In this episode of “The Opinions,” the columnist M. Gessen argues that when it comes to America’s institutions, President Trump is taking a page out of a Soviet-style playbook.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
M. Gessen: The Trump administration has threatened universities — at this point, I hesitate to say how many high-profile universities — with pulling their federal funding, which in this case means pulling research grants. Some of them amount to more than $2 billion, as in the case of Harvard, unless they submit to various demands.
News clip 1: The administration wanted Harvard to limit activism on campus, end DEI programs, and change the school’s governance.
News clip 2: President Trump also threatening to revoke the university’s tax exempt status, accusing the school of pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired sickness.
News clip 3: Harvard’s president wrote a letter in response saying the school quote will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights by agreeing to the terms.
In effect, these demands are to place the university under direct federal oversight.
The pretexts that the administration is using have to do with D.E.I. and antisemitism. The real reasons, I think, are anti-intellectualism and greed, and the fact that Trump is building a mafia state.
Now, a mafia state is an absolutely centralized system in which one person, the patron, the don, distributes money and power. And so in order to build a mafia state, such an aspiring patron needs to strip other agents of their money and power. Some universities are actually quite wealthy, so they are to some extent independent financial centers and they are centers of independent, intellectual and political power. And that’s what Trump is really going after.
I hesitate to talk about how important it is that Harvard stood up to Trump because it really should be a no-brainer. Of course, these demands are blatantly illegal. It almost literally says: “Nice university you got there. Shame if something happened to it.”
There’s no way that a university could accede to those kinds of demands. And yet we saw Columbia, which was the first university targeted, try to bend, apparently in the hope of preventing further attacks. It very quickly became obvious that it doesn’t work.
After Columbia had $400 million in federal research grants suspended and Columbia immediately ceded to demands that are similar to — though weren’t as broad as — the demands levied against Harvard but after Columbia agreed, the money didn’t rematerialize. So then Columbia sacrificed its president pro tem, and that still wasn’t enough.
So, I think that Harvard, on the one hand, was consulting with its lawyers. On the other hand, we now know — hearing from its political scientists — that there were warnings about how dangerous it would be to cave to this administration. And on the third hand, they were also looking at what happened to Columbia and realizing that there’s no negotiating with a mafia state — if you give a little, they’ll just take the rest.
We’ve had many previews of what Trump is going to do to universities, and I think it’s worth taking a minute to review his strategy. Because he has said that he would use nonprofit status against universities, that he would try to get an endowment tax against universities, that they would go after international students — who represent a significant source of revenue for a lot of big universities — and that they would go after other sources of federal funding such as financial aid. Which is also very important for a lot of schools, including ones that don’t get a lot of research funding from the federal government.
So it’s interesting to me that Trump started with these research grants because research grants are really the easiest thing to wield individually against universities. Divide and conquer is, of course, one of the most important strategies. And so an endowment tax would be more likely to affect many universities across the board. But research grants are granted individually, so they can be pulled individually. But I think we should expect the Trump administration to use the full arsenal of tools as its disposal.
And it has the ability to, if not bankrupt universities — it certainly has the ability to bankrupt universities that don’t have significant endowments, which is most of them. And it has the ability to weaken universities that even have giant endowments, such as Harvard.
The only way for universities to really address this is to come to terms with the fact that there is no way for them, with this administration, to keep their federal money. So what are they going to do knowing that they’re going to suffer huge losses? I don’t think at this point that it’s preventable. What is preventable is an all out destruction of universities as places where young people learn, as places where humanities research is done, as places where intellectual work gets done and disseminated.
The approach that some people have been advocating is for universities to protect their endowments; to try to protect their science funding, to get through Trump’s four-year term, and then hopefully things will get better. I don’t think that’s realistic.
I think if they want to have a university in addition to their endowment, they have to shift their priorities. Universities currently focus on competition — getting as many applicants as possible and admitting the lowest percentage they can; expanding through real estate; growing their endowments; and climbing the rankings in the U.S. News & World Report. They need to set all of that aside and focus on teaching as widely as possible.
In my column, I used the example of Bard College, which remarkably has responded to every crisis it has faced in the last 20 to 25 years by teaching more people. And so Bard College has more degree candidates outside its campus in upstate New York than it does on campus.
These degree candidates include more than 400 people who are studying in prisons in the Bard Prison Initiative, thousands of people who are attending Bard High School Early College, which are free high schools in six or seven different cities in the United States. It’s a really amazing and imaginative way of making the university widely accessible to the largest number of people.
We’ve seen what happens when universities succumb to autocrats. I saw it in Russia where I lived most of my life. We saw it in Hungary where it’s no coincidence that independent universities were an important target of the Orban administration. What happens is that there’s very little intellectual opposition and it is marginalized because it doesn’t have any institutional support, which is part of what universities are for.
One of my books is called “The Future Is History,” and one person I talked to described the net knowledge loss that occurred in the Soviet Union over its 70 years of totalitarian rule. After the Bolshevik Revolution, there was systematic and intentional destruction of the old intellectual class.
As a result, this one economist told me, economists who were trained in Soviet universities in the 1970s lacked the sophistication and knowledge necessary to read Russian economists who had worked in the 1920s. So in a rapidly developing field such as economics, they actually knew less. They had less language, they had fewer tools of self-understanding than people who had worked 50 years earlier.
That’s an extreme but a perfectly realistic example of what happens when you have an autocratic president who wants to destroy knowledge production. So this is not going to stop with Harvard, however the battle of Harvard ends. But resistance on the part of Harvard, I think, makes it more difficult for the administration to expect significant concessions from other universities that have the resources to fight.
I’ve lived through this before — not nearly at this rate. It took Vladimir Putin a year to take over Russian media and almost a decade to really bring universities to heel. To see sort of the same playbook — but vastly sped up — and to see Americans who don’t have the history of living under totalitarian rule, and who think of themselves as freedom-loving, as valuing their rights to free speech and freedom of movement and all sorts of other important things, to see them fold a lot of the time, as happened with Columbia, as happened with many law firms, is incredibly disheartening.
I think the broader lesson is that there’s no such thing as negotiating with this administration. It is always going to demand more concessions until nothing is left of the institution that Trump has targeted.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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