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An interesting Opinion piece from The New York Times:
Trump Isn’t Fixing America’s Campuses. He’s Bleeding Them Dry.
Aug. 25, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
When I went back to my office at Duke last week to prepare for the fall semester, I confronted danger signs, police-style tape and other obstacles outside the entrance to the building. I had to weave my way in. And while the impediments reflected humdrum structural maintenance, I couldn’t help but see a metaphor in them, one so on the nose that a novelist writing about higher education under President Trump would probably be ashamed to use it.
Those of us in academia are on newly threatening terrain. Will the Trump administration take away yet more of our funding? How closely is it watching us? Those questions dog me, but no more so than a larger one: What sense, if any, does the administration’s attack on many of the country’s leading colleges and universities make?
Trump is right about some of higher education’s shortcomings, derelictions and outright failures. Campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza unveiled an antisemitism that many schools were shamefully slow to recognize, if they recognized it at all; their Jewish students didn’t seem to be accorded the same concern that classmates in other minority groups received. To varying degrees, many schools have promoted a progressive orthodoxy at odds with free discourse. Some diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives simply went too far. And there’s a striking lack of ideological and political diversity among faculty members, a significant majority of whom are left of center.
But what Trump and his allies are doing is no targeted effort to correct that. It’s a sweeping, indiscriminate, performative smackdown of elite institutions by a crew trying to solidify its power under the banner of anti-elitism. It doesn’t attempt to usher those institutions from a place of bias and extremism to one of neutrality and moderation. It answers excess with excess, orthodoxy with orthodoxy, censorship with censorship. And it disregards the damage it’s doing.
The leaders of this charge say that they want these institutions, with all their tax breaks and federal research funds, to be more accountable to the public. Fine. Let’s have a serious discussion about what that means. What it would look like. How it squares with academic freedom. And how it wouldn’t end up with colleges being forced to bend to the whims of whoever’s in power.
Because that’s what’s happening now. With debatable authority and without any consultation with Congress, Trump is using the suspension of federal grants, threats of further cuts and demands that schools essentially pay fines for their supposed transgressions to get them to do as he pleases. That’s not a discussion; it’s intimidation. That’s not accountability; it’s extortion. He extracted $200 million from Columbia. He’s reportedly looking for $500 million from Harvard and more than $1 billion from U.C.L.A. Why these targets? They’re politically juicy. These sums? They’re attention-grabbing. He’s staging a show of force. A spectacle of punishment.
And an illogical one at that. His and his allies’ principal grievances are with professors and courses in the humanities, in the social sciences, which are the realms where white supremacy and structural racism are studied. So they’re slowing money to … Alzheimer’s research? Gumming up or dragging down investigations into the causes and treatments of other diseases? Slashing studies of sea-level rise and flooding because they trigger “climate anxiety”? How does that fight antisemitism? It’s the DOGE approach, sadistic and sloppy: Inflict pain with no regard for what and who are really being hurt, because the true goal is to assert dominance, shrink others’ influence and please your supporters by destroying something in particular that they’ve decided to hate and smashing the status quo in general.
In an excellent essay in Times Opinion in May, Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor, perfectly captured the heedless, disproportionate nature of this offensive. Pinker copped to Harvard’s and (by implication) other top schools’ sins, including the vilification and reprimanding of a few professors who uttered words and floated ideas that displeased and discomfited some left-leaning students. He admitted the need for reflection and reform. But he also cataloged the over-the-top, all-over-the-place frenzy of the Trump administration’s response, including threats or moves to eliminate Harvard’s tax-free nonprofit status, block the enrollment of foreign students and cut or freeze a magnitude of funding that’s nearing $3 billion. Instead of focusing on discrete treatments for Harvard’s specific ailments, Pinker wrote, the Trump administration apparently preferred to “cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.”
The bloodletters say they’re acting in the public interest, for the public good. How is the crippling of science and scientific livelihoods a public good? How is the exsanguination of Harvard? Listening to Trump and his allies talk about higher education, I seldom if ever hear any adequate recognition of its successes — for prime example, the indisputable role that American universities played and play as cradles of innovation, global leaders in research and thus engines of national wealth — or any sufficient awareness of the care that we should take to preserve and perpetuate those.
What I do hear is a caricature of elite schools. I’ve been on the Duke faculty for more than four years, and I’ve certainly seen evidence of what right-wing critics of higher education are furious about. But I’ve also seen this: one student’s paper about how Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are merchants of grievance too ready to assign various Americans the labels of villain or victim; another student’s presentation on the overreach of some schools’ and organizations’ harmful language glossaries (“blind study,” “homeless,” “hardworking,” “brown bag”); all my students’ receptiveness and respectfulness when I’ve invited conservative guest speakers to talk with them and take their questions; my fellow faculty members’ delight that I brought those speakers in.
Despite the warning signs around my Duke building, the danger as I begin my fifth year of teaching here isn’t from within. It’s from without, and it’s chilling.
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