There is no dearth of commentary/punditry addressing the Trump administration’s frenzied effort to discard the Constitution and install a Right-wing autocracy, Much of that commentary is thought-provoking. (And yes, much more of it ranges from naive to dissociated from reality.)
A column in last week’s New York Times was one of the best I’ve read.
The author, M. Gessen, was examining the administration’s war on America’s universities, which she quite accurately noted is being driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. As she writes, “Trump is building a mafia state, in which the don distributes both money and power. Universities are independent centers of intellectual and, to some extent, political power. He is trying to destroy that independence.”
Gessen then makes an incredibly important point–one that requires academia to acknowledge how far higher education has strayed from its central purpose, which must be the production and dissemination of knowledge. As she insists, successful resistance will require more than simply refusing to bend to Trump’s will. It will require abandoning concerns about rankings, donors, campus amenities and the like —concerns that, as she correctly points out, tend to preoccupy university administrations and divert them from their core mission.
Most prominent American universities, most of the time, measure their success not so much by the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the world as by the size of their endowment, the number of students seeking admission and their ascent in rankings by U.S. News & World Report and others, which assess the value of a university education in part by looking at graduates’ starting salaries.
Trump has focused on research grants as an ideal instrument to blackmail academic institutions.
His first target, Columbia University, acceded to his demands within two weeks of losing $400 million in grants and contracts. When Columbia’s first sacrifice didn’t bring back the money, the university made another: its interim president, Katrina Armstrong. That didn’t satisfy Trump, who now reportedly wants Columbia to agree to direct government oversight. He is also brandishing financial threats, separately, at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern — and still there is no sign of organized resistance on the part of universities. There is not even a joint statement in defense of academic freedom or an assertion of universities’ value to society. (Even people who have no use for the humanities may see value in medical schools and hospitals.)
The assault on Columbia has demonstrated the futility of submission.
Slashing and burning its way through the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wilson Center, the United States Institute of Peace, the Smithsonian, and others, the administration has shown that it considers knowledge production worthless. In the rare areas where the president — or perhaps Elon Musk — may see value in research, the emergent mafia state is almost certain to distribute funds to its friends. One shudders to think what universities would have to do to fit themselves into that category.
Universities in other countries have faced similar assaults, and some have successfully defied them. Gessen provides a “case study,” from Poland which she acknowledges was radical–but which worked.
Adopting such a radical approach, and forsaking the usual concerns of development offices and communications departments, would be costly, to be sure. The universities most actively targeted by Trump have the resources necessary to weather such a radical reorientation. But as Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, told me, “Too many of our wealthiest universities have made their endowments their primary object of protection.”
I really urge you to click through and read the entire essay. Reading it paradoxically put me in touch with my inner Pollyanna. Perhaps–if resistance to MAGA’s assault on academic and intellectual achievement is successful–it will restore academia’s focus on the essential purpose of education: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Not job training. Certainly not acquiescence to the prejudices and fantasies of a “Dear Leader.”
Gessen’s final paragraphs are worth pondering.
So this is my radical proposal for universities: Act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and expand your reach not by buying real estate but by bringing education to communities. Create a base. Become a movement.
Alternatively, you can try to negotiate with a mafia boss who wants to see you grovel. When these negotiations fail, as they inevitably will, it will be too late to ask for the public’s support.
Harvard has just refused to be blackmailed by the administration’s threat to withhold a breathtaking nine billion in grants. Here’s hoping other schools follow its example.
David Brooks’ editorial in the April 15 NYTimes stresses that if all the universities would unite and act together they would have much more clout. Then he made the same point last night on PBS News.
I sent a letter to the president of the liberal arts university I attended asking them to join in. Then I copied it to about 100 others in the retirement center where I live and asked them to do the same. I doesn’t have to be a long letter, just make it personal.
EXCELLENT post, and Im hoping that they will indeed reorient themselves to their true mission.
What a hill to die on for universities—DEI. You aren’t much of an academy if you can’t defend supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
After reading the letter Trump’s mafioso sent to Harvard, the mafioso demanded government control over the university, which went far beyond DEI. Maybe those Harvard grads in Congress know about the phony admissions and the graduation of students who did not earn a degree, but just wanted the legacy of a Harvard stamp. I haven’t been impressed with Harvard grads for decades, but they still deserve independence.
Ball State University announced this past week that they were bending the knee to Trump and Braun – shocking! Not one dissenting vote from the BOTs. At least act like there was some argument over being sycophants. LOL
You know who runs the show when you walk into the business department and see Koch Energy’s name. I expect Mitch turned Purdue into the same Koch network plant in exchange for donations.
As utopian as it sounds to return universities to knowledge centers, funding is everything. When the state decided to reduce funding, tuition went through the roof, and a massive bureaucracy was created to beg for funds from former graduates. Students became slaves to the federal government and banks. This is one reason why young people can’t afford to have kids.
Why did the mobsters like Lew Wasserman want Ronald Reagan to eliminate free college in California while he was governor? And, what did Ronnie do for them while in the White House?
NEOLIBERALISM’s sole purpose was/is to reduce taxes to the oligarchs. The more I learn about Stanford University, the more I believe the CIA runs the university. 😉
The Ruling Trio hate freedom, especially intellectual freedom. Freedom is hard to monetize. Freedom leads to people saying hell, no, and that’s intolerable to the rule of the aristocracy.
That’s what revolutions are. A spreading resistance to compliance. The intellectual fortitude to resist and insist on doing things our way, not the ways of others, we did not choose to be leaders.
Not to mention the mass cutting of liberal arts programs/degrees and the death of “student athletes” in favor of college sports big business/entertainment.
Trump can not tolerate power being in anyone’s hands but his. And, obviously, if a school bends one knee, he will soon ask for the other to be bent, and so on.
I think we, here, all know that education is anathema to the ruling class. And, DEI is terrifying to the White Christian Nationalists, at the least.
When he was asked, yesterday, by a reporter, whether, or not, he was being played by Putin, he said “I’m not being played, I’m trying to help.” However, “Little Marco” Rubio suggested that we might have to walk away from Ukraine’s war of self-preservation, even as Putin continues to attack.
The problem with questioning this narcissist is that he will throw smoke in the eyes, and no one gets to question that BS.
In 2024 peaceful Gaza War protests on Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana campus, why had IU administrators given permission to deploy Indiana State Police with “sniper capabilities” on the roof of the Indiana University Memorial Union building (Newsweek 4/30/24)? What was the deadly threat that peacefully assembling unarmed IU students presented? Is it reasonable to assume the Indiana troopers had been issued live ammunition and were given authority by their command to shoot to kill IU students? Did that authority originate at the White House?
In 1970, there was a similar suppression of university students’ peaceful protests that ended in deaths of multiple unarmed students – both at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Tennessee.
In the May 4, 1970 Kent State Ohio National Guard shooting of unarmed non-violent student protesters of the Vietnam War, four students died and nine others were wounded. Reportedly, guardsmen fired 61 shots from rifles, shotguns and handguns. Ohio guardsmen were apparently issued live ammunition and given authority by their command to open fire on students who were displaying no weapons. Was 1970 shoot-to-kill authority given by the White House?
Pressure on universities in 2025 to accept authoritarian suppression of students’ First Amendment rights of peaceful protest, and universities using police force to pressure non-violent students to end protests against wartime genocide, did not begin with the 2025 Trump administration.
Executive Order 14173: Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity has been received by American Embassies around the world. Procurement officers are instructed to send certificate of compliance agreements for signature from entities in sovereign nations who provide contractual services. The letter states the anti-discrimination clause does not violate any laws of sovereign nations. However, the nuances of holding contractors accountable to a law whose historic context has no nexus to the affairs of sovereign nations is most troubling. While embassies enjoy immunity claiming their own soil within the compound, they are otherwise accountable to the law of the land of sovereign nations. Holding embassy contracts with foreign entities for cleaning the toilets apparently requires the Trump brand for meritocracy.
I’ll give you one interesting story, my daughter who is now 39, has worked for the veterans administration for 12 years. To previously was a lab technician, and, before that, an international banking administrator, Fraud division!
I remember her concern, applying to work for the government. There was some openings in human resources and probationary hires. I remember her telling us that she didn’t want to bother because there was 10,000 individuals for three jobs. She just knew she wouldn’t get it. But this job was a work from home. My daughter of course is mixed, and she looks African. But, you would never know by talking to her on the phone. Because my wife and I made sure that she used not the Kings English, but American Midwestern English. Everything was done over the phone, The person that would be her boss, loved talking to her. It was an abject lesson on people judging a book by its cover instead of learning about the individual and what they think and believe. They hired her sight unseen, claimed she was overqualified but very intellectually prepared for the job. She took back her maiden name after her divorce, so, they looked at the name Sorg, and figured she was a good German person.
A couple of years later at an all hands meeting in DC, she met her superiors face to face. And they were very surprised. By that time, they had formed an intellectual relationship and friendship. She was One of the top and most liked performers in their jobs at the VA.
Now, they are eliminating jobs like crazy, there’s no one left to do the research into misconduct and/or false accusatory conduct. DEI along with wokism, is the code to allow discrimination of those who don’t look like they are supposed to. They can’t eliminate her on the grounds of DEI because she wasn’t hired under that. They didn’t even know who she was as far as her ethnicity. She was hired sight un’seen based on her records. Now she’s being judged by white fascist Uber rich foreign nationals, those who are still steeped in apartheid from South Africa (Musk).
The nazi-esque programs of rounding people up and shipping them into camps outside of the country, well, we saw Auschwitz, we saw the other camps outside of Germany. We saw what they were and what they did. And what was the first step in being allowed to do all of these things? Find a scapegoat, or a scripture says, Azazel goat. That was the Jew. Then, weaken the court systems, start culling the military hierarchy, restrict the press, and dismantle the educational systems including higher learning. Recognize anything? Then, a national emergency / martial law, everything is done by military tribunal, and of course you had to have the appropriate identification otherwise you were going to be shipped off to a camp never to be seen again.
When you don’t have knowledge, you can’t have wisdom, when you don’t have wisdom, you cannot have the power of appropriate discernment, without discernment, person’s conscience cannot function properly. Without a properly trained conscience, it’s easy to destroy your neighbors. It’s easy to hate your neighbors! And you can do so without feeling any twinge guilt. the finger pointing comes later after the horses were burned to death in the locked barn. This is something that should never have happened here, but, here is where these things were left to grow in a petri dish of hatred and narcissistic wet dreams! United States was never a democracy anyway, even the Nazis in Germany pointed that out, and they loved Manifest Destiny. And that’s what they used to start the war!
I’m glad Richard came on with the first comment; I am with him all the way. Brooks is right; it isn’t several channels, it is one…..as Trump’s attacks derive from the same root. Collaboration, persistence, resilience and defiance…..even when Trumpists try to back away (to regroup later)…. So glad that the conceding law firms are re-thinking those ‘agreements’ and may follow the firms that resisted, are suing and, I do believe, will win. It would be ‘nice’ if CBS would stop acquiescing (re: the Harris interview) in order to get what it wants…. In the end, it’s absolutely clear, that Sheila is right again: “The assault on Columbia has demonstrated the futility of submission.”
Todd, the neoliberals want a lot more than just reduced taxes, although they certainly want that, for rich people and corporations, anyway. As examples, they also want much less regulation, a vast reduction in the power of unions, and, of course, an assembly line to produce trained worker drones whom they can exploit.
Sheila, I sure would like some clarification on the current Indiana judge’s ruling on a visa plea for Indiana universities international students. https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/lawsuit-denied-aclu-trump-student-visa-cancellations-indiana-university.