For the Trump administration, ‘universities are the enemy’

The White House has attacked some of the country’s most prestigious institutions. What now is the role of higher education in US society?

The Trump administration has gone for the coffers of six of the eight Ivy League universities: in addition to suspending research grants and contracts totalling $175m to the University of Pennsylvania, $210m to Princeton and $510m to Brown, it has initiated an audit of the $9bn Harvard receives each year. Over $5bn in research funding has been frozen. And this may just be the beginning. Under attack are the bastions of American educational elitism, known for their excellence – and for the social homogeneity of their student bodies.

First in the line of fire was Columbia. In early March, the government announced it was cancelling over a third of the school’s annual federal funding, to the tune of $400m, as punishment – officially, anyway – for its lax approach to antisemitism. The campus, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, had been one of the most visible focal points of protest against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Columbia quickly capitulated, shifting the pressure to its peers – even if Harvard, now the administration’s primary target, has since attempted to mount a counterattack. The Education Department has sent threats of ‘potential enforcement actions’ to some 60 institutions and imposed new conditions on accessing federal funds. With support waning, Trump and his team may well be hoping this clash will provide a much-needed political boost. ‘Universities are an easy target for conservatives,’ says Dylan Riley, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley. ‘For some Americans, they embody the arrogance of the big coastal cities. Their prestige is measured by how many people they admit – or, more accurately, exclude.’

In 2021 future vice president JD Vance, who was raised in a poor Appalachian family but studied at the elite Yale Law School, gave a speech entitled ‘The Universities are the Enemy’ at the National Conservatism Conference. ‘Polls all show the vast majority of faculty lean left,’ Riley points out. ‘It’s not surprising that the (…)

Full article: 2 840 words.

Martin Barnay

Martin Barnay is a sociologist.

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(5) Melanie Hanson, ‘Economic effects of student loan debt’, 25 November 2024, educationdata.org/.

(7) CJ Libassi, Jennifer Ma and Matea Pender, ‘Trends in college pricing and student aid 2020’, College Board, New York, 2020, research.collegeboard.org/.

(8) ‘Fast facts’, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/.

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