The Unmaking of the American University
For Johns Hopkins, the first shot from the Trump Administration came on February 28, 2025. That day, a press release from the Department of Justice arrived, saying that the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would be visiting ten campuses, including Hopkins, to investigate potential violations of federal law. Nobody ever visited the university, but subsequent shots had far more severe consequences. The federal government terminated eight hundred million dollars in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Hopkins had been administering; this led the university to lay off more than two thousand employees. The slowdown and termination of scientific-research grants at Hopkins resulted in an additional financial hit of five hundred million dollars last year.
At Brown, administrators learned that their grant funding was ending from an April 3rd article in the Daily Caller, the conservative paper co-founded by Tucker Carlson. “EXCLUSIVE,” the headline read. “Trump Admin Freezes Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Another Ivy League School.” Later that day, the government stopped payment on all of its research grants to Brown, amounting to five hundred and ten million dollars. Princeton got its notification on March 31st: more than two hundred million dollars in research grants had been suspended. The Trump Administration was simultaneously sending a series of letters to almost every college and university in the country, beginning on February 14th. The first one ordered all schools to end their D.E.I. programs. “It said you can’t discriminate,” the president of Vassar, Elizabeth H. Bradley, told me. “We don’t. We didn’t use the term ‘D.E.I.’ ” Last spring, Bradley recalled, a new letter from the Trump Administration seemed to arrive roughly once a week, warning its thousands of recipients to stop doing something the Administration considered impermissible.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the degree of shock moves like these caused in American élite higher education. One could ask: How did universities not see the assault coming? In the early weeks of 2025, it had been little more than a year since the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned, after facing harsh questioning by members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about antisemitism on campus. Beginning in the first week of his second term, Donald Trump signed a raft of executive orders targeting higher education, by, among other things, ordering investigations into D.E.I. programs and antisemitism on college campuses. And hadn’t the new Vice-President, J. D. Vance, given a widely noticed address at a conservative convention in 2021 which he titled “Universities Are the Enemy”? But, from the universities’ point of view, conservatives’ unhappiness with them is eternal—in one form or another, it goes back more than a century—and it had never escalated to the level of an all-out war, including during Trump’s first Presidential term. It seemed inconceivable that the hostile rhetoric needed to be taken literally.
Now the compact between the universities and the federal government has been broken, and maybe not just temporarily. The Trump Administration has deployed a brutally effective, previously unused technique for getting these institutions’ full attention: suspending their funds, even those appropriated by Congress and legally committed to in contracts. The Trump Administration is unusual in its disregard for the law, rough way of doing business, and heedlessness about the effects of its actions. Still, it isn’t completely out of touch with political reality. These actions are not nearly as unpopular as universities think they should be. The heart of this tragedy is that universities believe themselves to be devoted to the public good but fall far short of the level of public support they need. How did that happen?
The leading American universities are among the oldest institutions in the country—some of them are older than the country. They couldn’t have survived for so long if they hadn’t changed many times over the years, in response to internal and external forces. If one wanted to designate a few key moments as representing the equivalent of the sleek black slab in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” guiding humans to their next great developmental leap, maybe the most significant for universities would be in the late nineteenth century, with their embrace of research as a central activity. A generation of American university presidents went to Germany, where the research university originated, to imbibe the new ideal; they were, as the philosopher Josiah Royce wrote, in 1891, “a generation that dreamed of nothing but the German University.” The primary purpose of the university would henceforth be the pursuit of pure knowledge. This redefined what it meant to be a professor—the job now conferred extraordinary freedom, which could lead to advances, especially in science, that would benefit the whole of society. The advent of the American research university gave birth to formally organized academic disciplines, tenure, and modern research labs. These are universities’ operating systems, not publicly visible but underlying everything that happens.
The black slab reappeared during the Second World War, when the federal government began substantially funding universities. Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who’d spent the war years organizing the government’s defense research projects, including the invention of the atomic bomb, wrote a long memo to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 suggesting that the U.S. should launch a major new initiative to fund research at universities, which would be controlled by scientists with little direct government supervision. Out of this came the National Science Foundation, in 1950.
Bush’s rationale for this endeavor was partly the promise of medical advances and mainly the coming Cold War. American scientists of his generation were aware that European academic immigrants—Hitler’s gift to the United States—had been crucial to the development of the atomic bomb, and they believed that the U.S. would have to enhance its ability to train scientists and sponsor their research in order to compete with the Soviet Union. There was a larger social vision attached. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard and a close collaborator of Bush’s, wrote a series of fervid, utopian essays for The Atlantic Monthly during the Second World War, in which he proposed that universities could not only conduct government-funded research but also liberate the United States from any form of inherited privilege. This was urgently necessary, because the Soviet Union was telling the world that it had created a classless society. American universities would draw their students from all regions and all classes (the SAT, which Conant was instrumental in promoting, was supposed to enable this project) and educate them at minimal cost. In return, their alumni would devote themselves to the national democratic project and resist any impulse to pass on money or position to their children.
“Watson, yet again an important piece of evidence inexplicably burns up.”
In the early postwar years, there was tension between people like Bush and Conant, who focussed on favoring a handful of the country’s colleges and universities with research funds, and the leaders of the broad expanse of public universities, who wanted to develop the world’s first mass higher-education system. The person who most effectively pulled together the élite and democratic strains in higher education was Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, who built a three-tier system—research universities, state colleges, and community colleges—that was meant to educate the entire youth of the state and to direct them to their appropriate socioeconomic destinations, tuition-free. But it took hardly any time for the University of California to come under attack—first, from the left, via Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, which didn’t like its bureaucratic aspect and its rich diet of government defense contracts, and then, far more consequentially, from the right. Ronald Reagan began his political career with a successful race for governor of California in 1966, in which he promised to punish the university for being too tolerant of its student radicals. One of his early moves in office was to support the University of California Board of Regents’ ousting of Kerr.
“The professors are the enemy,” President Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger in 1972, more than a decade before J. D. Vance was born. “Write that on the blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.” Still, Kissinger, like a number of Nixon’s advisers, was himself an academic. And Nixon had declared a war on cancer, which was waged mainly in government-funded research labs at universities. Inside universities, the tide of the New Left, rising since the early nineteen-sixties, had begun to recede. A shift in student interest into business careers was under way. It wasn’t as if peace reigned between universities and the federal government, but full-scale conflict seemed inconceivable: the two sides needed each other.
Knowing what we know now, the postwar years look different, as if a trap was being laid: universities, especially élite universities, were subject to recurrent animosity from the political right, even as they were becoming ever more dependent on the federal government. In Delmore Schwartz’s 1937 short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the main character imagines himself in a theatre, watching a movie of the courtship that preceded his parents’ horrible marriage. “I stood up in the theatre and shouted: ‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it,’ ” he says. Would it even be possible to feel regret while replaying the establishment of research agencies, the arrival of federal scholarships and loans for college students, the government’s efforts to eliminate discrimination on campuses, and the universities’ role in inventing lifesaving drugs and launching the technology industry? You’d have to be awfully coldhearted to see these developments as potentially problematic, and hardly anybody in higher education did.
When I was a little boy, my grandfather, a pediatrician in the blue-collar town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, sometimes drove me to Princeton. We’d stand on Nassau Street and drink in the magnificence of the campus, as if it stood for everything great, and also distant, in the world. Today, Princeton is even more magnificent, with beautiful modern buildings scattered among the Colonial and Gothic ones, and elegant stores lining the street across from the campus. Compared with the time of my early visits, Princeton is far more prosperous. After decades of successful fund-raising and other forms of institutional overachievement, the university has an annual budget of more than three billion dollars, and an endowment of more than thirty-five billion dollars. It’s also at once far more open (it’s no longer the province of white Protestant men) and far more closed (it accepts less than five per cent of its undergraduate applicants). Officially, Princeton costs more than ninety thousand dollars a year; students from families with incomes of up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars pay no tuition. Still, the student body comes overwhelmingly from the upper middle class or higher, with the top one per cent heavily represented.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, a legal scholar who, for the past dozen years, has been the president of Princeton, is well aware of these contradictions. “You have institutions that are élite, that can’t let everybody in. We feel pressure for excellence and democratization,” Eisgruber said. “It’s O.K., but it makes things hard. We want to do research of unsurpassed quality, and be open to people from all backgrounds. We make a point of bringing in community-college and military transfers. There’s a tension between these visions. I don’t have a good answer for it.” Early in his presidency, he said, he had put a great deal of time to working on Princeton’s mission statement, a short version of which is carved into a granite circle embedded on the ground in the heart of the campus: “Princeton in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” The sincerity of the statement doesn’t entirely dispel its cognitive dissonance.
Princeton’s trajectory is typical of the leading private universities. Collectively, they have vastly expanded their reputations and their geographic reach. The Ivy League is now, arguably, the Ivy League of Black America, the Ivy League of star squash players from Pakistan, and the Ivy League of ambitious young conservatives. Many of its students wind up going into high-paying private-sector jobs, especially in technology, finance, and consulting. The over-all picture, at least from the outside, is of fantastically rich and powerful institutions that, while insisting on their moral superiority, hand out tickets to futures of private wealth and prominence, which go mostly to the children of families from the top of the income distribution. Michael Young, the British sociologist who popularized the term “meritocracy” back in 1958, did so to warn that a formal system of selection by the education system would eventually become the object of violent populist rage. Young’s peculiar, and also prescient, dystopian novel “The Rise of the Meritocracy” ends with a murderous uprising against the meritocrats in 2033.
Universities’ vulnerability is internal, as well as external. Schools require the support not only of the federal government but also of faculty, students, alumni, parents, donors, and trustees. As in the fable of the blind men and the elephant, they don’t all have hold of the same thing. “It’s tremendously hard,” Eisgruber said. “They all see the university in a different way. For some, it’s an athletic team. For others, it’s a lab.”
Holden Thorp, a former university president—he was the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 2008 to 2013, and now supervises six publications of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—gave me a more cynical version of this sentiment: “If you’re a non-Jewish administrator, like me, you’ve been to so many Shabbat dinners at Hillel that you can say the kiddush. And then you set up a Palestinian-studies center. And, when you’re talking to conservative alumni, you say, ‘Why don’t you get more involved with the business school and the athletic program?’ It was like Willy Brandt promising the East and West Germans that they’d each get what they wanted after unification. The reason is, we couldn’t afford to lose any friends, and we don’t want public controversies. We kept telling people what they wanted to hear, to keep them involved.” The pursuit of U.S. News & World Report rankings, which demands higher per-capita spending on students; the practice of investing endowments in illiquid assets like hedge funds, which generates higher returns (that get spent, not saved) but keeps the money out of easy reach; the ever more competitive market for academic superstars, which means reducing the course loads of the highest-paid faculty members—each of these has gunned the engine a little more, making universities bigger and more expensive to operate, without producing much in the way of rainy-day funds in case something goes very wrong.
When Conant was laying out his vision for higher education in postwar America, he noted that his ideal future citizen “will favor public education, truly universal educational opportunity at every level. He will be little concerned with the future of private education.” In fact, private universities are far more dependent on gifts from donors and close ties to private companies than they used to be, and the leading public universities have developed similar ties to the market economy. And both, private and public, are deeply intertwined with the federal government. Like the big banks in 2008, they combine being rich with being unable to withstand a sudden, major financial setback.
During Barack Obama’s first term, the Department of Education intervened forcefully in the operations of universities, announcing that hundreds of them were under investigation for their handling of sexual-assault allegations. Citing Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, the Obama Administration mandated that universities institute specific new procedures for responding to assault accusations. These were somewhat controversial even inside universities, because they were heavily weighted against the accused, and because the Administration indicated that noncompliance could ultimately lead to the loss of federal funds. During those years, many universities were also establishing D.E.I. offices and enacting requirements that applicants for faculty positions produce statements about their commitment to diversity. Conservatives got a picture of universities moving rapidly to the left, and of a Democratic Administration using the power of the state to encourage this.
A dramatic decline of trust in universities among Republicans began during this period, and so did significant decreases, from a low baseline, in the conservative presence on élite-university faculties, especially in the humanities and the social sciences. Gallup polls that measure the public’s trust in institutions have found that, between 2015 and 2024, Republicans’ trust in universities fell from fifty-six per cent to twenty per cent. (Among Democrats, it fell from sixty-eight per cent to fifty-six per cent.) Charlie Kirk established Turning Point USA chapters on hundreds of campuses and began targeting professors whom he considered unacceptably left-wing. The Heritage Foundation launched Heritage Action, a more openly political offshoot. During the Biden Administration, officials from Trump’s first term created think tanks such as America First Legal, the America First Policy Institute, and the Center for Renewing America, which made plans to take a more aggressive approach toward higher education. “Universities are one of the only issues that unites all elements of conservatism—immigration, academic radicalism, anti-wokeness,” Gregory Conti, a political-science professor at Princeton, said. “An attack could have come from any Republican official.”
Lulled by the first Trump Administration’s relative quiescence toward them, universities did not fully appreciate the potency of the conservative mood. But one can get a sense of it from a talk that Representative Virginia Foxx, then the chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, gave at the American Enterprise Institute in the summer of 2024. Foxx said that Trump had told her “he didn’t think the federal government should be involved in education at all,” and that she had replied, “ ‘Yes, sir. The word ‘education’ is not in the Constitution as a responsibility of the federal government. That is my position. However, I am not in charge. If I were, I’d get us out of education in a heartbeat.’ ”
“And this is the place where I get along pretty well without you for most of the day.”
Inside universities, political conflict usually entails various factions disagreeing about which rules and tactics to use in pursuit of causes that everyone agrees on. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza made for a far more difficult case, because core groups within the university disagreed on the issue at hand—Zionism—as fundamentally and passionately as people can disagree. Immediately, bitter controversies broke out, and it became impossible to unite all the universities’ constituencies in their defense. And, for outsiders, the period after October 7th put post-colonial ideology on very public display—seeming to confirm conservatives’ idea that élite universities’ primary commitment is to a radical version of social justice.
“The moment I knew we had reached the point when we weren’t going to be able to bob and weave our way out of it, as we’d been doing since the nineteen-eighties, was the hearing,” Holden Thorp said—referring to the education committee’s hearing on December 5, 2023, when Representative Elise Stefanik asked the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. whether they would tolerate calls for the genocide of the Jewish people on their campuses. All three presidents replied that it depends on the context. “What they said was very legalistic,” Thorp noted. “You could see it running out of gas. It was uncoupled from the emotions of the moment.” Clips from the December 5th hearing provoked outrage; of the seven university presidents who testified before the education committee during the 2023-24 academic year, only one is still in office.
By many accounts, Josh Gruenbaum, who came into the Administration from KKR, a giant private-equity firm, was key to devising the specific tactic of suspending research grants. Gruenbaum, an ally of Elon Musk’s, was appointed commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, a unit within the General Services Administration, the government’s central purchasing agency. An article published last March in Jewish Insider said that, “as Gruenbaum sees it, why should the federal government enter into lucrative contracts with partners who are out of step with the Trump administration’s priorities?”
Today, Gruenbaum is on a team assigned to implement Trump’s plan to rebuild Gaza. As is typical in this Administration, it has never been clear who is in charge of the confrontation with universities, so multiple departments, a variety of arriving and departing officials, and loose internal alliances have vied with one another for control. The Administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism has focussed on its eponymous issue, but the White House, under the direction of Stephen Miller, has paid more attention to dismantling D.E.I. and trans rights. The White House has supervised negotiations with universities—a number of which have made settlements with the government in order to have their funding restored. President Trump himself appears, as usual, most interested in forcing specific enemies to bend to his will and extracting large financial penalties from them, the amounts seemingly plucked out of the air.
Penn, Trump’s alma mater, was the first university to sign a settlement, on July 1, 2025. The Administration restored a hundred and seventy-five million dollars in suspended grants; Penn promised to ban trans women from participating in women’s athletics and to revoke their previous titles and awards. Columbia, the site of the country’s largest and most publicized pro-Palestine protests, settled soon afterward. (I have been a Columbia faculty member since 2003, and I was co-chair of the university’s antisemitism task force.) The government agreed to resume payment of Columbia’s scientific-research grants and to end its investigation of the university for alleged violations of civil-rights laws, and Columbia agreed to pay the government two hundred million dollars—the largest cash settlement thus far—and to appoint a “resolution monitor” to oversee its compliance with these terms. The settlement also contained specific provisions about academic matters; under one, Columbia agreed that the provost’s office would conduct a review of several programs, including the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.
Perhaps the Administration’s biggest tactical mistake was a long letter to Harvard that went out on Friday, April 11, 2025, signed by three officials from three different departments and filled with demands. (According to the Times, Administration officials later said that the letter had been sent in error.) It did not bother to say, in the case of every demand, what laws the Administration was accusing Harvard of violating; some of the demands—like a ban on admitting international students who are “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence”—were flamboyant policy preferences. That gave Harvard an opening to sue the Administration for, among other things, violating its First Amendment rights. In September, a federal judge in Boston ruled in Harvard’s favor, saying that the Administration’s actions amounted to “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion.” The Trump Administration has appealed the decision, but, for now, Harvard’s funding has been restored.
Harvard, however, is both resisting and negotiating. Trump has announced several times that a settlement with the university is imminent; on February 2nd, hours after the Times published a story that the negotiations were proceeding in Harvard’s favor, he demanded a billion-dollar penalty from the university. Harvard so far has not issued a public response. The university evidently can’t afford to walk away.
After Columbia, the next university to settle with the Trump Administration was Brown, on July 30th. Brown has a veteran president, the economist Christina H. Paxson, who has been in office since 2012. She negotiated a peaceful end to campus protesters’ encampment in the spring of 2024. But when the Administration cut off funding to Brown, last April, Brown did not, like Harvard, receive poorly drafted threats that it could take to federal court. It also has a medical school and a public-health school, both of which are heavily dependent on federal grants. In a statement announcing the settlement, Paxson said that the funding freeze “posed enormous challenges for Brown’s research mission and financial stability.”
During negotiations with the Administration, Brown maintained control of what is taught and researched there. The heart of the agreement, however, is similar to Columbia’s: Brown’s grants were restored, and government investigations of the university ended; in return, Brown agreed to pay fifty million dollars over ten years to “workforce-development organizations” in Rhode Island. The agreement included terms on how the university will handle antisemitism and D.E.I.—Brown promised to undertake measures such as keeping trans women out of women’s locker rooms and making special recruiting efforts at Jewish schools—but these don’t apply to teaching and research.
After the settlement was signed, Trump put up a triumphant post on Truth Social: “Woke is officially DEAD at Brown.” A few weeks later, the Administration published a ten-point “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” and asked nine universities, including Brown, to sign it. This was another of the Administration’s mistakes: the compact came from the Department of Education, which isn’t a major dispenser of grants, so it combined a lot to dislike (such as “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”) with a low cost to resistance. Brown was the second university, after M.I.T., to announce that it would not comply. That gave Paxson some political credibility with opponents of the settlement. A few weeks later, she sent a lengthy message to alumni, saying that she would like to reduce Brown’s dependency on federal grants. Reducing it wouldn’t come close to eliminating it. Brown gets eighty-three per cent of its research funding from the federal government; the number among its peer institutions typically isn’t much lower. Nobody, it seems, can do without the grants. After Brown, the University of Virginia, Cornell, and Northwestern settled; U.C.L.A., like Harvard, is negotiating. (After failing to extract a billion-dollar fine from U.C.L.A., the Trump Administration recently sued the university, alleging civil-rights violations.)
At least a portion of the conservative world has exulted over having forced the universities to submit. One of the most floridly triumphant is Christopher Rufo, the Seattle-based provocateur who’s helped lead attacks on universities. “We’re renegotiating the relationship between the university and the state, the university and the wider society,” Rufo said. “The universities violated the fundamental compact. They forgot it ever existed. We’re having a debate that only one side sees clearly.” He recalled, “When we launched a campaign to decapitate the leadership of Harvard, I was astonished. They were catastrophically ill-equipped for a political fight.” In a month, he said, Claudine Gay, the Harvard president who’d resigned in 2024, “gave one comment to the Boston Globe. I thought, What are these people doing?”
It wasn’t simply that the universities were bad at politics. Many presidents were aware that their trustees, the legal owners of private universities, would not have supported resistance. “It begins with trustees. Our job is to be fiduciaries,” Andrew Bursky, a businessman who is the chair of the board at Washington University, told me. Universities, he said, have not kept up their relationships with politicians: “We were engaged with the community, but not with the state legislature or the Feds. Like, zero. We need to build relationships. If we don’t get it fixed, it’s going to be fixed for us.” Faculties were not united, either. Long ago, Clark Kerr remarked that research universities are collections of individual entrepreneurs; this applies particularly to star scientific researchers, who are responsible for funding their own labs and can move them to another university.
At some universities, a divide has opened between grant-dependent scientists who support settling with the Trump Administration and grant-free humanists who don’t. Grant-funded science is far more expensive than most other university research; it involves elaborately equipped labs, staffs of graduate students and postdocs, animals used as research subjects, and considerable paperwork requirements. Universities typically have no way of keeping these labs going without multiyear grants; an abrupt halt, like the Trump Administration’s, can be disastrous.
When the attack on higher education came, Christopher L. Eisgruber was serving as the chair of the board of the Association of American Universities, an organization whose members are the leading recipients of research funding. Eisgruber publicly disagreed with Columbia’s decision to settle with the Administration, but a more conservative wing, informally headed by Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, and Andrew D. Martin, the chancellor of Washington University, was against the idea of the organization taking a stand. As a result, the A.A.U. made no statement. Diermeier told me, “There’s often an inability to get out of the bubble. The presidents are not all aligned. One group, of which I have been an advocate, believes that higher education has drifted away from its core purpose—that it has become politicized. And, then, there are other influential voices who think there’s nothing wrong, that it’s just a political takeover. That position leads to the resistance language.”
What if a university president had taken the conservative critique seriously long before Trump recaptured the White House—would it have made a difference? We have a natural experiment to test that question: Johns Hopkins. And we know what happened: it didn’t help.
Hopkins was founded, in 1876, as the first American university designed to emulate the German research-university model from the start. The only academic ever to become President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, got his Ph.D. in political science from Hopkins in its early years. Today, Hopkins is the largest private employer in Maryland, and the largest recipient of federal research funds in the country, thanks to its medical complex and its Applied Physics Laboratory, a defense contractor situated twenty miles away from its main campus. Its undergraduate college is small and heavily skewed toward premeds.
Ronald J. Daniels, a Canadian law professor, became president of Hopkins in 2009. When Trump returned to the White House, Daniels appeared to be riding high. One of Hopkins’s alumni, Michael Bloomberg, has given the university more than four billion dollars during Daniels’s tenure. Its school of public health is now named after Bloomberg; his donations allowed Hopkins to permanently adopt need-blind undergraduate admissions, among other things. The peak of student protest during Daniels’s presidency came not during Israel’s war on Gaza but in 2019, in response to his decision to establish a campus police force; in 2024, he helped persuade students who’d set up an encampment to take it down. In recent years, Hopkins created a school of government in D.C. and the S.N.F. Agora Institute, which is aimed at strengthening democracy and will soon move into a new headquarters on the university’s Baltimore campus.
In 2021, Daniels published a book titled “What Universities Owe Democracy.” In it, he calls on universities to do more “civic education” and complains that the segmentation of academic life makes this difficult to accomplish, which in higher education is conservative-coded. Daniels went on to speak about the themes of the book at the American Enterprise Institute, in D.C., which led to a formal partnership between A.E.I. and Hopkins—a sign that Daniels wanted to reach out to conservatives in a highly visible way. (A.E.I. has started an initiative to influence universities in a conservative direction.) Daniels has endorsed the idea of hiring more conservative faculty members, and he was one of thirty university presidents who attended a conference in Dallas last spring called Restoring Trust in Higher Education, organized by Diermeier and Martin.
Even so, without warning, the Administration terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to Hopkins. After a few months, just as mysteriously, some of the grant flow was switched back on, but the university’s research funding is still down by forty-three per cent. This is in line with decreases nationally, especially in grants for health research, but cuts of that magnitude are particularly devastating at Hopkins because of its large medical complex. It’s the top recipient of N.I.H. grants in the country.
Last July, America First Legal filed a complaint against Hopkins with the Justice Department, saying that D.E.I. practices at its medical school violated the law and that its undergraduate-admissions office was not complying with the Supreme Court decision abolishing affirmative action. But there have been no obvious consequences of this complaint. So far, Hopkins hasn’t asked to negotiate a settlement with the government, and it hasn’t been asked. Only a few faculty members, all in the humanities, have written critically about Daniels’s handling of the situation. “My sense is that the university is trying to keep a low profile,” Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Hopkins who formerly served as provost, told me. “If you’re a university president and you look around, those who have stuck their heads out of the foxhole have been shot. The rational response is to keep your head down.”
Theodore J. Iwashyna, a doctor and researcher who is on the faculty of Hopkins’s medical school and its public-health school, does federally funded research on recovery from acute diseases like pneumonia and sepsis. Iwashyna described his life as a grant recipient, up to now, as having been similar to that of a small-business owner who has a trusted local banker. Researchers like him produce a grant proposal (these can run to as long as five hundred pages), wait a few months, and get a score from a panel of experts. (Another medical researcher told me that she and her colleagues are scrubbing words from their proposals that might be triggering to officials in this Administration, like “disparities” and “equitable.”) If all goes well, they eventually get a document called a Notice of Grant Award, which Iwashyna compared to a letter of credit, giving the researcher enough certainty about funding to be able to keep working.
Hopkins covers the costs of the front end of this process; what makes this worthwhile is that the federal agencies Iwashyna works with make multiyear commitments. He gave a vivid example of how harmful the recent slowdown in grant-making has been: a Hopkins pulmonologist submitted a proposal to the N.I.H. to test his hypothesis that a widely used device called a pulse oximeter, which clips onto a patient’s finger and measures the oxygen level of the blood, might regularly produce inaccurate readings. This is not a minor question—just about every patient in an intensive-care unit is outfitted with a pulse oximeter. The proposal got an unusually strong score from an expert panel last June, but the Notice of Grant Award still has not arrived. Nationally, N.I.H. grants to universities are down by more than ninety per cent in the current fiscal year; during that time, the National Cancer Institute hasn’t made a single grant.
Iwashyna and his colleagues worry about the future. Who’s going to want to go into medical research as a career? With large cuts in admission to Ph.D. programs at many universities—the intake of Ph.D. candidates at Hopkins’s public-health school is down by fifty per cent—how can people who remain interested in research even get the opportunity? “This Administration has introduced multiple levels of stochastic dysfunction,” Iwashyna told me. “Everything is brittle, nothing is working. Then they pick individual institutions to bully. Part of how bullies function is to make sure the others are too scared to intervene. . . . It disturbs me. I was a nerdy kid in the nineteen-eighties. I recognize these tactics from the folks I knew growing up who valued humiliation.” He mentioned Biff Tannen, the bully in the “Back to the Future” movies. “That fucking guy is running the country right now.”
Trump could do much more damage to élite universities during the rest of his Presidential term—or he could lose interest, because it has become more gratifying to remove heads of state. That would not solve the universities’ problem of thick dependency on the government and thin political support. Even in deep-blue districts, where universities are often the largest employers, it’s hard to find political candidates who are making the defense of higher education a central theme in their campaigns. Meanwhile, conservatives in Oklahoma, Utah, Florida, Kansas, Iowa, and Texas have attempted to intervene in the operations of their public universities, through measures such as influencing curricula, increasing teaching loads, and restricting tenure.
When it comes to higher education, the house of conservatism has many mansions. One is filled with burn-it-down insurrectionists, like Rufo, who see universities primarily as enemy territory, a stronghold of the left. Another is focussed on making a university education cost less and teach job skills, not the liberal arts—hence the Trump Administration’s efforts to eliminate student loans in fields with a low “return on investment.” Yet another is made up of the small cohort of conservative professors. They may be pleased that universities are at last paying attention to their complaints. At a recent convention of Heterodox Academy, an association of professors who feel uneasy with what they describe as the ideological orthodoxy on campuses, one of the group’s co-founders, Jonathan Haidt, led the audience in a loud chant: “We told you so!” But these various factions are not always aligned.
A book by the political scientists Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn (both conservatives), published just before Trump’s first term, reported that “many conservative academics feel more at home in the progressive academy than in the Republican Party.” Conservative academics are often traditionalists in fields like political philosophy and English literature, whose most cherished cause is restoring great-books courses and the study of topics such as aesthetics and diplomatic history. Their discomfort with the universities where they work is not just about wokeness; it can also be about the overwhelming careerism of the students.
Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton who is probably the most prominent member of this group, told me that one year he and the philosopher Cornel West had been asked to make a presentation to incoming first-year students and their parents about the benefits of a liberal-arts education. “There we were, in the biggest lecture hall on campus,” George recalled. “Eisgruber was there. I started and said, ‘We want to have your children use these years to become deeper, more independent thinkers. Our classes will unsettle you. You’ll be challenged.’ I could tell I was not making the sale—the parents weren’t buying it. They were thinking about Morgan Stanley. Then Cornel came on and said, ‘Your children have come here to learn how to die. You have to learn how to die before you can learn how to live.’ I saw one dad turn to another and say, ‘Seventy-eight thousand a year for this?’ ”
Most of the conservative academics I spoke to were not just deeply unhappy with Trump’s having cut off scientific-research funding; they were also concerned about how the conservative cause of the moment, viewpoint diversity in faculty hiring, might be implemented. Their objection is partly on principle—conservatives almost always oppose affirmative action, so, to be consistent, they oppose “affirmative action for conservatives”—and partly practical. Renaming D.E.I. offices, adopting “institutional neutrality” policies, and removing flamboyant social-justice messaging from departmental websites is easy. Changing faculty hiring practices is nearly impossible. An essential feature of research universities is that schools and departments have autonomy over employment. Even a university president who publicly endorses viewpoint diversity, which not many do, would have a hard time putting it into place. Robert Doar, the president of A.E.I., told me that he had pressed his higher-education team to endorse viewpoint diversity. “I said, ‘I don’t get it. I make the final decisions here, but a president who overrides a department’s decision is violating academic freedom?’ They told me, ‘No, it’ll never go.’ I said, ‘I guess you can’t fight city hall.’ ”
Very rarely, university presidents who are concerned about ideological dogmatism in a department temporarily take control of it—but the standard move to bring more conservatives on board is to establish an entirely new part of the university. Hopkins has done this with the S.N.F. Agora Institute, which recently hired a conservative economist, Peter Arcidiacono, a longtime opponent of affirmative action, away from Duke. Washington University has created a public-health school; its new dean, Sandro Galea, came from Boston University, and told me that he specifically wanted to work in a red state. He said that his school will, among other things, be empathetic toward people “whose primary interface with the world is faith.” More than a dozen public universities were ordered by their state legislatures to teach civics courses, meant to be comfortable places for conservative students and faculty.
These are not wholesale changes. Conservatives’ fundamental problem is that they cannot compete with major universities, in the way that conservative political candidates can compete with liberals in election campaigns. Many of America’s leading corporations are less than a hundred years old; few of its leading research universities are. To acquire a large tract of land in a population center, put up dozens of buildings, create a full suite of academic departments, and add the professional schools and hospitals that support the universities’ scholarly activities economically—it’s all but impossible. At a Heritage Foundation conference last year, participants mused about building up Christendom College (in Front Royal, Virginia) or College of the Ozarks (in Point Lookout, Missouri) into positions of national prominence, but that’s improbable in any of our lifetimes. Colleges recently constituted on the principle of being anti-woke—like the New College of Florida, which was overhauled by Governor Ron DeSantis to have a conservative bent, and the University of Austin, which began enrolling students in 2024—are small and shaky. Because most students and their parents see college as a path to employment, ideological upstarts have limited appeal.
What’s more plausible is that research universities in the Sun Belt—Emory, Vanderbilt, Tulane, the University of Texas—will rise to the top tier, as California universities did after the Second World War. Of the original nine universities the Administration asked to sign its proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” Vanderbilt and U.T. were two of the few that did not entirely reject it. Vanderbilt has announced that it is going to open campuses in New York City, San Francisco, and West Palm Beach. But these universities will still be a long way from a collective conservative paradise. They will simply present a modified version of the familiar picture, with professors and students who may be more conservative than their counterparts at other universities but who are still to the left of alumni, donors, employers, trustees, and money-providing politicians.
Conservatives are likely never going to be able to create universities they approve of that are anywhere near the level of the universities some of them would like to destroy. But that does not mean that universities are going to get beyond the crisis of the past couple of years intact—that a truly effective collective resistance will emerge, or that the moment will pass, or that the public will become aware of how valuable the universities are. Back in the days when the system that is now under attack was being invented, Clark Kerr gave a lecture at Harvard in which he posed this question: “How may the contributions of the élite be made clear to the egalitarians, and how may an aristocracy of intellect justify itself to all men?” People who spend their lives in universities think they know the answer—medical breakthroughs, opportunities for future leaders from humble backgrounds, the expansion of knowledge—but the public, evidently, isn’t persuaded. Can the government, even in different hands, forget what it has learned in the past year about how easy it is to get universities to give it the deference that businesses give their largest customers? It seems unlikely.
The government has many weapons in its arsenal, which don’t require the presence of Trump in the White House to be used. Federal research funding amounts to more than sixty billion dollars nationally, much of which goes to the top universities; the total value of outstanding government student-loan debt is well over a trillion dollars, and this affects nearly every college and university. What if more conditions were attached to those loans? Optimists can point to some partial political victories for the academy in the past year: the Administration moderated a proposed increase in the endowment tax, and Congress passed an increased budget for the N.I.H. (which doesn’t guarantee that the Administration will release the money). Fundamentally, though, what has seemed to universities to be a rock-solid set of arrangements isn’t fully protected by law.
The premise of the great American universities today is a difficult one, to say the least: that they can be fantastically selective (but in a completely fair way), offer their students and faculty access to the most prestigious and well-rewarded precincts of American society, relentlessly increase their costs, assure the world that they are devoted to public service and social justice, and win the public’s grateful appreciation for being among our country’s most successful institutions. Trump, with his unerring talent for exploiting vulnerabilities in the liberal order, took full advantage of these contradictions and has caused enormous damage. It is going to be hard to undo. The golden era of autonomy for universities is probably not going to return. ♦