The Trump administration’s unprecedented drive for control over American universities has upended schools coast to coast, pushing — or outright forcing — vast and wide changes to the rules, culture and finances of higher education.
It is hitting schools large and small, public and private, in states red and blue, with profound implications for the economy, national security and the future of science.
While some of the shifts could unravel if political agendas reverse — and some of the cuts are still being litigated in court — university leaders are concluding that many of the changes made so far to research, diversity and campus culture are likely to last long after President Donald Trump leaves office.
That is partly because the Trump administration has fundamentally altered the partnership between government and higher education, forcing university leaders to rethink how they fund and run their institutions. It’s partly because some changes are baked into laws that will be hard to undo. It’s partly because even after the administration is over, a conservative Supreme Court will remain. And it’s partly because, in some cases, school leaders agree that some of the reset was needed.
“This is a moment of structural change,” said Andrew Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. “Our relationship with the federal government is going to be different going forward, and we need to adapt to that reality.”
The breadth and speed of the transformation has stunned people on all sides of the debate over how universities should run. The administration has frozen billions of dollars of federal research grant money, extracted concessions from multiple schools, launched investigations that led to the resignation of the president of the University of Virginia and demanded $1.2 billion from UCLA.
“I think the basic question for all of us is, can government be a reliable partner moving forward?” said Steven Tepper, president of Hamilton College. “I think that is probably broken, and it is going to take us years to figure out what will replace the previous contract that has defined us.”
Administration actions have impacted admissions, financial aid, diversity efforts, campus speech and universities’ long standing as beacons for international students and scholars. Perhaps most profoundly, the decades-long research funding partnership that has powered the U.S. economy and bolstered national security is eroding, forcing universities to rethink scientific goals.
Michael Gordin, dean of the college at Princeton University and a historian of science, said if these changes become permanent and produce a collapse of the U.S. research system, that would be one of the worst things to happen to science in 300 years.
America is the leading intellectual and economic driver of science globally, he said. “To have a heart attack happen at the center of the system is potentially disruptive on a scale we just have never seen before,” he added.
Asked about the impact of the administration’s first year on higher education, Education Secretary Linda McMahon took credit for promoting merit-based admissions, ferreting out alleged fraud in financial aid and making “historic agreements” with universities accused of bias. Conservatives have championed these and other changes for decades, she said, “and in just twelve months, we’ve made them a reality.”
Political pressure on higher education has been ramping up for years, since long before Trump began dismantling the Education Department and waging war on what he described as radical, leftist campuses. In red states, new laws constricted what schools could teach and do. On Capitol Hill, Republicans confronted college presidents with high-profile hearings.
All of this accelerated when Trump returned to the White House.
Trump’s actions reflect public dissatisfaction with colleges in America, especially elite schools. A Pew Research Center poll in Octoberfound 7 in 10 Americans saying higher education was generally going in the wrong direction — up from 56 percent who said the same in 2020.
In only one area did a majority of respondents rate higher education well: Fifty-five percent said universities did an excellent, very good or good job advancing research and innovation.
“We’ve become increasingly arrogant, increasingly isolated,” said E. Gordon Gee, who spent 45 years as a university president at multiple prominent public and private institutions, most recently West Virginia University. He said many of the challenges schools are facing are self-imposed. “We’ve lost the trust of the American people,” he said.
A new model for research
For decades, the federal government has been a reliable and critical partner in research that has delivered medical breakthroughs, created advances for the military and powered the U.S. economy. Universities are now looking for a new template.
Among the changes underway: cutbacks in the number of graduate students at some schools, a move that threatens the pipeline of future scientists, and a hunt for new funding sources, including corporate and philanthropic partners.
“Every university should be looking at other sources of revenue, and most already have,” said Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education (ACE).
The search for new partners could mean a shift in the very nature of science, with less attention to federally funded support for future scientists and basic research — which could lead to slower, less predictable, but potentially far more profound advances — and more attention to shorter-term applied projects that appeal to industry and state-level politicians.
The seeds of today’s vast government-university partnership were planted after President Harry S. Truman received a groundbreaking report during World War II called “Science, the Endless Frontier.” It envisioned a bold system in which federal grants to universities would pay for basic research and spur important discoveries.
After decades and billions of dollars, the federal partnership became a cornerstone of both universities and the U.S. economy — until this year when the Trump administration abruptly canceled grants allegedly tied to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, cut off universities that fell out of favor, and tried to unilaterally reduce federal reimbursement for some grants. There had been complaints for years about high indirect costs for grants, but no administration had ever leveraged those funds to force changes in campus culture.
University leaders are scrambling to close the gaps.
At Washington University, officials are looking at both philanthropy and commercial partnerships to fill the hole left by about $11.7 million in federal cuts and to gird against any future cuts. Martin, the chancellor, said the university is also looking to increase revenue from clinical care at its hospitals to make up for the losses.
At the University of Utah, where federal research funding is down $83 million from $781 million last year, cuts are forcing the university to reconsider its focus, said the school’s president, Taylor Randall. His school is accelerating applied research, where results are more immediate and tangible than with basic science. It is also hoping that federal funding could be replaced by state funding, so it is aligning with state priorities, such as AI capacity and research involving the critical minerals that are found in Utah.
All research, Randall said, will be scrutinized to see if the return on investment is sufficient.
The political climate also led the school to admit about 100 fewer graduate students. “It’s uncertainty,” he said. “If you don’t know grants are going to come in, you’re hesitant to commit to a student.”
Some universities have seen scientists take jobs overseas, where they believe there will be stable support.
“We have had generations for which there was never any question of America’s supremacy for the best researchers and students in the world,” Fansmith said. “That’s reversing.”
DEI in retreat
On his first day in office Trump signed an executive order calling DEI programs illegal and immoral. The government canceled grants that included, even in small part, a DEI goal, and fired workers involved in DEI initiatives. It launched investigations of universities suspected of using race in admissions or scholarships.
This summer, the Trump Justice Department aggressively interpreted a 2023 Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions to ban virtually any consideration of race by any federally funded school in America.
Universities — even many not facing investigations — rolled back their DEI work en masse. They closed DEI offices, eliminated jobs, scrubbed their websites of any mention of DEI, ended scholarships targeted at students of color and stopped asking applicants for faculty positions to write “diversity statements” articulating how they would advance DEI goals.
At some schools, Black student groups and even magazines aimed at Black students lost university support.
More states have cemented the changes by passing anti-DEI laws.
In Texas, state legislators mandated a power shift away from faculty to politically appointed governing boards at public universities, with an eye to fighting what they see as liberal bias on campuses.
Ohio wiped out DEI and imposed some limits on what professors can say in public-university classrooms, among other provisions.
“There’s no question that some faculty are scared, worried that they’ll say something wrong and they’ll be called out,” said Ted Carter, Ohio State University’s president. “I know there are some faculty members that are very worried that there’s some sort of thought police happening in the classroom, and that’s not the intent here.”
It will be challenging, if not impossible, to build the momentum needed to reinstate DEI, said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at EdTrust, an advocacy group that promotes racial equity programs.
“I don’t think it’s coming back,” he said. “The infrastructure has been sufficiently dismantled or dismembered that it would be hard to put any of these initiatives back together.”
He added that the Supreme Court is hostile to race-based programming and that conservative legal activists are eager to bring cases.
Besides, he said, “why would you go into a newly created DEI program that may be undone in four years if there’s a shift in administrations?”
A focus on ideological diversity
A year ago, Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh was known for his popular course on conservative thought. Today, he is the director of the new Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, a growing enterprise that is creating programming, research opportunities and curriculums to promote ideological diversity at Tufts and beyond.
“There just clearly is a problem common across many elite universities,” Hersh said.
Conservatives have long complained about lack of ideological diversity at colleges and universities — an abundance of liberals and too few conservatives. Hersh’s initiative has taken off as the Trump administration has been pressuring higher education to embrace conservative thought.
In some high-profile incidents in recent years, students tried to keep right-wing speakers off campus, or shouted them down when they arrived.
In April, the administration sent a list of demands to Harvard University, including one that every department, field and teaching unit be audited to ensure it was “viewpoint diverse.” It also proposed that accreditors — the groups that oversee universities — prioritize “intellectual diversity in order to advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning.” And a proposed “compact”with universities, in which schools would get funding priority for agreeing to Trump goals, required schools to promote “a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints.”
The push is likely to last, many predicted, because university leaders also believe it is important to embrace a range of opinions on campus.
At Tufts, the idea for Hersh’s class on conservatism was inspired by students. Even liberal students, he said, yearned to learn multiple perspectives.
He heard comments like, “‘In high school we talked about Citizens United, but I never learned the conservative position,’” he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court campaign finance decision.
Since Trump took office last year, viewpoint diversity has been further pushed by the White House and required in some states. The new Ohio lawbans universities from taking positions on “controversial beliefs.” It also mandates that all students at state universities take a U.S. civics course, focused on the free market, and requires schools to demonstrate “intellectual diversity” in courses and seek out campus speakers with a range of political views.
Some conservative state legislatures have mandated centers promoting conservative ideas at state universities, and some private schools are embarking on similar paths on their own. Washington University, for instance, last year announced an initiative called the Ordered Liberty Project to promote viewpoint diversity.
“The Trump administration has made this an issue that every university has had to deal with,” said Jenna Storey, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, who helped develop a research and teaching collaboration with Johns Hopkins University aimed in part at exposing students to conservative ideas. Even for programs that were underway pre-Trump, she said, pressure from the administration “has probably caused efforts to accelerate.”
There has also been a concerted push by some universities to stop taking positions on controversial topics as an institution, a move that began pre-Trump but has advanced since he took office. At least 59 universities have adopted a range of policies affirming institutional neutrality, including many of the country’s most elite schools and many large state systems that represent multiple campuses, according to a tallyby the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
Internal motivation to change, not external pressure, is key, Storey said.
“Changes to culture can be nudged from without, but they have to be created from within,” she said, “by the people on campus every day.”
Lost autonomy
The past year has profoundly challenged universities’ independence, as the Trump administration proved the government can leverage federal money to bend schools to comply with many of its wishes.
As the White House froze funding and launched investigations, it pressured universities to reach deals. So far, a half-dozen elite schools have publicly done so, with some agreeing to pay millions of dollars, adopt new policies on race and gender, and provide detailed admissions data to the government. One school, Columbia University, agreed to let an outside monitor oversee the deal.
University officials insisted the agreements protected their autonomy, but some experts said they clearly chip away at independence.
It amounts to an aggressive use of powers that could be mimicked by future leaders of either party, they say. Another administration could yank research funding for entirely different reasons or demand deals to further its own agenda.
Such governmental pressure on schools is likely to continue, university leaders said. And, some fear, that may be the most profound change of all.
“For the first time in my memory, the government is seen on campus as a threat, rather than a potential partner,” said Ted Mitchell, president of ACE. It has created a climate of fear, he said, that is eroding schools’ independence as they make choices hoping to avoid being singled out for punishment. “That sword of Damocles is hanging over every institution in a way that we’ve never seen before.”
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