It’s hard to tell in the middle of a president’s term how much he’s changing the country. Donald Trump’s second presidency has seemed transformative on many fronts — trade, immigration and culture — but he has mostly pursued his objectives through unilateral executive actions rather than legislation. Genuinely transformative presidencies notch achievements that last; Democrats can reverse much of Trump’s populist agenda as soon as they retake the White House.
Or can they? In some cases, the Trump administration’s radical tactics might change American politics in ways a Democratic president can’t easily undo. Take higher education. The Trump administration sees elite academia as a center of progressive conformity — the incubator of the “woke” ideas that exploded in the early 2020s and that even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) recently suggested went too far.
On taking office last year, the administration promptly launched a barrage of legal attacks on key universities. It threatened or withheld billions in federal funding and launched civil rights investigations alleging progressive racial preferences and antisemitism on dozens of campuses.
Much of this campaign was legally flimsy, as a judicial decision last week finally tossing the lawsuit against Harvard University shows. But that doesn’t mean the effort won’t achieve some of its desired results. University of California Law San Francisco professor Zachary Price argues in a recent paper that the Trump administration’s “shock and awe” approach could lock in new incentives for universities even after Trump leaves office.
Antidiscrimination laws from the 1960s and 1970s have typically been used to push education policies in a progressive direction. For example, in 2011 the Obama administration directed colleges to pare back due process protections for students and faculty accused of sexual misconduct.
Trump has demonstrated that civil rights laws can be aggressively wielded against left-wing ideas as well. Progressive classifications around race and sex — as well as anti-Israel advocacy that veers into antisemitism — can expose universities to civil rights scrutiny and give the federal government a pretext to defund their research. The Trump administration didn’t remotely follow the proper procedure for threatening funding streams, but as Price notes, “the administration’s very lawlessness gave it the upper hand” in coercing the ivory tower.
Even if a Democratic administration tilts civil rights law back toward the left, universities will have to calculate the likelihood that a subsequent Republican administration will immediately revive the Trump approach. Racial equity programs that a Democratic administration champions might be deemed unlawful by a Republican-run Justice Department. From the universities’ perspective, what the law really requires is secondary; simply being on the wrong side of the federal government politically is costly in terms of bad press, legal fees and funding risks.
It’s rational, then, for universities to respond to the Trump administration’s onslaught by inching closer to the political center. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what many have been doing — or at least saying they’re doing. Harvard is seeking $10 million to hire faculty who will “broaden ideological representation across Harvard,” the student newspaper reports. Yale University published a report in the spring that criticized the influence of progressive groupthink on campus. Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis released an institutional statement pointing in the same direction.
Johns Hopkins and Tufts, among others, have announced initiatives to elevate a wider range of viewpoints. It’s hard to imagine most of this happening during a Kamala Harris administration.
It would of course be wrong to attribute elite higher education’s messaging pivot entirely to the Trump blunt-force strategy. The Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and subsequent war in Gaza shook up campus political alignments before the 2024 election. And the decisiveness of the election might have prompted university leaders to reflect sincerely on their own assumptions.
Yet Trump has given universities that rely on federal grants no choice but to change the way they think about their self-preservation and business model. The ferocity of his legal tactics has probably created some lasting deterrence against the kind of campus political excesses that occurred in the past decade.
In that sense, Trump might have achieved classically liberal ends by illiberal means. Elite campuses were, and in many cases still are, national epicenters of censorship and ideological purity. Trump met campus illiberalism with an illiberalism of his own — stretching the bounds of executive authority to exert political control over private institutions.
“A signature move in this administration,” Price writes, is “to use unexpected or even unlawful sanctions” to disarm and intimidate. That isn’t how the government is supposed to pursue social change in a constitutional democracy, so it will be disturbing at some level if the tactic actually works to help rebuild intellectual pluralism in higher education. But it would be just as disturbing if the tactic fails and campus deliriums sweep over the Democratic Party and the country once again.
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