The Trump administration has declared all-out war on American higher education, in recent weeks revoking federal grant funding in the billions of dollars in an effort to bring some of the world’s greatest universities in line with MAGA ideology.
First, the Trump administration came for Columbia, revoking some $400 million in funding in order to, it claimed, address the university’s handling of campus antisemitism and “persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Next in the ideological crosshairs were Johns Hopkins, Brown, Northwestern, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Harvard. Perhaps most visibly, the White House this week threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status and said it would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants unless it purged “woke” ideology and changed its hiring practices and admissions policies.
And why? “A list of Trump administration demands made at Harvard appeared to touch on a variety of conservative complaints with academia, including a lack of diverse political viewpoints among faculty members and a disdain for diversity, equity and inclusion programs,” The New York Times reported yesterday.
The irony is, of course, rich that the government of the United States would justify an attack on academic freedom — attempting to enforce ideological MAGA purity and to steer internal policies of private educational institutions — for the stated purpose of viewpoint diversity. Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist known outside academia for his popular TED Talks, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian.”
We have a bridge to sell anyone out there who buys the story that this is really all about eradicating antisemitism. Need we really point out that the White House embraces the support of far-right groups that are openly antisemitic and chummy with the international neo-Nazi scene, or that one of Trump’s favorite opinion-makers has an unsavory habit of “accidentally” throwing Nazi salutes?
All Americans, whether Republican, Democratic, or independent, need to take five minutes out of their lives to look into the whys and wherefores of federal funding to universities through agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Yes, the taxpayers of America give American universities billions of dollars a year. And what do the universities give America in return?
As Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton, eloquently pointed out this week in an op-ed in The Atlantic, as well as on PBS, the unique system here in the U.S. of funding long-term scientific and medical research through long-term federal grants is the exact reason why our nation has been the greatest innovator and inventor in history.
Here is a short list of a few of the world-changing American innovations and discoveries made possible only because of long-term federal grants of the very same kind the Trump administration is now shutting down: The internet, funded via DARPA grants to U.C.L.A., Stanford, and M.I.T. The Google search engine, funded via N.S.F. to Stanford. M.R.I. technology, funded with N.I.H. grants to various universities including Stony Brook. GPS technology, funded via the U.S. Department of Defense to several universities including M.I.T. and Stanford. Artificial intelligence, funded by DARPA and N.S.F. to Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, M.I.T., and others. The list goes on . . .
America’s role as the world leader of scientific and medical progress rests on this unique system of large-scale, long-term federal grants. Who will step into the breach left by the devastation being wrought — for no legitimate or justifiable reason other than a dislike of liberalism and a resentment of the Ivory Tower — by this attack on science and academia? Look to China.
We stand and cheer the universities that are fighting back. In a letter on Monday, Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, refused to back down. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” he wrote. By yesterday, 60 past and present university presidents had signed their own letter backing him. “Just over three miles from Harvard Square is the Boston Tea Party site where, in 1773, American patriots fought government tyranny,” these university leaders pointed out.
Meanwhile, Representative Elise Stefanik, MAGA of New York, was tweeting, “Defund Harvard.” But it is not Ivy League elitism that Trump and his loyalists are laying siege to, it is America’s standing as the world’s great leader in science, medicine, and innovation.