It is hardly news to say that these are bad times for American higher education in general and elite colleges and universities in particular. From forced presidential resignations to disruptive protests on college campuses, the 2023-24 academic year was very difficult for higher education.
Public opinion data brought more bad news. found that only 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, which is down by about 20 percentage points from eight years ago.”
In 2015, Gallup reported that most Americans, regardless of party affiliation, level of education, age, or gender, expressed confidence in this country’s colleges and universities. In the most recent survey, only among Democrats did a majority still express confidence in higher education.
And this week’s Republican National Convention made clear that if the GOP wins the election in 2024, colleges and universities, especially the most prestigious ones, are in for tough sledding. At this point, it is unclear whether they are adequately prepared for the battle ahead.
One can get a glimpse of that battle by reading Project 2025 and its Mandate for Leadership, the 2024 Republican platform, and listening to what MAGA activists and leaders say about colleges and universities and what they hope to do to them.
All told, it is pretty frightening.
Let’s start with Project 2025. Its Mandate for Leadership laid out an ambitious plan to reshape education at all levels, including at the college level.
You get a sense of that ambition in its proposal to eliminate the Department of Education.
Project 2025 envisions that a second Trump administration would use the threat of cutting off federal funds to reshape the ideological landscape of colleges and universities. It would do so by claiming to protect civil rights.
As Mandate for Leadership puts it, higher education needs to respect “the civil rights of all Americans, including those who have been censored by the government or had it weaponized against them.”
That means, among other things, “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”
Beyond this ideological attack, Project 2025 wants to move the federal student loan program to the Department of Treasury, but only as a temporary way station. Its ultimate goal is to turn the program over to private companies.
It hopes the second Trump administration will use “federal postsecondary education investments…[to] bolster economic growth, and recipient institutions should nourish academic freedom and embrace intellectual diversity.”
Those are code words used to target elite institutions, which conservatives believe have limited academic freedom and curbed intellectual diversity to promote “woke ideology” and political correctness.
Turning to the 2024 Republican platform, we see echoes of Project 2025 in its view of higher education. It promises to “cut federal funding” where colleges and universities push critical race theory and what the platform calls “radical gender ideology.”
It promises that Republicans “will ban the Federal Government from colluding with anyone to censor Lawful Speech [and] defund institutions engaged in censorship….”
Note the threat of defunding as the GOP’s preferred tactic in trying to bring elite schools to heel.
The platform also criticizes the cost of higher education and pledges to redirect the federal government’s efforts to “support the creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year college degree.”
Beyond these documents, there was an extraordinary and unprecedented moment during the Republican Convention when a disgruntled recent Harvard graduate was given time to deliver a blistering attack on his own institution. Singling out one educational institution in this way was a chilling reminder of the Republican hostility not just to Harvard but to the elite educational strata that it epitomizes.
As the Boston Globe notes, “Shabbos Kestenbaum, who sued the university in January over its response to campus antisemitism, railed against the Cambridge institution, calling the Ivy League school’s culture anti-western, anti-American, and anti-Jewish.”
The Globe quotes Kestenbaum: “‘My problem with Harvard is not its liberalism, but its illiberalism. Too often, students at Harvard are taught not how to think but what to think.’”
Kestenbaum used his speech to denounce “the radicalism on our campuses,” which he claimed “has no moral legitimacy.” He concluded his remarks by saying he was “proud to support Trump’s policies to expel foreign students who violate the law, harass Jewish classmates and ‘desecrate our freedoms.’”
As if all this was not enough to signal the dark clouds that will descend on elite colleges and universities in a Trump administration, the point was driven home by the selection of Ohio Senator JD Vance to run for Vice President.
Trump could not have selected anyone who has been more public and vehement in his hostility to those places. For example, in 2021, at the start of his senatorial campaign, Vance used a speech at the National Conservatism Conference to label America’s colleges and universities “the enemy.”
He urged his listeners not to remain passive bystanders in confronting this enemy. He urged them to join him in “honestly and aggressively attacking is in universities in this country.”
“We live,” Vance said, “in a world that has been made effectively about university knowledge.” But he labeled the knowledge our most prestigious institutions produce “deceit and lies.”
Vance pointed out those places are not “ideologically sympathetic” to conservative points of view
In addition, Vance claimed that they have broken the “social contract” by accepting billions of taxpayer dollars while burying young people under mountains of student debt. Last February, he advocated “reforming the tax code to take away their charitable status for tax purposes…” and going after “the university bureaucracy focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Like Kestenbaum, Vance has singled out Harvard University for particular criticism. He claims that it and other elite institutions have elevated identity over ideas.
Moreover, he accuses them of protecting “obviously mediocre people… because they fit a particular political narrative.” He says Harvard offers a “perfect manifestation of the idea that the universities are not so much after the pursuit of truth, as they are about enforcing dogma and doctrine.”
Vance thinks elite colleges and universities like Harvard “are just paper tigers. “We should,” he says, “be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”
In his February remarks, he called for “a political solution” to elite higher education’s corrosive influence and power. He offered Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán as an example of someone who has made “smart decisions there that we could learn from.” He explained that Orbán’s approach to higher education should be a “model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give the[m] a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”
Capitulate to their political agenda or die; that is the choice that Vance and the MAGA crowd will offer Harvard and its ilk if they once again control the levers of power in Washington, DC.
It is late in the game, and the stakes are high. Colleges and universities, particularly the most prestigious of those institutions, need to act urgently to develop a plan for how they will respond to a Trump victory in November.
They may be tempted to focus on how they will deal with the trauma such a victory will cause for many of their students, faculty, and staff. But they need to do much more. They should be frightened of what a second Trump term will mean for them.
Elite colleges and universities, and the rest of higher education, need a concrete political strategy to address the coming onslaught. Without it, they will be unprepared to fight for their survival and the survival of the values and approach to education that has made American higher education the envy of the world.
