The White House Assault on Higher Education

by Ambassador Thomas Graham (Retired) and David Bernell

The Trump administration continues to wage war on American institutions, seeking to bend or break them in the direction of obedience to Trump and MAGA politics. This holds true for law firms, universities, museums and cultural institutions, and of course, the American government itself, which is losing many of its people, programs, expertise, funding, and capacity to carry out its many tasks and mandates. Moreover, America’s political leadership is using government institutions to share private data on individuals, and to hide or get rid of other data it considers inconvenient or objectionable.

The individual pieces of the Trump administration’s dealings might look like disparate measures, but they are more appropriately understood as parts of a whole, targeting independent sites of power and knowledge that can challenge federal power and President Trump. The goal of these actions is not simply to win the battle in making public policy, but also to ensure that political opposition – now and in the future – will be hamstrung. The press has been repeatedly characterized by Trump as an enemy of the people, and he has sued several press outlets for their reporting. The legal profession has been the subject of several high-profile executive actions (this was the subject of our last article). The Democratic party fundraising organization ActBlue has been targeted. And Trump has also directed the Justice Department to investigate certain individuals who have challenged Trump and his views of the 2020 election.

In this ongoing political battle, higher education is another such area being pursued by this administration.

The American university system, consisting of a wide range of public and private institutions, is considered among the best in the world. American universities have a global reputation for engaging in first rate education and research. There is a reason that millions of people have come from overseas over the past decades to study in the United States. The United States is a prime destination for higher education. It’s not just top institutions like Harvard and Stanford, but many of the public universities that are also at the pinnacle of this system. In his book Earning the Rockies, Robert Kaplan described these schools (think of universities like Ohio State, UCLA and North Carolina) as places where “much of the scientific, technological, and engineering research and training of America takes place.” And he says, “do not underestimate the liberal arts at these schools.” Kaplan points out the connections our universities have to all aspects of national life. It was the productivity of the American heartland, he says, that “produced agricultural wealth, which was then easily transported by an arterial network of rivers (and later trains), laying the economic basis for industrial power, the emanations of which have included – and require – the great public universities.” These schools are, he points out, “the capstone of a vast social, economic, and political process that stares right at us, even as we don’t notice it.”

Donald Trump and MAGA most certainly don’t seem to notice this. The President looks at universities and sees “Marxist maniacs” teaching “woke” to the next generation. To that end, his administration believes they must be dealt with in a hostile manner, as one part of the effort to “put a spike through the heart of woke.” Vice President J.D. Vance (himself a graduate of Yale law school), has encapsulated this view clearly. He has said that, “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” because “the universities are the enemy,” and even that, “the professors are the enemy.”

The epithets are hurled at educational institutions because they teach things that Trump and MAGA don’t want to hear, and as David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker, “this administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past.” In March Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” seeking to change how the Smithsonian Institution teaches visitors about U.S. history, but the executive order speaks to a larger view from the White House. It says that there is a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth…Under historical revision, our nation’s unparallelled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” The response by the administration, therefore, has been to try and “correct” what educational institutions teach and publicly espouse.

The way that higher education has felt this effort has been through threats to federal financial support. Government grants and contracts with multiple universities have been impacted across the country, with funds for numerous research projects being frozen or revoked if they conflict with the administration’s priorities and political goals.

Trump’s first big move on American higher education was against Columbia University. In March, the administration announced that $400 million in federal grants and contracts for the university would be canceled. The stated reason was that Columbia was allowing pro-Palestinian protests and sentiment on campus to harass Jewish students. It is clear that many college campuses have plenty of work to do to ensure the well-being of their Jewish students so they are not threatened and harassed. However, the government’s action was simply a disingenuous weaponization of antisemitism to achieve the real aim of attacking institutions that don’t subscribe to MAGA politics. The administration provided a list of what it required of Columbia to keep its funding. The university soon gave in, saying it would make changes to mollify the administration. However, it came under great criticism for giving in to administration demands, and it didn’t get the funds restored, just an opportunity to negotiate further with the administration, which followed up a few weeks later by freezing another $250 million in federal funds.

Next on the list was Harvard. The administration sent a letter on April 11 to Harvard threatening to cut off its federal money of almost $9 billion in grants and contracts. The majority of this money goes to support hospitals and medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, and other diseases, and about $2 billion is for other research conducted at Harvard. To keep its federal funds, Harvard would have to acquiesce to the demands of the administration, and this list far exceeded what had been sent to Columbia. Harvard would have to accept for a lengthy time an outside government “audit” of faculty hiring, student admissions (including screening students from abroad for their ideological views), governance of the university, leadership and staffing, student conduct and discipline, and “viewpoint diversity.” The result, in effect, would be to turn Harvard over to government control.

Harvard’s president Alan Garber rejected the Trump demands out of hand. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he said. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” Trump’s response was swift, he froze $2.2 billion in grants to the school and then took the significant step of telling the IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status, (universities have this status all over the country due to their missions as educational institutions). He also posted on social media that, “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” This echoed an earlier post by Trump that said Harvard might lose its tax exempt status for “pushing political, ideological and terrorist inspired/supported” views. In order to actually do something like this, there is a lengthy process that is required to make such a determination. More importantly, U.S. law forbids federal officials from ordering the IRS to investigate taxpayers, and from “targeting individuals or organizations for ideological reasons.” As one observer noted, “The president has [now] done just this by tweeting that he wants [the IRS] to do so…This is a really profound undermining of the law.”

Harvard’s actions have been supported by over 600 other universities, whose presidents signed a letter in order to “speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Universities must be places, the letter stated, where students, faculty and staff are “free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.” The letter was released one day after Harvard filed its lawsuit, and it reflected the point made by the President of Wesleyan University, who said that “If we don’t speak up, it’s going to get worse. Much worse, much faster.”

What’s going on here is strategic move by the White House. It is engaging in a political and ideological attack on educational institutions, while accusing the universities themselves of engaging in political and ideological activity, thereby endangering their federal funding. This is a tactic employed by those in power who seek to use the law to serve their own personal ends: accusing others of engaging in a proscribed activity while suggesting that the accusers are entirely innocent and only following the law. It is but one more piece of evidence that the laws, practices and norms that have constrained American presidents in the past are being jettisoned by our current president.

It is of great importance that America’s universities fight this battle united with one another. The New York Times pointed out in a recent editorial that “Fear is a formidable tool, and it is the principal weapon the administration has used to bully immigrants, law firms and centrist Republicans into submission…If they [universities] follow Harvard’s example and refuse to be intimidated by unjust abuses of power, they may inspire other fundamental national institutions to do the same.”

To that end, the appropriate response by institutions that want to avoid being controlled by this ideologically extreme American government is to refuse to cooperate, in unison. In fact, withholding cooperation is the first, most readily available action to take. As Timothy Snyder says in his book On Tyranny, one easy way autocrats accumulate power is that people and institutions will often “obey in advance.” Even before they might be in the sights of the powers that be, individuals and institutions often adjust their words and actions to what the political leadership wants in order to avoid trouble. It’s an easy, attractive route to take, but it only strengthens the government’s power. And once an organization finds itself under attack, like a law firm or a university or a media outlet, the temptation to give in and cut one’s losses can be even greater. But as Snyder notes, the relief is only temporary. As Columbia University and law firms that have promised Trump free legal services are already finding out, the bully always comes back for more.

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has argued that what appears to be going on in the United States not only a consolidation of power, it is a revolutionary action. He argues that the upheaval in American politics, in which Trump and his allies are pursuing efforts to remake government and non-governmental institutions throughout the country, is reminiscent of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China. He says that Mao, “used his prestige as an insurrectionary leader to wage war on China’s bureaucratic and cultural elites. Trump is also using his power as the elected leader of an insurrectionary movement to overthrow the bureaucratic and cultural elites of the US.” (It should be noted that China’s Cultural Revolution resulted in the loss of 1-2 million lives.)

While Martin Wolf was not speaking in favorable terms about Trump and his supporters, they might nonetheless agree with his idea that they are seeking revolutionary change in the United States. And they have significant backing. Many Congressional Republicans are openly supportive of Trump’s agenda, while others are too scared to say anything against his actions. In addition, in the executive branch, presidents get to install in office a few thousand political appointees in leadership positions throughout the government, and these people are in office to help try and achieve the president’s priorities. There is also significant support for Trump and MAGA by non-governmental organizations like the Heritage Foundation, which authored the policy roadmap Project 2025.

This will be a protracted battle. As long as Trump sits in the Oval Office, there will be a continued risk of attacks on universities and the independence of education. This situation will require constant work to oppose. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1821, “Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.”