The second Trump administration has shown remarkable aggression in abruptly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at elite universities — in an effort to force them to make major policy changes in line with the president’s politics.
Trump officials revoked $400 million in research funding to Columbia University (illegally, per experts). They’ve also paused $175 million in funds to the University of Pennsylvania.
That’s likely just the start. They’ve threatened dozens of other schools. And the National Institutes for Health (NIH) is also trying to change its research funding formula in a way that would hit elite universities particularly hard.
The administration’s demands on these schools include cracking down on protesters of Israel’s war in Gaza, disallowing trans women athletes from women’s sports teams, and ending the practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in admissions and campus life. For Columbia, Trump officials even demanded the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department be taken out of the hands of its current leadership — a threat to academic freedom from the state.
All this fits into a larger strategy. Right-wingers have increasingly come to believe that elite universities are one of the main incubators of “woke” cultural progressivism; that, by advancing left-wing ideas about various issues and socializing young Americans into believing them, they help progressives dominate the culture.
Winning the culture war, they believe, requires a more aggressive attack on elite universities — to hurt them, and to coerce them into being more sympathetic to the right.
And Trump officials believe the tens of billions of dollars in research funding the federal government provides to academic institutions gives them leverage to make this happen.
They are apparently correct in this belief. On Friday, Columbia agreed to give in to various demands Trump officials had made, including giving campus police new powers to arrest student protesters and taking its Middle Eastern studies department away from its current leadership. (Trump officials have not yet said they’ll restore the revoked $400 million.)
All this comes at a cost to the nation. One key reason Republican presidents haven’t tried anything like this before: This research funding is largely for scientific and medical research, generally not for “woke” or political stuff. Until recently, there was bipartisan agreement that such research funds shouldn’t be used to play political games. Now, though, it’s being used as a weapon in the right’s war against the left.
“I think that putting the universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets, into a greater competitive market pressure, would discipline them,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo said recently. He wanted to threaten federal funding to universities, he said, to put them “in an existential terror.” Which is exactly what’s happening.
How elite universities came to rely on federal funding — and how conservatives realized this was leverage
As World War II made the US a global superpower and the Cold War pitted it against the Soviet Union, the federal government provided a huge commitment of research funds to try to make the US the global leader in science and technology. Much of that funding went to higher education institutions, funding for labs, experiments, and other studies from university-affiliated researchers. (Student loans, meanwhile, became another hugely important source of federal funds to universities.)
For nearly as long, elite universities have drawn the ire of conservatives who have argued that they’re poisoning the minds of America’s youth with their far-left ways, while being intolerant toward the right. For instance, when protests over the Vietnam War and other social justice issues dominated campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Richard Nixon seethed in the Oval Office: “The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”
Though Nixon’s administration and state governments wanted new laws punishing universities, “few of these measures passed and fewer were enforced,” historian Ellen Schrecker has written. Further national controversies in which conservatives were angry about happenings at elite universities also tended to fizzle out.
Over the past decade, though, elite universities have become increasingly central to the right’s narrative about what ails America — and conservatives have gotten more serious about trying to do something about it.
Many on the right have spent much of the past decade seething about the Great Awokening — the leftward move of the culture around race, gender, and sexuality in the mid-to-late 2010s.
Incidents at colleges and universities involving the alleged mistreatment of conservatives or people with non-left views got attention in the national media, and similar controversies soon unfolded across American society.
Influential voices on the right argued that “wokeness” was in large part created by elite universities. Rufo, for instance, argued that it was the evolution of a legal scholarship school known as “critical race theory,” and that to defeat it, conservatives needed to go after elite universities.
The blogger Curtis Yarvin, meanwhile, had argued for years that progressives dominated the country’s culture because of “the Cathedral” — elite academic and media institutions that, in his telling, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to fit their preferred ideological frames.
Such explanations like these seemed to ring true to those on the right frustrated by the leftward cultural shift. It named a specific enemy that could be fought against, as part of a strategy for gaining cultural power for the right.
So by 2021, then-Senate candidate (and Yale Law School alum) JD Vance was arguing that conservatives “have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” So much “of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country,” Vance said, is fundamentally determined by universities who are “very hostile” to the right. Why, he asked, had conservatives accepted that state of affairs? Wasn’t it time to do something about it?
Why the second Trump administration finally went through with trying to defund universities
The idea of pulling federal research funding from universities due to excessive wokeness was kicking around during the first Trump administration. Trump even signed an executive order that he claimed would do this back in 2019. But this turned out to be mostly toothless. The appetite to punish universities was not yet so strong to make it really happen.
In the early 2020s, though, the right’s backlash against academia intensified further, due to new controversies.
Part of this was specifically a backlash against the medical establishment. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the right’s distrust of scientists and public health experts deepened, due to vaccine skepticism and other controversies. So putting medical research funding at risk no longer seemed so unthinkable to them; indeed, it was arguably desirable.
As secretary of the Department Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now oversees much of this research spending through the NIH. Kennedy and his allies seem not just willing but downright eager to take a wrecking ball to the medical research status quo. ($250 million of the frozen $400 million in Columbia funds was NIH funding.)
Meanwhile, a separate backlash began, in response to campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Many students and faculty members supported the protests, but others — including major donors — opposed them, and argued Jewish students had become newly unsafe on campus. Trump took this up as a cause: His threats to Columbia came through his new “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.”
A final reason this attack on universities is happening now is that the second Trump administration is far more willing to bend — and blatantly break — the law, to try and get what they want.
The revocation of Columbia’s funds, analysts have said, is illegal. Cornell Law School professor Michael Dorf wrote that the federal government can cut off funding to punish civil rights violations, but only after a lengthy process. Instead, perhaps inspired by Elon Musk’s “move fast and break the law” approach, Trump officials just went ahead and did it.
Where’s the pushback?
All this seems to be working out quite well for the administration so far, as universities appear to be conceding to their demands.
Some schools are being proactive: The University of California announced last week that it would drop mandatory diversity statements from its hiring process.
And despite the seeming illegality of Trump revoking Columbia’s funds, the school didn’t sue in court to try and stop it. Columbia instead opted to seek an agreement with Trump officials. Per the Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Belkin, the university feared that a court fight would simply spur Trump’s team to find other legal avenues to take back those or other funds. (Columbia receives far more in federal funding that wasn’t yet revoked.)
So it seems that Trump officials and right-wing activists really did figure out how to effectively use federal funds as leverage to coerce universities. Such cuts would be devastating and universities deeply want to avoid them.
But Belkin’s Columbia sources cited another reason for the school’s concession: The school’s leadership also “believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”
So university trustees and administrators, according to this reporting, believed the Gaza war protests had gone too far and needed to be reined in. At least in part, they were using Trump’s demands as an excuse to make changes they wanted to make anyway.
This is part of a broader dynamic, in which many elites formerly sympathetic to left causes — or at least unwilling to fight them — have turned against the left. Many progressives, meanwhile, seem exhausted and disillusioned, and are no longer fighting back with much fervor. It isn’t the first Trump administration anymore, when social justice activists felt the arc of history was bending in their direction.
The implications here are ominous. Trump’s research funding extortion worked so well that he (and future Republican presidents) will surely be encouraged to use similar tactics again and again. Could a precondition for future federal funds be obeisance to the conservative agenda? How in the world can a situation where universities are so dependent on federal cash coexist with long-term academic freedom?
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