please tell me more.
Politics Outdoors 
Thanks for writing, David. (I accidentally deleted the first version of my comments. So this time writing comments in another document to paste into the box.) Agreeing with much of what you say, even within higher ed, a divergence of interests about which specific policies bother you the most. Attacks on “DEI”? Cancellation of federal grants or reduction of indirect? Claims of “antisemitism” for ineffective response to pro-Palestine protesters? Students (undergraduate and graduate) and faculty and administrators have never all had the same interests or much of a history of working together. It does seem that unionized campuses have a better record of collective responses than nonunionized.
I also think that the most activist people in universities have been participating in community-oriented organizations rather than campus organizations in responding to the attacks, which are on so many different parts of society, not just universities.
Back in 2021 when the attacks on Critical Race Theory got going, universities did almost nothing. Organizing was happening through networks focused on K-12 education. In my state (Wisconsin), statewide faith-based organizations formed a coalition to try to organize support for beleaguered school districts. The universities were nowhere to be seen.
Putting this in a larger context,
Making Sense of the War on Academia
Once upon a time, our selective colleges, especially those of the Ivy League, were bastions of America’s financial elites. Their graduates, male and largely white, dominated the higher echelons of the financial and political worlds. Since 1900, nine of fourteen presidents had degrees from these eight colleges. Even today, five of the 23 members of the cabinet have Ivy League degrees, as do many members of Congress and all but one justice on the Supreme Court. Despite the fact many of these politicians and most business leaders are generally conservative, the myth persists that these colleges are biased and intolerant.
These notions have spread. A 2024 Gallup poll, put the percentage having a high degree of confidence in higher education down to 36 percent from 60 a decade earlier. State support for public colleges has steadily declined. The problem derives in part from hostility to science. If climate change is a hoax, evolution a failed theory, and gender and racial equality “woke,” then yes, most reputable colleges lean to the left and academics avoid calling themselves conservative. But although 60 to 70 percent of those surveyed describe themselves as somewhat or very liberal, the alleged bias of America’s colleges is exaggerated. Unlike such explicitly conservative colleges as Hillsdale and Pepperdine that eschew balance, they do hire conservatives and have departments that are overtly so. Indeed many major conservative think tanks such as the Federalist Society (Yale) and the Hoover Institute (Stanford} have their roots in “liberal” colleges.
Meanwhile, more than 100 colleges require both faculty and students to adhere to conservative Christian principles. There are no anti-Semitic incidents at Liberty or Bob Jones because there are no non-Christians. As with conservative colleges like Hillsdale, their admissions and hiring policies exclude liberals.
When combined with changes in government-backed media and museums, and pressures on colleges to change their curriculums, the ideological foundations of the attacks on supposedly “liberal” colleges are manifest. Beyond ideology, however, the attack on higher education is founded in a less noted vision of academia’s role. As affirmative action based on previous histories of prejudice gives way to the legacy admissions and athletic scholarships in such as sports as sailing, golf and fencing that have long favored more affluent white males, elite colleges, in this new gilded age, will revert– with revised curriculums and less diverse student bodies– to a role of certifying the sons of those who can afford their increased tuitions. The Ivies– as when I taught at Princeton in the 1960s– will again serve as finishing schools for the privileged. Some of them will take advantage of the fine teachers and facilities to become artists, scientists and professionals; more will slide through earning the “gentleman’s C” that enables them to claim hereditary places in the establishment.
Public colleges and private institutions with smaller endowments will continue to decline. The largely public universities of the Big Ten, for example, have already seen their collective federal funds cut by more than double those of the Ivies. Starved of grants, scholarships and student loans, and increasingly denied full-paying foreign students, those that survive will provide the nation’s clerks and technicians. Combined with tariffs and industrial subsidies that cut both the import of goods and the export of skills and services, the policies of the renewed industrial order will obviate the need for many institutions of higher learning. Our dominance science and technology, in which we led in 60 of the 64 categories studied by an Australian think tank in 2003, was already down to only 7 categories in 2024. The balance of trade surpluses we have long enjoyed in research, finance and entertainment will decline more rapidly even if, as economists David Autor and Gordon Hanson put in a July 19 New York Times essay, “we may just get those jobs making tennis sneakers.” This return to an industrial economy will profoundly change our system of education. The need for trained and creative scientists, artists and professionals will decline as that for less creative careers grows. With fitting symbolism, the fines leveled on Brown, Columbia and other colleges are being reinvested, we are told, in programs to train the cadres of unskilled workers needed to keep the sneaker factories humming.
The attack on academic “liberalism” is designed both to restrict academic freedom and bring the country back to its industrial past, hastening the trend toward what economists call “job polarization,” with jobs at the top and bottom and fewer in between. In making America great again, democracy, equity and inclusion will yield to privilege and division. Americans will need to settle for the jobs in fields and factories they now shun, even as we import thousands of the doctors, nurses and technicians, as well as the film-makers, musicians, and artists we once trained.