Higher Education Is at the Top of Trump’s Hit List

An Early Assessment of the Attacks About to Come to America’s Colleges

In recent days, much of the focus on the Trump transition has been on his scandal-plagued nominees for top positions in the government. But as fun as it is to watch a few of his early choices go up in flames, the reality is that whoever ends up in Trump’s government will be not just bad, but abysmal and the bench of likely suspects is deep. So, enjoy a little schadenfreude if you must, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that the coming administration will simply bumble about incompetently for four years and go away.

Indeed, as many observers have noted, now that the election is over, the Project 2025 folks have magically reappeared after the incoming President’s disavowal-of-convenience on the campaign trail. What does the wrecking crew have in mind? In a very savvy New York Times piece, Thomas Edsall outlines some of the targets they’ll have lined up on day one:

The list is long, often focusing on academia, especially on elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Stanford; fields such as sociology and psychology; sanctuary cities; the nonprofit sector, which employs 12.8 million people, with an annual payroll of $873.1 billion; the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants; the three major television networks that are not Fox; the top ranks of the Justice Department, the C.I.A. and the armed forces; the array of civil rights enforcement departments embedded throughout the public and private sectors; and the already faltering diversity, equity and inclusion nests in corporations across America.

Edsall’s characteristically pessimistic assessment is that the “resistance” to Trump is exhausted and that there may not be enough principled people in positions of power to stand up to his attacks on a wide array of American institutions. Time will tell on that question, but the general thrust of Edsall’s argument—that the academy, the public sector, non-profits, the media, and much of what occupies our contemporary public square will be the premier boogie men—seems on the mark.

As a member of the academy, though not an elite one, I must say that being at the top of the list of people who Trump has characterized as “vermin” is a kind of perverse honor. Here I was thinking that the decades of dwindling funds for the humanities, a significant decline in college enrollment, and the perennial assaults on my profession were conspiring to make my generation of academics in higher education what some observers have called “the last professors” when Trump came back to power and turned my seemingly irrelevant squad into public enemy number one. At least being perceived as dangerous is sexier than being thought irrelevant except as a site ripe for “disruption” by an ascendent generation of smug technophiles.

Rueful graveyard humor aside, the threat to American higher education is real, and it is double pronged in that it serves both as a way to union bust the sector of the American economy with the highest labor density and as an opportunity to keep the full-scale culture war Trump was waging during the campaign going for the indefinite future.

The thinking in some higher education circles is that rather than trashing the entire Department of Education as previously speculated, the new administration will direct the former professional wrestling magnate, Linda McMahon, to initially go after the lowest hanging fruit by gutting and/or redirecting federal funding for higher education however possible while seeking to eliminate DEI programs and attacking academic freedom, freedom of speech, and even trying to eliminate entire disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, which it sees as nests of “anti-American” thought and activity.

The second phase of the attack, some assume, is that once the propaganda war against higher education is well under way, the Administration will then go after dues checkoffs for unions before eliminating collective bargaining entirely, thus turning academic work into at-will employment with an even more precarious, contingent labor force that can be bullied into towing the party line or else.

In sum, the end game is to discipline American higher education in a manner the harkens back to the days when the Robber Barons of yore sought to impose a thoroughgoing factory-style Taylorism on colleges to ensure that they would dutifully serve the interests of the corporate sector by limiting their mission to producing good middle managers and employees for big business.

Given that Trump is a President McKinley fan already due to his love of tariffs, it makes perfect sense that he would want to roll back the twentieth century in terms of education policy as well. All such conjecture should always be taken with a grain of salt, though the only real doubt here is most likely in the sequence of events, not the intent which has been clearly signaled, both in Project 2025 and during the campaign.

Where does this leave us? As the attacks facing us unfold, it appears it won’t just be culture war issues that will be coming our way, but a fundamental assault on the very notion that our society is well served by having higher education institutions with academic freedom, that are liberated from the dictates of the marketplace, and where challenging ideas (even unpopular ones) can be discussed without reprisal from the government.

Those who cherish the idea of intellectual exploration and value critical thinking will need to make the case that the institutions being demonized are, in fact, one of the cornerstones of our democracy, despite whatever excesses or political correctness are being relentlessly pilloried. Do we really want to wage a Ron DeSantis style, scorched earth war on higher education nationwide because the kids are protesting the war in Gaza and some folks are upset that they got asked to give their pronouns, unpack their white privilege, or talk about toxic masculinity in a sociology or gender studies class they took for a GE requirement?

Like it or not, the answer for many Americans at present is a resounding yes.

After years of “backlash populism” that redefined the elite in cultural rather than economic terms and raged against all things the snotty folks in the universities were doing, the dog may just be about to catch the car. And while toppling the status quo in the ivory tower may make good sport for the MAGA crowd and their allies, others just might discover that it really won’t make them feel any better when AI disrupts their profession, the promised salad days of the Trump utopia never come, and the loss of union density in the public sector leads to an assault on labor in the private sector and a lowering tide sinks the boats of all workers, union or not.

In any event, the billionaires will be fine, enjoying the hell out of the upward redistribution of wealth and their massive tax cuts. First things first, after all. The rest of us can simply duke it out in the meaner, leaner Social Darwinist economy being fostered by the economic power elite.

If the battle for higher education is indeed lost, some will cheer the demise of the pedantic professors they hate, but if intellectual labor is degraded and deskilled in the same way other occupations have been across the American economic landscape, we may wind up wondering why we can’t seem to find answers to some of our society’s hardest and most pressing questions that won’t be solved by slavish obedience to power, greed, or finding the right person to scapegoat. Even using our new AI infested cellphones won’t save us.

But don’t worry dear reader, I won’t stop sending missives from the frontlines until they take my keyboard away or replace me with a better, less difficult artificial version of myself. Maybe, just maybe, we can figure out a way to fight back.