Donald Trump is struggling with America's elite universities - and winning | Mint

Editorial note: On April 14, the Trump administration freezes $ 2.2 billion to federal funds for Harvard University after Ivy League College became the first institution to reject policy changes he claimed. It was not a hidden plot, but an open plan. In the eyes of the right, the elite universities of America are guilty of sins of sins: they spread illegal, leftist ideas; They include or censor those who are questioned, views; They discriminate against the majority in the name of diversity, fairness and inclusion (Dei); This allows anti -Semitism to fester. Before Donald Trump’s second term began as president, conservative activists set out the retaliation they prepared in great detail. The retaliation is now underway. The administration of Mr. Trump has withheld hundreds of millions of dollars to federal grants of prestigious schools, mostly in the Ivy League, and threatened to make billions of rands disappear. It has recalled visas for students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests last year, in some cases by grabbing ordinary Cellets on the street and pushing them into unmarked cars. This has limited overheads for scientific research in ways that have already led to thousands of lost jobs. For example, other levers, about access to federal student loans, have not even been drawn. The letter, not the law that every university president in America fears the coming of “the letter” of the administration. The first was sent to the University of Columbia on March 13, shortly after $ 400 million in grants were withheld. To win the money back, the letter demanded that Columbia expel certain students who participated in protests, reformed his admission policies and put his department in Middle Eastern studies in ‘academic reception’. The university has capitulated at all the claims. The president, himself a stand-in, resigned a week later. “The Columbia Opening Salvo was incredible to me,” says Chris Rufo, a prominent cultural warrior. “It’s almost amazing how weak, feckless and pathetic these people were.” More shaking downs followed. On March 19, Christopher Eisgruber, President of Princeton University, wrote in the Atlantic that the actions of the Trump administration pose “the biggest threat to the American universities since the red scare of the 1950s”. It could be an understatement: Joseph McCarthy, who placed suspected communists, was a mere senator, without the weight of the federal government behind him. At the end of March, the federal government informed Princeton that it suspended $ 210 million research grants, apparently due to anti -Semitism. On April 3, a letter from the government arrived at Harvard that threatens the $ 9 billion grants unless the university has deleted its dei programs and ‘departments that attract anti-Semitic harassment’. This week, $ 1 billion in funding for Cornell and $ 790 million was frozen for North West. The contempt of elite universities is not new to American law. Ronald Reagan won the Governorship of California in 1966 by “cleaning up the mess at Berkeley” and cleaning up the “beatnies, radical and dirty speech lawyers” that brought such a disgrace to the flagship state university. But prolonged antagonism has gradually increased as education has become more a dividing line in American politics, with graduates of the university increasingly stronger to vote democratically. In the 1970s, there were fewer than two academics who described themselves as liberal for each conservative. Four decades later, the relationship was six to one. To wander, humanities faculties in the humanities are especially the ideas that were unpopular with ordinary voters: that, for example, American society is structurally racist, or that everyone has a ‘gender identity’ that is not related to their gender. Confidence in universities has fallen down in the last decade. In 2015, nearly 60% of respondents told Gallup, a polls, that they have a lot of confidence in higher education. It has since dropped to 36%, almost the same relationship that says they have ‘very little’ or ‘no confidence’. Republicans are especially critical; Only 20% of them express faith in universities compared to 56% of Democrats. “The isolation of the Academy Writ, written from the entire society, is the root of many of these problems,” says Greg Weiner, the president of the university’s assumption. The hard and long protests against Israel’s War in Gaza over the past 18 months have further cemented the idea that campuses are no longer with the mainstream opinion – and gave the right opportunity to attack universities because they did not do enough to make Jewish students and faculties feel safe. The administration uses supposed anti -Semitism as grounds to claim reforms. “In some cases, these are not only unconstitutional demands, but there is no statutory authority for them,” says Jameel Jaffer, a professor of law and journalism at Columbia University. Mr. Jaffer points out that title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which called on the administration on behalf of Jewish students and faculties, makes sanctions possible – but only after a formal investigation. Even then, “the affirmative measures must be limited to the program that is contrary.” The withdrawal of grants can also be challenged. Universities may argue that the conditions imposed by the administration for their recovery are unconstitutional coercion. In 1967 in Keyishian V Council of Regent, the Supreme Court found that academic freedom was “a special concern of the first amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pal orthodoxy into the classroom”. The deportation of foreign students involved in protests is also of questionable legality. In Bridges v Wixon, the Supreme Court confirmed in 1945: “Freedom of speech and of the press are awarded in strangers living in this country.” The Trump administration explicitly rejected this idea. In his deportation proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student in Columbia who was involved in protests against the Gaza war, the administration calls a rarely used law that allows the Secretary of State to cancel visas for migrants whose continued presence can “potentially serious unfavorable consequences for foreign policys.” The Supreme Court has never said about this law, but in 1996 in Massieu v Reno, a federal district judge considered it unconstitutional. While this happened, the Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, the deceased sister of Mr. Trump. It seems unlikely that even the Supreme Court, with its conservative super majority, would endorse all the Trump administration’s attacks on universities, if asked. Yet most of the victims seem more likely to capitulate than litigation. This may be because universities are concerned that the administration, even if they rule in one case, will simply find other ways to punish and force it. In addition, judicial relief is only slow; There would be many financial problems during the delay. Talented faculties could possibly uncover to other institutions with less government headaches. In the same way, although many of the affected universities are extremely rich (see chart), the federal government can impose costs in so many ways that most no hope to endure the financial pressure simply. Instead, universities, whether recipients of letters or not, are the policy of law, so not of academic freedom. The University of Michigan has closed its Dei office on which it has resulted in $ 250 million over the past decade. The University of California, which was the requirement that prospective rents ‘diversity statements’ (in fact, professions of support for Dei), have recently dropped them. “This is the Vichy moment. It’s a classic collaborative dilemma,” said Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, a still-tapping institution. “You may have kept your school, but you live in a sea of ​​authoritarianism.” To bring universities to the heel of a position of cruel strength, “such as Mr. RUFO puts it, can only produce superficial results. Because the approach of Mr. Trump is so hostile and extreme, it could discourage universities from honestly judging how they went wrong and corrected the course. “None of this will make a difference in the long run unless it is accompanied by a complete accounting of what has happened in the last two decades in higher education in America,” says Anthony Kronman, a former Dean of Yale Law School. There is also little logic in the government’s decision to turn off financing for science in order to punish ideas arising from the humanities departments. Another recent decision, to reduce the part of research awards that can be spent on overhead, will reduce the amount of scientific research done at all American universities, not just the elite. Similarly, the weakening of the National Institutes of Health, which sets out large amounts of financing for medical research. The general antipathy of the administration against immigrants is likely to take a toll as well. “Our universities are the best in the world. We drain the world of human capital. It’s the goose that lays the golden egg,” says Nicholas Christakis, a professor of Yale. Mr. Rufo is unaware. He indicates that the campaign against Academics is only in his infancy. Surely more universities will be attacked and more forced ways of coercion will be tested. Conservative circles are spoken to demand the dismissal of particular professors. Mr. Rufo gives a short time to talk about the holiness of academic freedom. “Freedom is the wrong lens to analyze the problem,” he says. “The Faculty of Columbia Post-Colonial Studies is not doing academic research. They are doing political activism. They are engaged in ideological mania. And in order to have academic freedom, you must accept academic responsibility.” But even the acceptance of the remedies that Mr. Trump is, it does not seem to have been enough in the case of Columbia. Although it met the claims of the administration, it still did not receive the $ 400 million frozen. Correction (April 11, 2025): A previous version of this piece said that Eugene McCarthy was the senator who chased suspected communists in the 1950s. In fact, it was Joseph McCarthy. Sorry.