The Trump Administration Is Trying to Kill American Higher Education

I don't care about the "why" -- I care about the "what."

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

Recent readers may recall that I was in a bit of a funk last week because among other things “The [Trump] administration further escalated its war on Harvard in myriad ways. This is part and parcel of a wider war on higher education that will destroy American soft power, one of the country’s leading export sectors, and American economic productivity.”

Impressively, the situation on this front has gotten even worse in the last 24 hours.

On Tuesday the Trump administration moved to end all remaining federal contracts — amounting to $100 million — with Harvard University. The New York Times’ Stephanie Saul writes quite the set of paragraphs putting this into context:

The additional planned cuts, outlined in a draft of the letter obtained by The New York Times, represented what an administration official called a complete severance of the government’s longstanding business relationship with Harvard.

The letter is the latest example of the Trump administration’s determination to bring Harvard — arguably the country’s most elite and culturally dominant university — to its knees, by undermining its financial health and global influence. Since last month, the administration has frozen about $3.2 billion in grants and contracts with Harvard. And it has tried to halt the university’s ability to enroll international students….

The university has about 6,800 international students, making up 27 percent of its total enrollment. Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, characterized the cancellation of its ability to enroll international students as a potentially devastating blow.

“We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” Dr. Garber wrote in a statement last week, adding that it “imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”

If this seems like an exaggeration, consider the complete set of federal actions taken against Harvard that the New York Times’ Michael C. Bender has compiled. It’s an extraordinary list of punitive actions given that the Trump administration has been in office for just a little over a third of a year.

Now, as a professor at the Fletcher School, a direct competitor of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, readers might wonder if I think there might be some competitive advantage that might be gained from Harvard’s misfortune. And the answer to this is “not really, no,” for two reasons.

The first is raw politics: Harvard is the most prestigious university in the United States. It has the deepest pockets. If the Trump administration can force Harvard to acquiesce to its demands, that capitulation will make it that much harder for other universities to protect academic freedom.

The second is that while Harvard might be receiving the brunt of the administration’s malignant attention, Trump’s team is taking other actions that will harm most U.S. universities. According to Politico’s Nahal Toosi:

The Trump administration is weighing requiring all foreign students applying to study in the United States to undergo social media vetting — a significant expansion of previous such efforts, according to a cable obtained by POLITICO.

In preparation for such required vetting, the administration is ordering U.S. Embassies and consular sections to pause scheduling new interviews for such student visa applicants, according to the cable, dated Tuesday and signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

If the administration carries out the plan, it could severely slow down student visa processing. It also could hurt many universities who rely heavily on foreign students to boost their financial coffers.

“Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued septel, which we anticipate in the coming days,” the cable states. (“Septel” is State Department shorthand for “separate telegram.”)….

The news was met with frustration in much of the higher education community.¹

Frustration is an understatement. This administration seems bound and determined to force U.S. students to pay higher tuition, because it keeps stripping away alternative sources of revenue. Between slashing federal research funding to record-low levels, raising the transaction costs of accepting foreign grants, and this freezing the visa processing of foreign students, the Trump administration is disincentivizing scientific research and forcing universities to rely increasingly on the tuition payments of domestic college students.

The end result will be a poorer, less dynamic economy and a less vibrant society. I wish the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer was being hyperbolic in this paragraph - but he isn’t:

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

Why are they doing it? Serwer attributes it to politics: “by destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior.” I could proffer a variety of other ideological or political responses.² As of now , however, such rationales are besides the point. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s not for the reasons proffered by the administration. Harvard’s president Garber made that point on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday:

What is perplexing is the measures that they have taken to address these that don't even hit the same people that they believe are causing the problems. Why cut off research funding? Sure, it hurts Harvard, but it hurts the country because after all, the research funding is not a gift. The research funding is given to universities and other research institutions to carry out work – research work – that the federal government designates as high-priority work. It is work that they want done. They are paying to have that work conducted. Shutting off that work does not help the country, even as it punishes Harvard, and it is hard to see the link between that and, say, antisemitism….

And it is not only about Harvard. And I think that's important to keep in mind. The kinds of changes that the administration has begun and is contemplating, which include deep cuts to the National Institutes of Health and to the National Science Foundation, will affect all research universities and will have a real impact on the ability of the United States to remain at the forefront of science and technology.

Speaking at Princeton University, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell said earlier this week that, “We lead the world in so many ways, including in scientific innovation and economic dynamism. Our great universities are the envy of the world and a crucial national asset.”

The Trump administration seems bound and determined to piss that all away in an act of political vengeance. The entire country will suffer as a result.

1. Aw, Toosi must follow me on Bluesky.

2. For all I know maybe Trump just hates Massachusetts.