The Campus in the Second Age of Trump

They will hound us with subpoenas and investigations, deprive us of what little funding the government now provides, and seek to replace serious educational leaders with political hacks (Florida is the model). They will resurrect longstanding Republican plans to dismantle the federal Department of Education, seek to merge it with, perhaps, the Department of Labor (vocational training would then be the name of the game) or the Department of Defense (which will still need foreign-language instruction to carry out its diplomatic and spying missions), and they will eliminate the accrediting agencies that have maintained a modicum of responsibility for academic practices. They will surely also level a test of neutrality on the institutions they seek to control.

In the face of this authoritarian — if not fascist — takeover of what has long been the pride of this nation, institutional neutrality is no longer a feasible or ethical position for the leaders of higher education. The question of institutional neutrality is very much at issue these days — I’m part of a subcommittee of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure that is writing a statement on it. As an internal institutional practice, it is a complicated issue with many pros and cons. But as a public practice, it cannot serve the interest of higher education any longer. The requirement of institutional neutrality is the Trumpist way of canceling those of us who are committed to the critical role education must play in a democracy.

With the election of Donald Trump, we have arrived at the moment of exception to the principle of institutional neutrality outlined in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report. Implicitly recalling the capitulation of the likes of Martin Heidegger to Nazi power, the report noted: “From time to time, instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.” How many administrators will have the courage to join with Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth, who, in the weeks before the election, argued that, in the face of those calling for the destruction of higher education, institutional neutrality is neither an ethical nor a responsible political position? My despair in the current moment is that too few of our current college and university administrators will follow his lead.

Joan W. Scott is an emerita professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Related to abandoning DEI: Universities should scrupulously adhere to the law. It is an open secret that demographic considerations have a great deal of influence in academic hiring and promotion. Beyond what has been amply documented — take the work of just one journalist, John Sailer, let alone the findings of many others — almost every academic has had the experience of hearing ascriptive characteristics referred to as reasons for or against applicants. These practices run the gamut from being of dubious legality to being outright illegal. While some of this falls under the rubric of DEI, much of it is informal, and some of it comes under other headings, like Target of Opportunity. Not to mention that affirmative action in admissions appears to have continued despite the Students for Fair Admissions ruling, and even liberal commentators see that this has left universities exposed.

Universities should dissolve these programs. This will be painful, because many — perhaps most — in academe do not believe in a demographically blind approach. But little could be more straightforward than for a determined Department of Justice to investigate universities for violating nondiscrimination law. And — a crucial thing for academics to bear in mind — if such a path is pursued, the public will be on the side of the government, not the universities. Americans love their universities most when they are most meritocratic. Across racial groups, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to invoking social considerations and demographic factors in contexts of academic and professional selection. Powerful institutions that are perceived to ignore laws of which they do not approve also tend to be unpopular; if academics wouldn’t tolerate oil companies skirting the law in pursuit of their ends, they should not be surprised when those outside the ivory tower express shock at finding that actions they presume are impermissible take place regularly.

Finally, a friend of mine who knows this world well says that the principal cause of donor unrest has little to do with the particulars of critical race theory or gender theory or affirmative action. Instead, it is anchored in a more general impression that universities have become unpatriotic, and that the fastest way to move up or gain notoriety on campus is by denigrating America. I suspect this is also what drives the animosity toward higher education among many Republican legislators, who hardly have time to enter into rarified disputes about the meaning and origins of “wokeness” that play out in books and journals. So one thing universities could do would be simply to signal, in public pronouncements and extracurricular programming, that their appreciation and respect for the American people (who after all sustain and subsidize their institutions) is not contingent on particular electoral outcomes.

For all its evident imperfections, modern America is the most successful multiracial society in world history. Racial polarization has been decreasing throughout the Trump era, a trend which accelerated in this election. Despite what doomsayers would have us believe, American democracy is a genuinely vibrant contest of ideas, as can be seen in the fact that significant numbers of every ethnic, religious, and racial group vote for both parties. The United States has avoided devolving into a zero-sum battle between permanent demographic blocks, and one cannot simply infer an American’s political allegiance from the color of his skin or ethnic background.

It would be prudent, as well as right, for universities to make sure that optimistic assessments of America are heard on campuses, instead of allowing themselves to be identified with a cynicism and pessimism about the country that has too often provided a fast-track to academic advancement. The investment that the American people make in higher education through tax breaks and tuition dollars and philanthropy and public funding is astonishing and unparalleled; compare American generosity with the tight-fisted and indifferent approach to the quality of higher education in most of Europe. A little gratitude, a return to an ideal of service to this country, and the occasional display of national pride, are the least that higher education owes the American public.

Gregory Conti is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The incoming vice president has a view on Orbán’s strategy: JD Vance went on record stating that “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us.” “His way,” according to the Academic Freedom Index, has resulted in the only EU state with a “systematic and structural violation of academic freedom.” What might this model mean in the United States?

The decentralized and heterogenous character of American higher education poses a challenge for any far-right populist bent on capture. It is also an open question whether Congress will acquiesce to massive cuts in funding for students and for research. It didn’t during the first Trump administration, but a MAGA-fied GOP under the impression that Trump gained an anti-intellectual mandate might be a different matter.

Academic institutions — not just public ones — will come under pressure and, where possible, be made complicit (for instance, when it comes to dealing with temporary visa-holders). President Biden’s financial and civil-rights initiatives can be rolled back; professional accreditors are already being attacked as leftists; universities are told their endowments might be taxed or taken entirely. A return to the era of predatory institutions exploiting vulnerable populations appears assured. Patriotic education will be imposed where possible: Project 2025 advocates that most of “area studies” should be replaced with “international-business programs that teach about free markets.” Trumpists also want to require “institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the … goals of serving American interests.”

Culture war is cheap, even if undermining research will be very costly in the long run. It is also popular with certain audiences, including, broadly speaking, liberal ones — witness the obsession of quality U.S. newspapers with what happens on elite campuses and Christopher Rufo’s apparent ability to make journalists complicit in his strategies. There’s every reason for the far right to escalate their criticisms of higher education, though whether attacks on “Marxist maniacs” at universities are really all that important for the MAGA base is open to question.

What should certainly be rejected is the suggestion that “Trump got a mandate from non-college-educated voters.” True, Republicans tried to make an example of university presidents in Congress, but there’s as of now no evidence that higher education played much of a role in voting decisions. The notion that academics did something wrong — that they are disconnected from “real America,” and, in particular, that it’s their fault that citizens who identify as Republicans do not trust universities — should be rejected. This is the kind of propaganda that prepares people to obey in advance and become comfortable with unforced concessions to far-right anti-intellectual agendas.

Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University.

We learned that workers are down on their knees and think politicians don’t know what they are up against. While professionals see the economy as healthy (as confirmed by a gaggle of Nobel laureate economists), workers believe what they experience: The price of eggs is hitting the roof. Their support for Trump expresses an urgent need to be heard. They are on the outside, looking in at the privileged world of college graduates, and the American dream seems ever more out of reach after decades of growing inequality, now exacerbated by skyrocketing housing costs.

These massive cutbacks accelerated at the same time that university administrations, largely in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, became eager to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. DEI became institutionalized on campus, and the humanities embraced the DEI turn — partly because of intellectual trends, partly because of the long overdue need to diversify faculty hiring, and partly because DEI-related hires were often the only tenure lines that otherwise contracting departments could get approved by cut-hungry university administrators. The humanities were valuable only insofar as they could demonstrate the university’s diversity commitments.

These commitments were always going to be politically fraught. DEI, after all, was originally conceived in the University of California system to be a more or less explicit workaround to the state’s affirmative action ban. And the institutionalization of the DEI turn exists in tension with other trends: the organized and sustained anti-DEI campaigns from right-wing activists; increasing right-wing radicalization of young men; and the declining enrollment numbers of white students — particularly white men — at colleges and universities across the country. Unfortunately, open discussion of these tensions has been largely considered taboo within the academy, lest it draw fire from malicious activists.

In my own discipline of history, the intellectual trends of the past decade have left many scholars ill-equipped to understand Trump’s appeal, especially in the context of a growing multiracial right. Despite intense public interest, the study of right-wing political culture — and the study of political and intellectual history in general — has been largely marginalized in the discipline. Junior scholars especially struggle to find support and career opportunities. Ironically, courses in “big-picture” political history — and the history of political culture and political ideas — remain incredibly popular with students and are a significant factor in sustaining history’s anemic number of majors nationwide.

University administrations, meanwhile, demonstrated the hollowness of their commitments to diversity with the brutal suppression of the Palestine solidarity movement on campuses last spring at the behest of donors, alumni, and politicians. Students and faculty who took universities at their word that they were committed to protecting racial, gender, and sexual diversity found themselves being beaten and arrested by university police. The firing of Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, after a campaign organized by right-wing donors and political activists over exaggerated claims of plagiarism and academic misconduct confirmed that even at the most elite levels of higher education, universities will back away from their stated commitments and values to protect their funding sources.

What this means for the humanities is that the DEI-hiring boomlet that has been keeping the humanities on life support will almost certainly be over during the second Trump administration. While Project 2025 has remarkably little to say about higher education, the document is rife with hostility to DEI, critical race theory, and “cultural Marxism.” Right-wing culture warriors are already crowing about their triumph over “wokeism.” Universities facing an organized campaign of hostility against DEI initiatives will back away from those commitments lest they lose federal dollars.

Will the last humanities professor please turn out the light?

David Austin Walsh is a historian and the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right (Yale UP, 2024). He currently teaches at the University of Virginia.

Trump regularly called Black leaders “lazy,” derided Black majority cities, feuded with iconic Black figures like Representative John Lewis, faced a Black candidate in the presidential race — yet he gained nearly 3 points in Black-majority counties.

We know that the Republicans are the anti-DEI party, and yet this last election was a nationwide red wave in which Republicans improved their standing with minority voters — the very people DEI claims to represent and support.

Democrats believed they could win the votes of ethnic minorities by highlighting Trump’s insulting rhetoric, but as Democratic strategist James Carville noted, “We could never wash off the stench” of slogans like “Defund the police,” strongly associated with identity politics.

And even some progressive commentators and Democratic leaders are blaming it on higher education.

Here is Maureen Dowd writing in The New York Times: “Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism … The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements and faculty-lounge terminology like ‘Latinx’ and ‘BIPOC’ (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).”

Ritchie Torres, a moderate Democratic Latino Congressman from the Bronx, blamed Trump’s victory on the “ivory-tower nonsense … that managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party.”

Reverend Al Sharpton derided people who seek to “overthrow the system” rather than improving it as being “in the ivory tower taking a nap.” Joe Scarborough agreed: “Keep that in your college classes.”

Those phrases made me wonder: Should higher education be going through a similar reckoning as the Democratic Party?

After all, the theory of higher education in recent decades has been similar to the theory of the Democratic Party: As college campuses have gotten more ethnically and racially diverse, they should invest in a wide range of diversity efforts that make minority students feel more welcome and help them thrive.

So far, so good.

But is the particular approach chosen by the diversity infrastructure on college campuses actually alienating the very people it is meant to welcome and support?

Diversity programs frequently describe minorities as marginalized and oppressed, victims of the structural racism and white supremacy inherent to America.

Some years back at the University of California at Berkeley, diversity trainers told professors that they should avoid calling the United States “the land of opportunity” or asserting that “the most qualified person should get the job” because such language involved microaggressions against minority students.

And yet survey after survey shows that ethnic minorities embrace American patriotism and the importance of hard work. It is white progressives who are far more critical of these core American values.

In the parlance of the day: By centering their own critique of America, white progressives marginalized the documented patriotic and aspirational preferences of racial minorities.

According to an Echelon Insights poll published in the Financial Times, 75 percent of white progressives say “racism is built into our society.” That is 15 points higher than the number of Black people who answered yes to the same question, and 35 points higher than Latinos.

The numbers are similar when it comes to the assertion that “Most people can make it if they work hard.” Only 25 percent of white progressives agreed with that. But 40 percent of Black people agreed, as did 60 percent of Latinos.

The difference between white progressives and Black and Hispanic Americans is even starker on the question of patriotism. Only 30 percent of white progressives agree with the statement “America is the greatest country in the world.” Compare that to nearly 60 percent of African Americans and over 70 percent of Latinos. Indeed, Latinos look more similar to white conservatives — 90 percent of whom agree that America is the greatest country in the world — than white progressives.

White progressives seem to want approaches to diversity that emphasize racist oppression, but African Americans and Latinos resonate more with a message focused on making the most of opportunities. White progressives insist on emphasizing American prejudice, but African Americans and Latinos are inspired by national pride.

Higher education has a crucial role to play in helping the United States become a thriving multiracial, multiethnic, interfaith democracy. But to achieve that goal, the diversity infrastructure on campuses needs to resonate with the values and aspirations of underrepresented minority students rather than being skewed toward the preferences of white progressives, who are significantly overrepresented in higher education.

Diversity programs in college should not make minorities feel like they are less capable of achieving their dreams by emphasizing external barriers over personal potential. And they should not make graduates less able to relate to people from diverse backgrounds by insisting on using terms like “Latinx,” which are wholly rejected by the very group of people the word is supposed to describe.

College should be a place where everyone’s potential can be nurtured, where people from diverse backgrounds learn to relate better to one another, where we take pride in our nation’s progress and responsibility for moving it even further forward.

The stakes are high, not just for our campuses, but for our politics as well.

Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith America, author of We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy, and host of the Interfaith America With Eboo Patel podcast.

As President, Trump appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who declared an end to the race-conscious admissions programs used by colleges and universities to ensure diversity among their student bodies. President-elect Trump has already threatened to fine schools that continue to pursue this kind of equity and to use the proceeds to pay restitution to white “victims.” These attempts to dampen diversity in admissions restrict a university’s right to determine “who may be admitted to study.” They also undercut the pedagogical benefits of having students from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

As President, Trump also issued an executive order banning diversity training in the federal sector (an order he is expected to expand in his next term). Trump’s federal ban set off a wave of copycat legislation across the country. At least 14 states have now enacted anti-DEI laws. These laws target not only universities’ administrative DEI operations, but also, and perhaps more critically, the teaching of an ill-defined set of subjects bearing on the nation’s racial history, among other things. In banning topics broadly classified as “critical race theory,” political opponents have derided it as a “destructive ideology,” one that is “grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world.” Putting aside this gross distortion of critical race theory, it is imperative that colleges and universities resist encroachments on their academic freedom.

As Robert Post has argued, colleges play a vital role in our democracy by producing and disseminating knowledge for the purpose of educating the citizenry and shaping public policy. In doing so, they contribute to democratic competence through the unfettered exercise of professional judgment. It is no coincidence that legal protections for academic freedom first emerged in response to McCarthyism. Rather than allowing politically disfavored views to be censored, academic freedom protects the right of colleges to determine for themselves “what may be taught [and] how it shall be taught.”

The Supreme Court has said our democracy depends on future leaders who are “trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues, rather than through any kind of authoritative decision.” The commitment to DEI in higher education facilitates this wide exposure and robust exchange; the attacks on DEI, by contrast, thwart these goals. Unless colleges are willing to defend their right to academic freedom, they will cede their authority as knowledge experts and sites of critical inquiry to political autocrats who seek not to enlighten or inform, but to suppress and control.

Stacy Hawkins is a former vice dean and a professor of law at Rutgers Law School.

I teach at a selective, small liberal-arts college in Southern California, a school known for its support of undocumented students and early adoption of DEI policies. When Vance calls professors the enemy, he is surely thinking of my colleagues — and me.

Yet, funny thing: Vance and I might have been friends. My dissertation adviser, Patrick Deneen, is regarded as Vance’s preeminent philosophical influence. I admired Hillbilly Elegy and share some of Vance’s concerns about the state of our nation. Those concerns are what propelled me into liberal-arts teaching.

The core idea of liberal-arts education is that it trains us in the arts of liberty: those skills, habits, and ways of being that enable participation in a free society and in turn enables a free society to flourish. Across the generations, from John Winthrop to W.E.B. Du Bois, this country’s leading lights have understood that a liberal constitutional order depends on liberal-arts education.

It may be that Trump and Vance aspire to a “bloodless revolution” that would end the liberal constitutional order of the United States. If they do, liberal-arts education — most of higher education as we know it — is likely to wither.

Or it may work the other way: that in attacking liberal-arts education, Trump and Vance attack the liberal constitutional order, regardless of their intent.

Professors have always had a tricky relationship to the state. We work within the status quo, powering the powers that be. At the same time, our intellectual pursuits force us to question the status quo, making us a nuisance to the powers that be. We political theorists call that the philosopher-city problem, and we think of Socrates.

Socrates taught that being a nuisance by questioning the laws in fact shows reverence for them. You cannot be said to care for something — a person, a cause, a country — unless you are inclined to ask how it’s doing.

Now, with so many questions unanswered, we can only keep asking them — to the incoming administration, and to each other.

When I walked into class the day after the election, my students were silent. They stared at printouts of the Book of Exodus, their assigned reading. They turned out to have a lot to say. We considered, for an hour, the Israelites in the wilderness.

Susan McWilliams Barndt is a professor of politics at Pomona College.