When I went back to my office at Duke last week to prepare for the fall semester, I confronted danger signs, police-style tape and other obstacles outside the entrance to the building. I had to weave my way in. And while the impediments reflected humdrum structural maintenance, I couldn’t help but see a metaphor in them, one so on the nose that a novelist writing about higher education under President Trump would probably be ashamed to use it.
Those of us in academia are on newly threatening terrain. Will the Trump administration take away yet more of our funding? How closely is it watching us? Those questions dog me, but no more so than a larger one: What sense, if any, does the administration’s attack on many of the country’s leading colleges and universities make?
Trump is right about some of higher education’s shortcomings, derelictions and outright failures. Campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza unveiled an antisemitism that many schools were shamefully slow to recognize, if they recognized it at all; their Jewish students didn’t seem to be accorded the same concern that classmates in other minority groups received. To varying degrees, many schools have promoted a progressive orthodoxy at odds with free discourse. Some diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives simply went too far. And there’s a striking lack of ideological and political diversity among faculty members, a significant majority of whom are left of center.
But what Trump and his allies are doing is no targeted effort to correct that. It’s a sweeping, indiscriminate, performative smackdown of elite institutions by a crew trying to solidify its power under the banner of anti-elitism. It doesn’t attempt to usher those institutions from a place of bias and extremism to one of neutrality and moderation. It answers excess with excess, orthodoxy with orthodoxy, censorship with censorship. And it disregards the damage it’s doing.
The leaders of this charge say that they want these institutions, with all their tax breaks and federal research funds, to be more accountable to the public. Fine. Let’s have a serious discussion about what that means. What it would look like. How it squares with academic freedom. And how it wouldn’t end up with colleges being forced to bend to the whims of whoever’s in power.
Because that’s what’s happening now. With debatable authority and without any consultation with Congress, Trump is using the suspension of federal grants, threats of further cuts and demands that schools essentially pay fines for their supposed transgressions to get them to do as he pleases. That’s not a discussion; it’s intimidation. That’s not accountability; it’s extortion. He extracted $200 million from Columbia. He’s reportedly looking for $500 million from Harvard and more than $1 billion from U.C.L.A. Why these targets? They’re politically juicy. These sums? They’re attention-grabbing. He’s staging a show of force. A spectacle of punishment.
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The post Trump Isn’t Fixing America’s Campuses. He’s Bleeding Them Dry. appeared first on New York Times.
