Murdering higher education, 1-2-3
The Trump administration is pursuing this goal from several directions
Much of Donald Trump’s governing approach in his second term is to take conservative bogeymen — long used for fundraising and for riling up base voters — and actually use the power of the government to attack them. We’ve seen that with foreign aid, food stamps, health care, and more, but one of the most aggressive areas has been in higher education. Coverage of Trump attacks on colleges and universities, though, has been somewhat simplistic and poorly-framed, so I wanted to examine three models, with examples from several schools.
1. Scaring students into staying home
This hasn’t gotten a ton of national attention, but California State University Los Angeles has recently pushed to have more classes offered on-line and to relax rules on absences and make-up work. This is, of course, the opposite direction schools have been trying to head since Covid. There seemed to be widespread agreement that Zoom education was sub-par, at best, and that young people were not learning nearly as well in that environment. So why is the school going back?
Because of the ICE raids throughout Los Angeles County. The undergraduate population at Cal State L.A. is roughly three-quarters Latino, and since it is a commuter school, students often have to travel a considerable distance across town to get to class. This puts them at risk of harassment, warrantless arrest, detention, or worse at the hands of ICE and other law enforcement officials. The university made the decision that they’d rather keep their students and give them alternative options for attending class than to force them to withdraw because they’re afraid of being arrested.
Will this kill the school? Not likely. But it’s reducing the quality of education there and reducing students’ future prospects. At a school at which roughly four out of five students is a first generation college student, this will have an impact for decades to come.
2. Bullying schools into sacrificing leaders and policies
In late June, a pressure campaign by the White House and the U.S. Department of Education aimed at the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors succeeded in pushing university president Jim Ryan to resign. This campaign was aimed at shutting down the university’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity efforts, which President Ryan had sought to preserve.
As I noted at the time, neither the White House nor the Department of Education had the authority to fire a university president. But if the university acceded to Trump’s pressure campaign, it would make the next capitulation all that much easier.
And just four days after Ryan’s resignation, the Department of Education announced an investigation into practices at George Mason University, focusing on alleged “antisemitism” (translation: not punishing students enough for protesting Israel’s atrocities in Gaza) on campus and the school’s use of DEI practices. A great deal of pressure has been aimed at the university’s Black president, Gregory Washington. And when GMU’s Faculty Senate adopted a resolution in support of President Washington and campus policies, the U.S. Justice Department announced it was investigating the faculty for civil rights violations. Then House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote to GMU demanding documents about civil rights compliance.
The plain goal here is for the Trump administration to demonstrate its strength — to show an ability to fire and replace university leaders and set university hiring and admissions policies, even if no such legal authority exists — and to get compliant higher education leaders as a result.
3. Using research dollars as a cudgel
The highest profile approach, of course, has been the campaign aimed at wealthy and famous schools like Columbia and Harvard. Despite these schools’ vast resources, they are highly dependent on federal research money. Scholars there often win research grants from organizations like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and more, and schools receive a percentage of “indirect costs” for hosting those scholars, providing lab space, etc. With the Trump administration now substantially restricting or even eliminating some research grants, many of the nation’s leading research universities are having to scale back their operating expenses considerably. This means not hiring needed faculty, raising tuition for students, providing fewer campus services, and more.
Early on, Trump chose to make an example of Columbia, threatening to cut off $400 million in research funds unless the school did more to rein in “antisemitism,” to punish pro-Gaza protesters, to eliminate DEI efforts, and restructure several campus departments. Columbia has largely capitulated to Trump, paying an extortion fee of $200 million and acceding to administration oversight in the hopes of retaining its funding. The administration has met more resistance from Harvard, but recent reporting suggests that Harvard may be willing to pay half a billion dollars in extortion money to the federal government to stave off some of Trump’s attacks.
In none of the above scenarios is a school likely to shut its doors. Students will still apply and attend, they will be taught by capable faculty, and elite Ivies will continue to be elite Ivies.
But that’s also like saying that you can still vote in Moscow and protest in Budapest and run a newspaper in Beijing. While true, those things simply mean less when the government is asserting authoritarian power over the key institutions of a free society.
The Thought Police that libertarians have been warning us about for decades have finally arrived. And it’s not coming from “woke” or “politically correct” faculty and administrators stifling speech and punishing students for saying conservative talking points — that was never really a thing. It’s happening today with a presidential administration picking university leaders and setting school policies for hiring, admissions, and teaching via campaigns of intimidation and extortion.
And once again, the schools that think they can keep their heads down and emerge unscathed are likely to be deeply disappointed.
My thanks to Drs. Jesse Acevedo and Jennifer Victor for input on this piece.
Let me add to #3 in a much more direct way that is not a threat, but already a reality. Millions of dollars in research funds have already been cut. This has gutted graduate schools. In many graduate programs, especially in the hard sciences, students don't just apply for acceptance into the program, they need to get "hired" (their term) by a specific professor to work in their lab on a specific project that is funded by a specific grant. Way too often, I am learning, that is a federal grant that has been cancelled.
Almost a year ago, I agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Frontiers in Ornithology Symposium this October. This is for high schoolers and undergrads aspiring to careers in ecology, wildlife mgmt, etc. I've been interviewing undergrads, grad students, and profs. What I'm learning is that graduate programs have been decimated, in that probably MORE THAN HALF of all admissions spots have been cancelled. Where programs normally admitted 10 or more grad students, now, for the academic year about to start, they only have funding for one or two. I assume the same is happening in other fields (e.g. healthcare-related fields). The implications of this, of course, are long term.
Totally agree. There is something called hatch funds that people in the agricultural/economic sciences access to bring on board graduate (Master's) students. The fund pays for the education of these students while the students help faculties do research. That fund, I understand - at least at the University where I am, is now gone and the department, like Stephen mentioned above, cannot bring grad student on board anymore.