The Trump administration is waging an assault on higher education, beginning with “Ivy League” institutions like Harvard University and Columbia University, as well as “elite” private institutions like Northwestern University. In just the first four months of Trump’s second term, they have terminated millions of dollars in research funding for studies which include transgender people or anyone the administration might see as falling under a gender identity or diversity, equality and inclusion category.
The Trump administration froze $400 million in funding to Columbia University for alleged “antisemitism,” with threats of that number rising to $650 million, despite Columbia capitulating to the administration’s demands.
When Harvard stated they refuse to bow down to the administration, they froze over $2 billion in federal funding. The administration is also threatening to pull the institution’s tax exempt status, and is looking into terminating the institution’s participation in the Student Exchange and Visitor Program, which could result in mass losses in the current student body, mass losses in tuition dollars from international students and the potential of forced deportations of students who cannot find new institutions to transfer to.
These funding freezes, grant terminations and hearings within the House Committee on Education and the Workforce have only continued expanding across the nation. This assault spans multiple federal agencies, among them the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Energy.
While Columbia quickly capitulated to the Trump administration’s demands, the administration has not returned their funding. Instead, they remain in negotiations as of this writing. It is clear the administration is not simply attempting to change a policy here or there. As part of the billionaire’s agenda, they are attempting to restructure higher education, be that through inducing fear or through pressure by holding institutions financially hostage.
A far-right wishlist for restructuring higher education
In addition to funding freezes, Trump has signed a barrage of executive orders related to higher education, including:
- A ban on transgender women competing in NCAA women’s sports, erroneously titled, “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports;”
- An end to what they term “COVID vaccine mandate coercion,” or, in other words, the requirement of COVID-19 vaccinations for the promotion of public health;
- Requiring the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, to investigate accreditation agencies, which ensure that universities provide a rigorous and appropriate education, for the promotion of “unlawful” DEI requirements;
- Investigating higher education institutions that do not “appropriately” disclose funding from foreign nations and institutions, as part of their new Cold War policies against China and their attempts to blame pro-Palestinian student activism on “financial infiltration” from states like Qatar;
- Preventing public service loan forgiveness for graduates who work at immigrant rights organizations, organizations that are alleged to “support terrorism,” or which provide gender affirming care to children;
- Demanding the dismantling of the Department of Education;
- Demanding that universities and colleges provide a list of international students who participated in the Palestine solidarity encampments to the Department of Homeland Security and cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s attempts to deport those students like Mahmoud Khalil.
The administration’s current efforts align with the proposals in the far-right agenda known as Project 2025 for the restructuring of higher education. The authors, including its pioneer, Russell Vought, who currently serves as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, call for the Trump administration to terminate Title IX protections for transgender girls and women, confront the “Chinese Communist Party’s influence on higher education,” allocate increased funding for education on “free and market economies,” assess how campuses are creating a negative “disposition towards the United States,” and end programs like GEAR-UP, which make it possible for low income, particularly Black and Latino, youth across the nation to access a higher education.
Project 2025 calls for the president to utilize the force of the Department of Justice to go after institutions, like higher education, to hold them “accountable” to the constitution and to executive orders. Already, we have seen the Trump administration and the billionaire class carry out multiple pieces of this far-right wishlist.
The battle for higher education: An ideological counteroffensive
The end goal of the billionaire class is to restructure higher education, either bringing universities like Harvard and Columbia under conservatorship, pulling and freezing enough in funding to force these institutions to collapse, or holding universities hostage until they give in to completely rebuilding their institutions. Once universities collapse, new ones will be built, shaped from the beginning with an ultra-right-wing ideology, and those institutions that continue to capitulate to the administration will do so under economic distress. Speaking at a rally during his presidential campaign, Trump foreshadowed these current attacks, stating, “To every college president, vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”
Behind the current attempt to restructure higher education are two key political figures: Christopher Rufo and Stephen Miller. Conservative political “activist,” Rufo has become a key advisor to Trump on higher education. Rufo, a member of the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida joined the Board as an appointee by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in an attempt to ideologically restructure the college. Soon after joining the Board, Rufo released “The Fight for New College: A Short Documentary on the Counterrevolution in Higher Education.” On the documentary’s webpage, Rufo writes, “The hard Left [sic] has dominated the universities for generations … Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed a new board majority, including me, to New College of Florida … Whatever your opinion, one thing is certain: the takeover of New College has changed the dynamics of America’s culture war and, if successful, will provide a model for conservatives across the nation.”
Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Homeland Security Advisor and architect of the first Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants, founded the America First Legal Foundation during the Biden administration to fight the “radical left.” Using its vast financial resources, America First Legal has sued numerous institutions with DEI policies for purported racial discrimination. The foundation has also carried out suits against K-12 schools for transgender inclusive policies and is currently suing the State of Washington for sanctuary status legislation.
Having carried out his own attempts to restructure higher education through private litigation, Miller, who has the ear of Donald Trump, has now encouraged efforts to freeze funding at universities and colleges.
This is not the first time the right wing has attempted to ideologically influence higher education. In 1971, Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. signed what later became known as the Powell Memo. The Powell Memo inaugurated a right-wing counteroffensive and served as a blueprint for the production of right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and called for the funding of capitalist intellectuals to win over youth in the battle of ideas.
What is different this time is that the billionaire’s agenda is not simply seeking to proliferate their right-wing ideology, they are attempting to smash institutions of higher education to fully eradicate any progressive ideological presence on college campuses across the nation, having born witness to the complete loss of a generation of elite college students who turned their backs on the imperialists and stood in solidarity with Palestine.
A socialist vision for higher education
In fighting against the billionaire agenda, we must both demand that universities’ academic freedom remain recognized and demand changes to higher education that reflect the needs of the working class (not the small minority of billionaires who run this country).
A socialist vision for higher education includes a complete debt jubilee for student loans and increased funding for higher education in order to make college degrees free and accessible to all. Programs like ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, Black studies, and LGBTQ studies, won by masses of organized students and workers, must receive greater funding and institutional support. Tuition dollars and funding from the government must divest from Israeli institutions and corporations, as well as from oil companies and the private prison system.
Under a socialist system, higher education would provide students the education needed to advance our society. Rather than billions of dollars being invested into universities by the Department of Defense to advance imperialist priorities and to develop new military technology, a socialist government would invest in research on environmentally sustainable artificial intelligence to reduce the time we have to spend working each week; research to find treatments and cures to HIV, cancer, and interventions to end the Black maternal mortality rate; and classes and programs that teach students the true history of the United States, while inculcating in students an understanding of their role in building a protagonistic democracy.
Students and higher education workers are rising up to demand an end to the assault on higher education. Now, they must broaden the struggle and connect to the fight for a free Palestine, for an end to deportations and detentions of immigrants, and for the complete end to billionaire rule. Only a mass movement, encapsulating within it the many people’s struggles of the working class, can defend our existing rights and advance the class struggle. United in our fight, we can defend our existing rights and win a new society — a socialist society.
Feature photo: Columbia University – Low Memorial Library. Credit: Flickr/ajay_suresh (CC BY 2.0)
