Killing the University

The Conservative War on Higher Education

In a little-known speech at the National Conservativism Conference in 2021, J.D. Vance opened his remarks by saying, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

He goes on to lament the teaching of critical race theory and liberal bias among academics, and suggest that, “Maybe it’s time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.”

Though shots have already been fired by DeSantis and others, the conservative war on universities has now begun in earnest. Under Trump, the federal government will use whatever tools it can to change the nature of political discourse on American campuses.

In the opening salvo of Executive Orders, there was one relevant to universities that did not get enough attention. Executive Order 14188, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-semitism,” appears to lay the legal groundwork for expelling foreign students should they participate in pro-Palestine protests. In the words of the White House explainer, the goal of the EO is to “investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.” It includes this direct warning to foreign students:

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

This is, of course, a gross mischaracterization of the students involved in the protests this past year. While there was a notable increase in documented instances of antisemitism on college campuses, by and large the protestors were not some collection of anti-Semites, pro-Hamas jihadists, or Nazis, as they have been maligned. These were young adults that displayed the courage and prescience to call out the acts of genocide in Palestine, even when most American politicians refused to do so. The most vulnerable among them—the foreign students—now face a gross infringement on their freedom of speech.

The biggest tool the federal government has is research funding. When a researcher receives a grant from the NSF or NIH, part of that money goes to the university itself to pay for the facilities and staff needed to support the lab. Grants never support the true cost of research. For many universities, this indirect money is a significant part of the budget, and federal grants are what keep the STEM faculty and graduate students afloat. The is especially true at land grant universities and other institutions that do not have large private endowments.

Last week, the Trump administration announced a new policy that will cap indirect funding from grants to 15%. It is often as high as 50%. This amounts to a massive reduction in funding, overnight and without advance notice, that has already disrupted vital scientific research. Here’s an excerpt from a piece by H. Holden Thorp, the editor of Science:

The cost of overhead has typically been split about equally between the government and the institutions. Thus, if the indirect rate was 50%, then for every dollar of direct research expense, an additional 50 cents in indirect support would come from the government and 50 cents from the institution. Lowering the indirect rate to 15% would cut the overall federal support budget by 35 percentage points, leaving the university to cover the rest. For example, if an institution has $200 million in NIH support for direct costs, then at a 50% indirect cost rate, the indirect support from the government and the institution would each be $100 million. Thus, the total federal funding would be $300 million. Abruptly cutting the indirect rate to 15% would decrease the government’s contribution to support costs to $30 million. That’s a removal of $70 million from the total federal investment.

And here’s a comment from my Princeton colleague Jake Shapiro that gets to the heart of the issue:

Jake is being diplomatic here in that he is attributing the policy change to a desire for “savings.” The reality is not so benign. The grounds for this new policy, like the order targeting foreign student protestors, are ideological in nature. In the original Project 2025 description, this shift is justified on the grounds that universities “also use this influx of cash to pay for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts,” and capping the rate at 15% would “help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.”

In other words, the Republicans are willing to gut the American research enterprise because they think universities are hiring too many women and black people. That’s what this comes down to.

Already, we’ve seen 22 states come together to sue, leading to a temporary order to halt the policy. This cap hits all universities, including large land grant institutions in Southern states, which are huge employers and beloved institutions. Senator Katie Britt of Alabama (yes, that Katie Britt) has come out against the cap, as has Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

I suspect this type of back and forth will be the norm of the next four years. The Trump administration will seek to exert ideological control over universities, and universities will push back with lawsuits. There are many cards still to be played, including increasing the endowment tax, or potentially denying federal funding to institutions that continue existing DEI practices. This might sound extreme, but there is precedent here. Most universities have shuttered their Confucius Institutes, which are Chinese language institutes funded by the Chinese government, in response to language in the National Defense Authorization Act that restricted defense funding to schools with those programs.

Such a scenario will place universities in a bind and may actively divide the faculty. What happens when the Trump Administration says that any school with an African American Studies Department can no longer receive NSF grants? For many schools, being cut off from federal money would be a death sentence. At a minimum, a loss of access to NSF/NIH funding would completely gut the STEM departments at most universities, and very few could make up the loss with endowment funding. We may well get to a place where whole departments are wiped out to preserve access to grant money.

Universities are legalistic, risk averse institutions, and many are “obeying in advance” rather than actively standing up for the values. Some are actively scrubbing DEI language from their websites, and some professors are changing their research interests on their faculty pages. Michigan State University recently canceled a Lunar New Year event in response to one of Trump’s executive orders, only to later apologize to students for overreacting.

It is worth noting, as has become the theme of this newsletter, that attacking universities and professors is a common strategy of non-democratic regimes. In his 2021 address, Vance said plainly, “the professors are the enemy,” quoting Nixon. Executive Orders from the Trump Administration now call our universities “anti-American.” For a China scholar, this sort of language is chilling. In a podcast appearance, J.D. Vance praised Viktor Orban for his efforts to bring universities to heel:

“What do you do at the Department of Education? Well, you do what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary, which is basically say, ‘You’re not allowed to teach critical race theory anymore, you’re not allowed to teach critical gender theory anymore … You’re not allowed to do those things and get a dollar of federal money or a dollar of state money.’”

It's never a good sign when the Vice President is openly praising an autocrat, but that has become standard practice for the Republican Party these days.

I would just close by noting how American universities should be a point of national pride. They drive innovation, economic growth, and social mobility. And they are the envy of the world. When I meet colleagues from other countries, they are consistently blown away by the quality of our facilities, our students, and our research environment. Our universities thrive precisely because of our democracy—we have strong norms of academic freedom that allow ideas and innovation to thrive. I think universities need to do more to sell their contributions to the American people, to remove themselves from the culture wars, and to make the opportunities of college accessible to as many people as possible. Attacking university funding will wind up raising tuition fees, reducing scholarship money, and putting college further out of reach for many American families.

That’s all for today. Thanks for supporting my work.

Best,

Rory