Why This Assault on the Universities is More Serious than Earlier Ones

Although it has faded from the headlines in the last few weeks, amidst the endless tsunami of Trump news, the administration’s assault on elite universities has not abated. This week, it formally terminated nearly all its research contracts with Harvard (previously, it had only frozen them). Meanwhile, the budget bill making its way through Congress would raise the tax on elite university endowments by a massive amount. Harvard’s annual bill would jump from $56.6 million to an estimated $849.3 million, and Princeton’s, from $39 million to $586.4 million, or about 17 percent of the university’s operating budget.

My colleague Greg Conti has a new piece out in Compact analyzing “the Trump II approach to higher education.” It consists mostly of a close reading of Linda McMahon’s recent public letter to Harvard, which justified the administration’s attacks. Despite the Education Secretary’s embarrassingly crude prose, Greg, one of the most thoughtful conservatives I know, says that her “broad critique… does have some merit.” Nonetheless, he concludes with deservedly harsh words about the wanton destruction of research establishments: “Waging an open-ended war with no clear end articulated and with what sometimes seems like a nihilistic glee at bringing what are, for all their faults, some of the country’s most valuable institutions to the abyss does not fit well with the broader project of American renewal to which the Trump administration claims to be devoted.”

I wish I could agree with Greg that the excesses of the administration’s campaign stem mostly from ignorance and impulse. If so, there would be a greater chance that someone with sense might quickly curtail them. But I think there are other, more dangerous factors at play here.

The principal role of America’s leading universities was, for a long time, an institutional one: to reproduce a social elite. Intellectual matters were secondary. Today, we worry about students not learning enough because of AI, but there is nothing new about Ivy League students paying precious little attention to their classes. For Harvard undergraduates like Franklin Roosevelt, social life and extracurricular activities mattered far more than formal studies—his greatest (and unfulfilled) ambition in college was to join the prestigious Porcellian Club. The USA did not possess real research universities until the foundation of Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago in the late nineteenth century. It was only in the twentieth century—and especially after World War II—that schools like Harvard grew into the research behemoths they are today and developed a serious intellectual profile. It was only under figures like Harvard President James Conant that the Ivy League started prizing intellectual capacity above all other factors in undergraduate admissions and insisting that all students make classes a serious priority.

Before Trump, the most prominent conservative attacks on elite universities mostly involved their intellectual role. For critics from Joe McCarthy and William F. Buckley, through Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew to Allan Bloom and other foes of “political correctness,” the universities deserved censure because the faculty were left-wing, advocated left-wing ideas, were abandoning the Western canon and even, thanks to the lure of “French theory,” supposedly contesting traditional notions of truth. But a social elitist like Buckley had no desire to diminish the place of his alma mater, Yale, in American life, or to make a Yale degree a less prestigious credential.

The Trumpists often sound like these predecessors, and one might assume that Ivy League graduates like Trump and Vance would themselves have little desire to reduce the institutional prominence of the elite universities. But that is not the case. MAGA’s populist base doesn’t just hate places like Harvard because they are left-wing, but because they are elite—because of their institutional role, not just their intellectual one. Remember that in the 2024 election, white voters without a college degree backed Trump over Harris by 66 to 32 percent. These voters derive little benefit from the research done at places like Harvard. From Fox News and other Trumpist outlets they hear an unceasing litany of stories about how the elite universities are wasting public money on wokeness and DEI, or on the sort of “dangerous” biological research that supposedly triggered the COVID pandemic. Many of them would like nothing better than to see Harvard go bankrupt.

Linda McMahon’s public letter to Harvard, written with a Trumpian love of capital letters (‘why is there so much HATE?” “your then University President, who was an embarrassment to our Nation”), perfectly exemplifies this populist angle of attack. Whether or not McMahon herself ever learned to capitalize properly, she certainly employs people who did. But, as with her boss, the Education Secretary’s performative illiteracy sends the very clear message that she is one of the People, not one of those woke, pencil-necked eggheads wasting taxpayer money on America-hating nonsense.

Harvard has sued the federal government over the research funds which the administration canceled in blatant violation of existing law. In the short term, it may receive some relief from the courts. But the real decisions now lie with Congress. Will it slash the federal research budget by 40 percent or more, as the president has requested? Will it raise the endowment tax? Many congressional Republicans have elite university backgrounds: Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard Law); Tom Cotton (Harvard and Harvard Law); Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale Law), etc. etc. etc. And in the past, the pressure to continue research into cancer, heart disease and other maladies has led congressional Republicans consistently to favor large NIH budgets.

The question is now: will the perceived threat to Republicans’ political lives trump (pun intended) their attachment to human health and to their own alma maters? Are they willing to see the elite universities destroyed, as opposed to reformed? Will they support the president, even at the cost of destroying the most important scientific research establishments on the planet?