Universities have no choice

There is no negotiating with an annihilation attempt

The Trump administration is at war with higher education in the United States.

But just because there are two sides — the White House and the schools — that doesn’t make it a balanced fight. This isn’t, as the Times put it, “Trump vs. Harvard.”

Instead, this conflict is best understood as an annihilation campaign by the authoritarian faction. Add it all up — investigations, funding cuts, raised taxes, restrictions on international students, attempts to strip accreditation — and it’s clear the administration is, first, going after all of higher education and research (Harvard, Columbia, and other elite institutions are just test cases) and, second, the goal is not subjugation. It is destruction.

Trump aims to eliminate research and teaching not directed by politics — which is to say, to destroy higher education entirely.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Linda McMahon, a former WWE executive turned secretary of education:

“In sync with the administration.”

Higher education is built on a bedrock principle of independence from political manipulation. A university “in sync” with our political leadership is nothing more than, at best, a partisan think tank, and at worst, a machine for propaganda, cronyism, and self-enrichment.

Academic freedom isn’t just about intellectual debates. It’s the free exchange of ideas unrestricted by politics, the pursuit of discovery wherever the evidence leads, and the ability to prepare students to be independent thinkers, not mindless followers of an autocratic doctrine.

Forget about “will universities resist or submit.” The only choices are “resist” or “cease to exist as independent institutions in the United States.”

All universities are (or will be) impacted

To be clear, if you follow the money, the White House is coming for your university.

Yes, Harvard may be at the forefront, but read the local news — I’d bet almost every university in your area is already financially impacted (or bracing for impact).

Whether your kids go to Stanford or North Dakota State, their educational future is on the line. The same thing is true for the next generation of cancer cures and energy research. Or for the agricultural and nutrition research done at the 106 land-grant universities. Same for the billions in economic activity that universities generate in all 50 states (over four million Americans are employed by institutions of higher education).

The cuts are happening across all areas of study. Per The Upshot, National Science Foundation (NSF) grants are down *51 percent across the board* compared to this time in past years: Trump has cut science funding to its lowest level in decades (gift link).

Grants for graduate education in STEM and in science and engineering statistics have been cut entirely. Physics is down 85 percent. Earth sciences grants have been cut by 80 percent and math and biochemical engineering both by more than 70 percent. Information and AI research are down 60 percent.

(Seriously, read the article. The infographics are striking.)

Destruction is the point

The funding cuts are just the beginning.

Look at Harvard and Columbia. They are the test cases for how the administration seeks to destroy academic freedom with every lever they have. Demands include: control over the ideological makeup of staff, students, and curricula; power over student admissions; ability to censor university leaders; surveillance over students and faculty; and now, apparently, the ability to fire university leadership. And separate from these demands, it has purged research that describes facts about the world it finds inconvenient — like climate change and health disparities and the existence of LGBTQ people.

This is a playbook we’ve seen before.

In 2019, Franklin Foer, a writer for The Atlantic, went to Hungary to chronicle the government’s attacks on the Central European University (CEU): Viktor Orbán’s war on intellect (gift link).

The article is worth reading in full, but here’s a taste:

The university is widely considered the country’s most prestigious graduate school—it’s been a training ground for presidents, diplomats, and even members of Orbán’s own inner circle. But that inner circle had turned against the institution that had nurtured it and now sought to chase the school from the country’s borders. As [CEU’s then-president and rector Michael] Ignatieff explained this to me, he shook his head. “This was not supposed to happen here,” he said.

Hungary once had some of the best universities in postcommunist Europe. But Orbán’s government has systematically crushed them. His functionaries have descended on public universities, controlling them tightly. Research funding, once determined by an independent body of academics, is now primarily dispensed by an Orbán loyalist. When I arrived in Budapest, a pro-government website had just called on students to submit the names of professors who espoused “unasked-for left-wing political opinions.” A regime-friendly weekly published an “enemies list” that included the names of dozens of academics, “mercenaries” purportedly working on behalf of a foreign cabal.

Like Pol Pot or Josef Stalin, Orbán dreams of liquidating the intelligentsia, draining the public of education, and molding a more pliant nation. But he is a state-of-the-art autocrat; he understands that he need not resort to the truncheon or the midnight knock at the door. His assault on civil society arrives in the guise of legalisms subverting the institutions that might challenge his authority.

[Read the whole article.]

The parallels with the United States are terrifying — right down to the regime loyalists cynically turning on their alma mater. (JD Vance, a Yale graduate, has openly praised Orbán’s “smart decisions” on universities. The administration is reportedly targeting the Harvard Law Review to expunge a disciplinary record for a specific White House staffer.)

The most chilling detail, however, is how this story ends: In the intervening years since that article was written, Orbán won his war.

As Ignatieff wrote in the Washington Post this week (gift link), the CEU now principally operates in exile:

We fought back as best we could. CEU rallied support from universities around the world, and Orban’s inbox was bombarded for weeks with letters from university presidents telling him to stop. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa flew in from Madrid to lend his prestige to our cause. Tens of thousands of people gathered to protest. When the huge crowd surged across Budapest’s Széchenyi Chain Bridge, heading for parliament and chanting “free universities in a free society,” everyone at CEU knew that they were ordinary Hungarians who understood we were fighting for them, too.

Nothing mattered. Orban could count on Trump’s administration to let him get away with it. After fighting for years, CEU had been forced out of Budapest.

To be clear, American universities have a much stronger hand to play than CEU did. For one, there are thousands of them — not just one. They have much deeper pockets, much stronger legal protections, and a much deeper role in American life. Their destruction, on economic and cultural terms, would be far more painful for the American people than CEU’s was for Hungarians.

And even so, it took Orbán almost a full decade to destroy CEU. It is up to all of us, as Americans, to ensure that this war on higher education is an aberration a decade from now. Meanwhile, the universities’ task is to survive this (hopefully temporary) onslaught.

How to survive the annihilation attempt

To survive as independent centers of research, discovery, teaching, and debate, universities must do everything they can to protect their core activities — above all, academic freedom — for long enough that they even have a chance to rebuild. Here’s how to do so:

1. Hang together and hold the line

Most important of all, academia must act collectively — moving and acting with one voice.

The administration succeeds by dividing and conquering, with universities one-by-one coming under the thumb of the White House. Per CNN, the administration is trying hard to negotiate with individual schools to strike “deals.” (Whether or not these negotiations are real or if it’s just spin from the White House is a different story.)

Read more: Why collective action is the only way

Sidebar: If there genuinely are universities considering cutting deals — again, I’m skeptical — they’d do well to read this piece in the Wall Street Journal on what happened to the law firms that capitulated (gift link): “After firms struck deals to avoid punitive executive orders, some big clients decided to take their business elsewhere.”

Just a guess, but I suspect the long-term reputational impact of capitulation for universities is likely to be much worse even than it was for law firms. Safer to stick with the herd.

2. Brace for the financial worst-case scenario

Worth recognizing that universities are in a real and painful bind here. I don’t want to understate the gravity of what they’re facing, especially economically. As Semafor explains, the financial math is really bad.

Because of this, creative financial retrenchment and self-defense is one of the most important survival strategies. Universities are likely going to have to make hard decisions and painful cuts to endure this moment. Similarly, private donors — and state governments — must do what they can to step up and fill (some of) the void left by the federal government.

These cuts will hopefully be temporary.

3. Fight back wherever possible

Sadly, it’s likely that not all of these attacks can be stopped, at least in the short term. But universities can and should fight back at every opportunity. Doing so can limit the damage — or even just delay and stall the harm.

Read more: A natural experiment in how to survive Trumpism

So far, in most of the places where higher education has fought back — especially in the courts — it has won. But there is a lot more to do.

Every partial victory, even every delaying action, helps get American higher education closer to surviving this.

4. Win over public opinion

Fundamentally, this battle — whether the Trump administration succeeds in destroying American higher education — is a political one. It will ultimately be decided in opinion polls and (eventually) voting booths.

Universities are going to have to get more comfortable explaining their enormous economic and social benefits to the public. Here too universities must band together, elevating political messengers from within their ranks to speak for academia as a whole.

Similarly, the rest of us must answer the call. Alumni must stand up for their schools in the streets, not just in school spirit. We need to learn to show up for protests like we do for college sporting events. Everyday Americans need to speak up for higher education and the research, technology, prosperity, and opportunity they have provided. (More on how at the bottom of this email.)

There’s a lot for universities and their supporters to work with. The stories already are just astounding. Just one, in the New York Times this week (gift link):

Ardem Patapoutian’s story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science.

He arrived in Los Angeles in 1986 at age 18 after fleeing war-torn Lebanon. He spent a year writing for an Armenian newspaper and delivering Domino’s at night to become eligible for the University of California, where he earned his undergraduate degree and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience.

He started a lab at Scripps Research in San Diego with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, discovered the way humans sense touch, and in 2021 won the Nobel Prize.

But with the Trump administration slashing spending on science, Dr. Patapoutian’s federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain has been frozen. In late February, he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to “any city, any university I want,” he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years.

[Read the whole article.]

5. Don’t conflate attacks on academia with good-faith reform conversations

Finally, more of a “don’t” than a “do.”

There are plenty of problems with higher education in the U.S. Plenty of ways schools can reform themselves to bring down costs or increase efficiency or better protect students and discourse and the free exchange of ideas.

All of these conversations are important; universities should not be complacent about the need for reform or improvement. But all of that has absolutely nothing to do with this fight. Everything the Trump administration is pursuing is about quashing speech, destroying academic freedom, and dismantling American higher education as an independent institution.

In this context, even engaging with this administration on questions of reform is either giving credence to their false pretext or distracting from the existential threat to free speech and inquiry.

Our scientific, academic, and educational system is the envy of the world. It took centuries to build. Now it is at risk of being destroyed in less than four years. If higher education survives this moment — yes, if it survives — then we can go back to arguing over how to make it better.

Are you seeing other tactics at colleges and universities near you that are helping overcome the threat? Let us know in the comments.

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What else we’re tracking:

• Trump’s partnership with Elon Musk — which allowed him to shred so much of the federal government and civil service, create an unprecedented data “panopticon” of all Americans, and build towards a techno-autocracy — has now imploded in spectacular fashion. This is a remarkable and significant development, we’ll have more thoughts on it soon.

• In a major turnaround, the administration backed off an illegal demand for data on millions of SNAP recipients following a lawsuit by Protect Democracy and others.

• The pardon power is not as absolute as Trump believes it is. Read this excellent piece in The New Republic by Grant Tudor and Kim Wehle on how the courts have been quietly checking the president’s power to overrule the justice system.

• Congress hammered Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought on the administration’s erroneous claims of a sweeping power to withhold funds: “You are living in a legal and historical fiction.” (Read the real history of impoundments here.)

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What you can do to help:

Want to stand up for science in your state?

First, learn about the critical research that the NSF funds in your state here.

Second, sign on to Stand Up for Science’s open letter condemning Trump’s assault on scientific research here.

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Your moment of collective courage:

This weatherman speaking honestly and plainly, on the air, about the impact these attacks on science have for weather forecasting.

More of this please.

Are there other examples of collective courage that are giving you hope? Let us know in the comments or on social media with the hashtag #CollectiveCourage.