Higher Ed May Never Be the Same

For decades, institutions of higher learning and the U.S. government shared a mutually beneficial compact. Schools were the beneficiaries of billions of dollars in funding and could expect minimal political meddling, and the government and the American people received myriad benefits in return. In addition to educating generations of students, universities became incubators of technological innovation, medical breakthroughs, and much more. But then Donald Trump was reëlected, and, as he has done in so many other areas of American life during the past year, he ruptured that compact.

The Administration’s swift moves against élite universities—notably taking the form of huge funding cuts—hit the schools like a thunderbolt. But shouldn’t they have seen this coming? In this week’s issue, the staff writer Nicholas Lemann, who spent a decade as the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, charts the history of how the nation’s top universities became indispensable centers of research and, over time, reliable bogeymen for the political right. By the time that the Trump Administration began its full-on attack on academia, it had the backing of many voters. “These actions are not nearly as unpopular as universities think they should be,” Lemann writes. “The heart of this tragedy is that universities believe themselves to be devoted to the public good but fall far short of the level of public support they need.”

In the coming years, Trump could continue his attacks on the nation’s universities, inflicting more damage—or he could lose interest. Another question is what might happen after he is gone. Lemann reports from Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, where research funding is down by more than forty per cent. The irony, as he discovers, is that Hopkins was already pursuing many of the efforts that the Administration would later demand of other schools—including prioritizing intellectual diversity among the faculty. Yet the school was nonetheless targeted alongside its peers.

This hostility from the right toward American colleges and universities is likely to outlast Trump, as long as it remains a useful political cudgel. “Conservatives are likely never going to be able to create universities they approve of that are anywhere near the level of the universities some of them would like to destroy,” Lemann writes. For now, it’s easier to tear things down—and, as a result, American higher ed may never look the same.

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