On this episode of “The Opinions,” Patrick Healy and David Leonhardt discuss President Trump’s attempts to remake higher education and argue that higher education should reform itself first.
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Patrick Healy: I am Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America. A really important way to understand Trump’s approach to power is through the domino theory. Trump makes an example out of one person or institution to send a message and he’ll push until that one falls over and then others fall in line.
He did this in business and lawsuits for years. Now we’re seeing it in his presidency, and nowhere more than higher education. Take Columbia University. Trump threatened the school with $400 million in funding cuts if they didn’t agree to a series of demands. Now Columbia is trying to make a deal with him.
So who is next? And what do Trump’s attacks on higher education mean for these institutions over the long term and for the rest of us?
My colleague David Leonhardt has been writing about universities for decades. For the last five years he wrote The Morning newsletter for the Times and he now oversees editorials at Times Opinion, including a recent one on higher education.
Welcome, David.
David Leonhardt: Thank you, Patrick. It’s great to be here.
Healy: I want to start with what you were thinking as you started to see Trump target universities. What do you think he was really up to here?
Leonhardt: Trump has been quite clear that he admires authoritarians in other countries. The way he talks about Vladimir Putin, the way he talks about Xi Jinping in China, the way he talks about Viktor Orban in Hungary.
If you look at the leaders of countries who have taken over countries that, at least at the beginning, were democracies, or somewhat democracies, and moved them toward more authoritarian forms of government — that includes Hungary, Narendra Modi and India, Recep Erdogan and Turkey and obviously Putin — they’ve seen higher education as a threat.
They’ve seen it as something that tends to come from intellectuals and come from the left, and these leaders come from the political right, and they’ve seen it as a source of empirical truth that can threaten these leaders’ attempts to essentially control truth.
And so they’ve shut universities. They’ve put themselves in control of those universities and Trump hasn’t gone that far yet, but the way he’s going after higher education has a lot of echoes of that, and it really is worrisomely authoritarian.
Healy: It’s so true. The way that Trump looks at freedom, at independence, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry — these things are dangers to authoritarians. Institutions that remain independent are threats to an autocratic approach.
I want to add something to your point because I come at this a little bit differently. I see evidence of two things. I see Trump’s vindictiveness agenda and his domination agenda. He attacks anyone or anything that opposes or disrespects him. The Ivy League, liberal professors, student protesters, D.E.I. offices, lawyers who defend free speech. Even New York City. And he seeks to dominate anyone or anything to accrue more power, money, deals. You know, more cards in his hands, as he likes to say.
I just see no evidence for a vision of higher education. I see no deep thinking about antisemitism. It feels like it’s about inflicting maximum pressure and pain in the ways that you highlighted the way that Putin and Orban and these other authoritarians have done.
Do you think it is about making an example out of some of these institutions or do you think he actually wants to break them down and rebuild them in his image, or take them in a different direction?
Leonhardt: I think it might be worth distinguishing a little bit between him, Trump the president, and some of the people around him.
I think you’re right that for Trump this is really more about destruction than it is about rebuilding. You can see that also with Elon Musk and DOGE. There is a way in which you could go in and you could say: We’re going to cut government spending, we’re going to build up U.S.A.I.D., we’re going to take out stuff that feels liberal and we’re going to really emphasize a smaller, more moderate, more conservative version of U.S.A.I.D.
Healy: A reform agenda can be very popular.
Leonhardt: Yes. And even if there would be many people who wouldn’t agree with it, that would still be one way to go about it. That’s not what they’re doing. They really are destroying.
I think there’s a version of that with higher education as well. Now that said, there are people around Trump who do have more of a theory of this. Our colleague Ross Douthat interviewed Christopher Rufo, who has been the leading conservative intellectual taking on liberal intellectuals.
In that interview, which I recommend to people, Rufo is very clear. He conveys that what he wants to do is to take this sector of American society that he thinks is overwhelmingly liberal and he wants to shrink it and allow a less liberal version of it to grow up. Then it’s more competition and Christopher Rufo uses that term, “more competition.”
So I think it’s the idea that not everybody aspires to go to the University of Michigan or Harvard. More people aspire to instead go into more working-class jobs or more people aspire to go into A.I. while getting a certificate rather than a college degree.
I mean, it’s inchoate, but I think that’s roughly what the vision looks like when you’re treating it in the most generous terms. And I’m not saying that some more conservative version of higher education is going to grow out of this, but there are people close to Trump who do have at least a partial vision for what they want to see, something to replace what they’re attacking.
Healy: David, as leaders like Trump and as people like Rufo gain more power and exercise more power, the opposition matters even more.
You and I are journalists. We’ve watched and we’ve covered Trump over the years and he is on the attack using these tactics like the domino theory out of the old Roy Cohn playbook. One falls then more fall, and I think it’s a manifestation of Trump’s campaign line, “I am your retribution.” Taking aim at the elites who criticized MAGA voters and called them deplorables.
I think we’re on track at a lot of universities and also law firms and other institutions that you’ve written about where people are going to say: Well, can I make a deal with Trump or can I keep my head down and stay out of the line of fire? Maybe not appreciating that this guy and the people around him like Chris Rufo are on a war footing.
Do you think they realize the seriousness of this? And if I’m being alarmist, push back on me. Or are you seeing signs of resistance that they’re fighting back?
Leonhardt: So you asked two questions there, Patrick, and I’ll answer them, I think, differently. Do university leaders realize the seriousness of Trump’s campaign against them? I actually think many of them do. I can’t speak for all of them. But I talk to university leaders regularly and I think many of them understand that, look, he’s talking about reducing scientific funding by reducing the amount that universities get to pay to keep their labs heated and to keep the lights on and to pay for getting rid of hazardous waste. It’s called overhead spending. He’s talking about cutting that for some universities by tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s talking about increasing a tax on their endowment. That could cost even more for the richest universities than the scientific funding cuts. So when you look at some of the biggest universities, we’re potentially talking about something like a 10 percent reduction, maybe more, in their annual budgets. That’s even before we get to the targeted efforts against places like Columbia. I think many of them understand the seriousness of it.
You also asked what they were doing about it. I think the answer to that is very little. They are sort of hoping that what he’s doing is going to pass their own institution by. They are anxious and they don’t exactly know what to do. They’re in a really tough spot, I don’t want to suggest otherwise, but I actually do think that they could do more than they are doing to try to push back against Trump.
Healy: I remember one of my first interviews with Trump in 2015 after one of the Republican primary debates. I asked him why, when he started getting criticized onstage, he came back so fiercely and intensely. I wondered, is that really going to play well, wear well with voters? Do they really want that? And he gave me a line: If I get hit in the face, I need to hit back 10 times as hard.
I do find myself in the context of higher education wondering, when universities are doing so relatively little to resist, do they understand that the only way to strike back at Trump, to get his attention, to put him on notice effectively, is to hit him back even harder? And I realize I’m not offering solutions on how to do that here, but —
Leonhardt: It’s hard because when you take that original example, you’re talking about two candidates on a debate stage who, to some extent, are equal in power. And so if you and I are at a political debate and I come after you, you can come right back after me, and to some extent we’re equals.
There’s a massive imbalance of power between Trump and higher education. Trump controls huge amounts of the funding they’re reliant on. And he controls the regulatory state, which can go after them in other ways. Universities don’t have a lot of points of leverage against Trump. They aren’t institutions that can necessarily move American swing voters, at least not directly.
And so I do think universities are right to try to think about this strategically and even cautiously. But at a certain point they also have to act.
I think that the most promising route for universities involves two things. One is they do need to fight back a little bit and they need to talk about the value of what they do. They need to talk about how many financial aid students now enroll. I’ve given them a really hard time about that over the years covering higher education. They still don’t do well enough, but they do a lot better than they used to. I also think universities need to be introspective because some of what Trump is pointing out I actually think are real problems, even if his solutions can be really damaging. And so I do think universities need to figure out this mix of both fighting back, but also cleaning up their own mess.
Healy: It’s such a challenge because some faculty members, students, people on campuses, they’re so hungry for it. We’re seeing just in the news, professors from Yale to the University of Toronto saying they don’t have faith and trust that their institution is not just going to fight the good fight against Trump, but also protect the research dollars that they need to have to do my work.
The targeting of universities can seem like a really narrow line of attack in Trump’s larger project to change the country, but these institutions, they do so much research that we all depend on. I’m thinking of mRNA technology, for example, that helped lead to the Covid vaccine.
How do you think about the role these elite institutions play in American lives?
Leonhardt: American higher education is the strongest higher education sector in the world and it’s not particularly close. You can look at rankings of the world’s top universities — many of which are produced by people outside the United States — and U.S. universities dominate them. You can look at who wins Nobel Prizes. Still, in a typical year, the U.S. wins twice as many Nobel Prizes as No. 2 on the list. And I should say it’s a mix of native born Americans and immigrants who are now Americans working at U.S. universities.
If you don’t find Nobel Prizes and rankings persuasive, think about when elite and wealthy people in other countries, when they think about where they want their children to go to college, they often want them to go to college in the United States. When people get sick and they’re facing desperate medical situations, where do they want to get treatment? People who have all these resources overseas, they often want to come to the United States and go to a U.S. academic medical center. So do many Republican politicians in the United States when their relatives get sick. Who do they want to treat them?
We have developed this incredible system in which the federal government funds research that researchers at universities then do. It leads to cures. It leads to incredible economic benefits. Why is Silicon Valley where it is? Because it’s next to Stanford University. That’s why it’s there. Why has Boston recovered from deindustrialization so much better than so many other cities in the Northeast? It’s because Boston — as you know, you’re a Bostonian — is this hub of research universities. And so again and again, you see these huge benefits that research universities bring and they are tangible benefits that really do help many, many Americans.
I think that is absolutely central to the case for universities and Trump really is going after things that are going to reduce our ability to find treatments for things that make our relatives sick and even kill our relatives.
Healy: It’s so strange, David. We have leaders like Donald Trump, who went to Wharton himself and who talks about how M.I.T. needs to produce more air traffic controllers — that’s where we need to get the geniuses for air traffic control. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton, JD Vance went to Yale Law. These people understand on some level the greatness and the importance of these institutions in our lives.
Does Trump want to create more thought leaders and a leadership class at these institutions that are more in the conservative space? Is he actually thinking strategically about this? Or is it just more the vindictive agenda, the dominance agenda?
Leonhardt: I think it’s much more the destroying agenda than it is the rebuilding agenda. He’s going after what we sometimes describe as “civil society” in all kinds of ways. He’s going after law firms and judges. He’s going after universities. He’s going after government employees. He’s obviously going after the media. And he’s going after them in order to monopolize power. It’s really important to see this campaign against universities as part of that.
There’s also the difficult conversation about the fact that universities have made real mistakes, in my view, over the last couple decades. They really have — in a way that I think is inconsistent with their mission — become part of Team Blue on certain issues and in certain ways. And not just the Democratic Party, but a relatively far left part of the Democratic Party.
On all kinds of issues — and not just elite universities, the California Community College System has done some of this — they have really adopted views that most Americans don’t share. I think that explains some of Trump’s campaign against those universities, a kind of vindictiveness against what he calls wokeism. I also think it explains why universities are so vulnerable, because some of these things that they have done are very difficult for them to defend in public. In fact, if they tried to respond to Trump by defending some of what they’ve done, they would make themselves less popular, not more.
Healy: I’ve had conversations recently with pretty liberal, progressive professors at Columbia who’ve told me how for some of their progressive colleagues denying Israel’s right to exist is tantamount to required thought for students. It’s like the price of admission. Or about how D.E.I. offices multiplied on campus and were unsympathetic to Jewish students’ evidence of antisemitism.
These are parts of universities that clearly need reform, but are also part of what made them vulnerable to attack and to real critique. You and I both read Frank Foer’s recent piece about Columbia in The Atlantic. That headline said it all: “Columbia University’s Antisemitism Problem.” Why do you think Columbia and other elite universities have struggled to deal with some of these vulnerabilities that you identified? The caricature for Trump is that left-wing Communist faculty run the place, but you and I have both been to Columbia. This is not Moscow on the Hudson. Why is it so hard for them to get it right?
Leonhardt: I also encourage people to read that article. I think it’s important to say, look, there are incredibly difficult debates over Israel and Palestinian rights that people need to have. The idea of harshly criticizing Israel is not antisemitic. But one of the reasons I think it’s important to read this article is that it is maybe the best distillation of the evidence that what happened at Columbia and some other campuses crossed well over that line from harsh criticism of Israel and into something that really is antisemitism at times. Jewish students at Columbia began hiding visible symbols of their Judaism, stars of David or yarmulkes, because they knew they would be harassed or in some cases even physically shoved. Those cases are under debate about what exactly happened, but there are certainly cases of it.
If you tried to go up to Columbia over the last year, you basically can’t enter the campus because the protests have been so tumultuous that the campus has essentially shut down. Students barged into a building, they jostled janitors. The janitors said they did even worse than jostle them. They painted swastikas on walls. Columbia’s reaction to this was so incredibly weak. What happened at Columbia really was antisemitism and the university really did react incredibly weakly to it.
And you asked why. That’s a really complicated question. I think that there is a version of modern leftism that sees almost everything through the prism of race. And so Israel has become particularly important because, in this version of leftism, it is a story of white people oppressing dark-skinned people.
I think one of the things that we learned in this last election is that Israel and Gaza was not actually a particularly important issue to most American voters. And obviously we’re a country with terrible problems of racism, but this larger notion of seeing the whole world through problems of race is actually a notion that growing numbers of Black, Latino and Asian voters reject, which I think is part of the reason that all of those groups have moved away from the Democratic Party and remarkably toward Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
Healy: I see it a little bit differently and I want to try this out with you: I think that universities like Columbia look at that cauldron of complicated, fiery issues and that they are, in some ways today, so led by their general counsel’s office, so led by lawyers who are advising the boards of trustees or presidents, here’s what you need to say. Here’s what you can’t say. Here’s how you can enact student discipline. Here’s how you can’t. Here’s how you need to deal with speech around Israel or Gaza or antisemitism. And I think Trump knows this. He knows that asymmetrical power that you were talking about earlier, the way a president can put a university on the ropes, especially when it’s dealing with such a pinched approach to leadership through lawyering. He knows that he has the upper hand here.
I find myself thinking fundamentally that this is a leadership problem, that this is about universities that have for decades been organized and run in certain ways, that have task forces, that have committees, that have a lot of lawyers kind of advising them. And Trump is kind of a bull in the China shop, just smashing past all of that. I just wonder how do universities deal with the asymmetry of that?
Leonhardt: I partially agree with that. I guess I would say, to me, it’s only part of the story. I agree that universities are often really weak when it comes to disciplining students, when it comes to taking bold positions. But if we try to figure out when have they been weakest in disciplining students and when have they been willing to do it? I think it’s worth thinking about their weakness in combination with the sort of leftism that has become dominant on these campuses. These schools often were willing to discipline people who did certain things. They just weren’t willing to discipline students who intimidated Jewish students. So to me, yes, I think part of this is the sort of weakness and the fear they have about doing anything, but I really do think part of it is ideological.
As for what they should do now, look, by the time Trump comes for your university, it’s probably too late. You face really unpleasant choices. I think that universities should get their own house in order. I think they should acknowledge that they’ve been too weak about disciplining students. They should acknowledge that they’ve allowed students to protest while hiding their identity. The original laws in this country saying that you can’t protest by hiding your identity were meant to restrict the Ku Klux Klan. So, there are a whole set of things that I think universities can do.
Harvard just released a report from its graduating seniors. Only a third of them felt fully comfortable speaking about their honest views in class. And moderate and conservative students were particularly unlikely to feel that way. So I actually do think even though it will come off as submitting to Trump — and in some ways will in fact be submitting to Trump —- these universities have policies that are really hard for them to defend. I think they should fix those, and I think they should simultaneously make a really forthright case for why so much of what they do is valuable to our country.
Healy: One of my old newspaper editors, Marty Baron, liked to say, when we had errors in a story: If you’re wrong, get right — as quickly as possible. I think you’re right that universities may worry about the perception that they’re bending the knee to Trump and doing deals with Trump. That may be a separate matter. But if they know that something is wrong internally, deal with it now. Be reformers. I think there are a lot of voters, a lot of Americans who want institutions reformed in some ways.
Leonhardt: There are real world consequences to the narrowness of university ideology. I know there are probably people listening to this who say I’m making a mountain out of a molehill and who cares, the universities aren’t actually brainwashing students. I actually agree with that. I don’t think conservatives enter universities conservative and leave liberals. I think people can think for themselves.
But I think Covid is an example of how the intellectual narrowness of universities had real world costs. Universities are where we have so many of our epidemiologists and our public health experts. That is one of those fields in which, when you survey the people in it, it leans extremely left. People in that field did a series of things during Covid that ended up being quite damaging and wrong. We still don’t know where Covid came from, but we certainly shouldn’t have been trying to chill debate about whether Covid came from a lab in China. They called for mask mandates, including on their own campuses, but also in wider society than it went on for months and months and months.
Worst of all, a lot of these epidemiologists argued very strongly for keeping schools closed for months and months and months on end. They are a large part of the reason that schools in Democratic-run areas remained closed for a year or more in some cases, whereas schools in places like Utah and Nebraska and Mississippi were much more likely to open. In retrospect, Red America got that decision right, and Blue America got it wrong. I’d love to see a little bit more self-reflection from the epidemiologists at these leading universities who led us down such a wrong path.
Healy: There is such power in America when leaders admit that they were wrong about something, when they take that reflection. In the time that I’ve been in Times Opinion, probably the most popular thing that we published was this package by our columnists that had the title “I Was Wrong.” People like others reflecting on and acknowledging things that they didn’t get right, in part because it suggests that those lessons learned will put them in better stead the next time.
I’m grappling with whether it’s too late for some of these institutions to really stay fully out of the line of fire. David, as you look ahead, are we looking at a situation where like Chris Rufo is going to be sitting around, going through the course catalogs of every university, looking at titles of classes or titles of departments and saying, no, no, no, no?
I find myself wondering what universities can do to rebuild trust, to acknowledge they were wrong and rebuild credibility. And if there’s really the possibility for collective action here when you have so many institutions that are these dominoes that aren’t really working together to push back on Trump.
Leonhardt: It’s important to say that a lot of the conservative critics of universities, including Christopher Rufo, also don’t want a fully open debate. They want to restrict debate in many cases so that it’s just their view of the world. They want to take books out of schools about L.G.B.T. people. That’s really damaging.
A world in which Donald Trump’s ideological enforcers are going through a course catalog or telling schools exactly what their admissions policies need to be, rather than letting schools follow the Supreme Court ruling on it, would be a really damaging world.
Universities are beyond the point where they can follow any strategy that’s guaranteed to work. Some of that is their own fault. Much of it is Donald Trump’s doing and fault. But I think they have to think about what the strategies are that give them the best chance of winning over people in the middle. What are the best strategies that they can follow for making themselves look valuable and reasonable? I think that’s a mix of broadcasting their strengths, acknowledging and fixing their weaknesses, and also banding together.
I think it would be really good if a bunch of universities came out together and said “Hey, this is what we’re changing and this is why we’re valuable.” In politics, there really is strength in numbers. There are no guarantees, but I think what the universities have done so far has not been nearly bold enough either in terms of acknowledging error or in terms of fighting back.
Healy: David, thanks so much for joining me.
Leonhardt: Thank you, Patrick.
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