Donald Trump’s war on America’s universities

Last week, my colleague Edward Luce devoted his Swamp Notes to the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Syrian-born US green card holder detained by immigration officials on March 8 and threatened with deportation, despite having broken no laws and not having been charged with any crime. 

In arresting Khalil, who had participated in pro-Palestinian protests on the Columbia campus, the federal government relied on an obscure provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the secretary of state to deport non-citizens whose presence on American soil is deemed to have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. President Donald Trump himself has expressed the rationale for Khalil’s detention in more vivid terms, describing him as “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and warning that his arrest was the “first of many to come”. 

The arbitrary detention of a permanent resident is bad enough, of course. But, as Ed pointed out, Trump has a larger goal here, which is to punish US universities. The administration has chosen Columbia as the site of the first battle in a much wider war on higher education.

On March 7, education secretary Linda McMahon announced the cancellation of federal grants and contracts to Columbia worth some $400mn. By allowing pro-Palestinian protests on campus, she said, the university had violated anti-discrimination laws — notably Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, colour and national origin — and failed to uphold its obligations to its Jewish students. 

This was followed up six days later by what can only be described as a ransom letter setting out the conditions for Columbia’s “continued financial relationship with the United States government”. These include placing the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies “under academic receivership”, enforcing a mask ban on campus and adopting a contentious definition of antisemitism. As of Friday morning, Columbia had yet to respond to these demands, though some reports suggested it was preparing to capitulate.

The implications of all this should be obvious. A group of Columbia legal scholars has pointed out that the government has not only failed to observe proper procedures under Title VI (which requires that a report on alleged breaches be submitted to House and Senate committees 30 days before any funding cut-off), but that it also “risk[s] compromising academic freedom”. Simply put, they write, “funding conditions may not impose unconstitutional burdens on First Amendment rights”.

Conservatives, though, have long seen American universities’ reliance on federal research funding and federal aid to students as a point of acute vulnerability — and also as potential leverage in some future Kulturkampf to be waged against the country’s most prestigious academic institutions. Back in 1987, for instance, Ronald Regan’s education secretary, William Bennett, who had already proved himself a doughty and enthusiastic culture warrior as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, railed against “our greedy colleges” and what he saw as their addiction to federal subsidies that allowed them to keep raising tuition fees while remaining both “under-accountable and under-productive”. 

Today, the rightwing activist and anti-DEI campaigner Christopher Rufo explicitly appeals to the so-called Bennett Hypothesis in his attempts to theorise the Trumpian assault on higher education. He recently told Ross Douthat of the New York Times that his goal is to “figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror”.

Meanwhile, faculty at Columbia are left to survey the collateral damage inflicted by the loss of that $400mn in funding — this includes research into breast cancer, the link between diabetes and dementia, and the long-term health of children born to mothers suffering from Covid. 

And across the Atlantic, some are already scenting an opportunity, with European institutions offering refuge to researchers looking to leave the US. I’d like to invite my colleague Andrew Jack, the FT’s global education editor, to reflect on this. Andrew, do you think there’s a genuine chance of a Trump-induced brain drain from American universities? Or will the huge disparities in resources between the US and Europe mean the traffic won’t ever amount to more than a trickle?

Recommended reading

• I enjoyed this FT Big Read which explains how and why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos put his skirmishes with the first Trump administration behind him and learned to love the president. 

• In the New York Times, Ryan Mac, Kate Conger and Theodore Schleifer profile a little known but nonetheless highly influential member of the Trump administration: Steve Davis, de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and a longtime consigliere to Elon Musk. 

• And for some relief from the Trumpian maelstrom, I recommend this delightful piece by the novelist, and unlikely snooker devotee, Sally Rooney about Ronnie O’Sullivan and the physics of the green baize. 

Andrew Jack responds

Thanks Jonathan. You summarise the current tensions in US higher education well, which are reflected in the muttering I now hear frequently in the corridors of academia: who would want to be a US college president?

University leaders are in an impossible position, squeezed between student protests, disgruntled faculty, aggressive donors and politicians on a witch-hunt likened to the McCarthy era. Their institutions face penalties and grant withdrawals that are arbitrary at best, and often vindictive, based on crude keyword searches, simplistic calculations and lack of due process.

Sadly, all too many seem to be considering caving and keeping quiet rather than resisting and speaking up to challenge intensifying threats to academic freedom, freedom of speech and the innovative research which has, ahem, been the true driver of making America great for decades. Their silence and compromise is only likely to empower the critics to step up attacks.

No surprise that universities elsewhere — in Europe but also Canada and China — are eyeing young talent as well as established academics with renewed enthusiasm. The problem is that few can compete with American salaries and research funding, while many also face their own rising US-style populist sentiment at home which is discouraging international recruitment.

The US still offers the legacy of a rich ecosystem centred on well-funded universities connected to donors, investors and entrepreneurs to implement their ideas. It also supports a number of right-leaning colleges from Hillsdale to the recently created University of Austin, which deliver a less job-focused, more intellectual humanities-based liberal arts education struggling to find students in other countries.

I think we will certainly see some American “star” academics emigrate, and foreign-born ones deciding to return home or seek opportunities elsewhere. Judging from the first Trump presidential term, the outflow could be relatively modest. Then again, the increased aggression and lack of counterbalancing powers of the second term suggest more will seek opportunities elsewhere this time. The US academic model is not out, but it is certainly down.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “What’s Trump’s strategy beyond tariffs?”:
“Julius Krein is correct: tariffs can be part of a broader industrial policy, but that entails a coherence currently lacking in the Trump White House (where tariffs seem to be driven more by personal animus than national development).

Even the father of American Industrial Policy, Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, was not nearly as protectionist as he is sometimes portrayed. He did want tariffs and the newly formed American republic needed them for revenue purposes at the time, given the lack of an income tax and the corresponding need to pay for national defense and war debts from the Revolutionary war. Furthermore, if one reads the report on manufacturers carefully, Hamilton was very circumspect in terms of which sectors would need to get protection, should get protection and it wasn’t all-encompassing, autarky program, across-the-board tariffs. He was very selective in the number of industries they want to help out.” — Marshall Auerback