Together, we should be clear on what President Donald Trump is trying to do to higher education.
Destroy it. Whatever public rationales he or his administration release, the intent of his actions is clear, so if we’re going to discuss responses to those actions, we must remember, always, that Donald Trump is trying to destroy higher education.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times gets it; the rest of us should, too.
This goal is not new. In 2021 in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, future vice president JD Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance (and Trump) are open admirers of Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, who has subjugated the once-free higher education institutions of his country to his own needs.
This is the Trump/Vance playbook. The unannounced, unilateral (now paused thanks to court intervention) cuts to NIH grants, and the Dear Colleague letter that goes well beyond, and even actively distorts current law to threaten institutions with punishment for failing to obey, are just the latest attacks in a war that has been going on for quite some time, and not just at the federal level, but in the states as well, as exemplified by Ron DeSantis’s wanton destruction of Florida’s New College.
Sadly, as callous, counterproductive and wasteful of taxpayer money as it was, DeSantis taking a wrecking ball to New College in order to install his cronies while recruiting enough athletes for three baseball teams—despite New College not being in an athletic conference—was within the power of the state’s chief executive.
What Trump is doing to higher education institutions is not. It should be unthinkable for institutions to obey diktats that are not only unlawful, but in direct conflict with the purported mission of the institution.
If any institutional leaders are thinking that if they do just enough compliance with Trump’s demands, he will stop the war, they are kidding themselves.
How is the rush to declare institutional neutrality to not just words but actions, as enacted by Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier last year, working out? Surely they are feeling secure knowing that they got ahead of the abuse.
What’s that? That isn’t happening? Turns out Vanderbilt has had to pause graduate student admissions because of concerns about funding. I guess surrendering in advance wasn’t the way to go.
I used Vanderbilt only because it was a recent, handy example, not the only one. The silence from major, well-resourced higher education institutions is truly deafening.
Writing at her personal website, Jackie Gharapour Wernz, an education and civil rights attorney, calls the Dear Colleague letter “regulation by intimidation,” which is exactly right. Bending the knee at this moment only demonstrates the effectiveness of intimidation.
Wernz walks through a number of ways the advisories in the letter go well beyond well-established law, while also making an additional important point: Trump is busy gutting the very agencies that would be able to do the investigation and enforcement of institutions they believe are in violation of legal regulations. This reality, plus the various procedural steps involved in these investigations, suggests that it may be far more advantageous to dig in and run out the clock of this initial flurry, particularly when existing law is clearly on your side.
But this doesn’t seem to be the strategy for most institutions. They are going to hope this goes away. Trying to make yourself a smaller target doesn’t mean the people intent on destroying you are going to stop attacking.
Interestingly, the group of higher ed leaders who are … uh … leading belong to the Education for All coalition, primarily consisting of community college administrators. Under the “freedom’s just another world for nothing left to lose” theory, this should not be surprising. Giving in to the Trump administration’s demands to give up on providing educational opportunities to diverse cohorts of students with different desires and needs would be to abandon their work entirely. Their defiance is both principled and practical.
To me, this suggests that the more prestigious institutions that are cowering in the face of the intimidation perhaps do not see their mission in terms of providing access to all. In a lot of ways, the present situation is primarily revealing that which we already knew—that the interests in diversity, equity and inclusion in elite spaces were a virtue-signaling scrim over the much less savory reality of wealth and exclusion.
Look, I’m getting worked up here. The truth is, I don’t wish any harm on any higher education institution, but the institutions with the most resources, most power and most influence must step up.
The present threat goes well beyond an attack on the institutional coffers. These attacks on higher education are part of a much broader push toward authoritarianism as a federal executive (and his minions) direct the actions of formerly free institutions and people.
The good news is that should institutions stand up for themselves, I think they will find many people standing up with them, including, most importantly, the students. Unfortunately, the longer institutions hesitate to stand for the values they claim to hold, the more distrust they’re sowing with the very constituencies who could save them, who do not want to destroy them, but the opposite, who want to see them thrive.
The stakes are almost impossibly high. Shouldn’t we act like it?
