Rightwing war on universities

Emma Green, New Yorker -  Conservatives have long viewed universities as radical enclaves. In 2021, when J. D. Vance gave a speech called “Universities Are the Enemy,” he was echoing Richard Nixon. What has changed is that higher ed itself is arguably weaker than ever. Both parties have denounced its soaring costs, crushing debt, and degrees that don’t yield jobs. The culture wars gave Republicans political permission to target not just progressive bias in higher ed but the basic structures of the sector. This was, according to Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to push through some real conservative reforms.”

In Washington backrooms, a playbook took shape, centered on two insights. First, nearly all universities depend on federal money. There’s student aid, and there’s research money—at some top schools, federal funding has made up a quarter or more of their revenue in recent years. Even Harvard, with the country’s largest endowment, cannot afford to walk away from the government, which awarded it nearly seven hundred million dollars for research in 2024. Second, some conservatives believed that research funds could be frozen or cancelled almost instantly, giving a future Administration a powerful tool to pressure universities.

By the time Trump returned to office, the higher-ed playbook was ready. The person in charge of coördinating it was May Mailman, then a policy deputy to Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers... Mailman told me that the Administration’s critique of higher ed has roughly three parts. The first is that many of these institutions are too rich to deserve endless public largesse. “We have a thirty-six-plus-trillion-dollar national debt, and American taxpayers are paying billions to élite universities with extremely generous endowments,” she said. The second is that universities are failing in their basic mission. Instead of producing citizens who will “propel our country into the next generation of greatness,” they are, in her view, creating “indebted students with useless majors who hate our country and like to go to riots.” The third is that the so-called woke aspects of campus culture—D.E.I., transgender athletes, unchecked antisemitism—violate federal laws.  More