Former President Donald J. Trump has retaken the Oval Office, a result sure to stir panic throughout much of higher education. The Republican campaigned on promises to wield the executive branch more aggressively against people and institutions doing things he doesn’t like, including colleges.
Early Wednesday, the Associated Press called victories for Trump in four of the seven key swing states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Those electoral votes were enough to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
How much Trump can accomplish depends partially on control of Congress. Republicans won a majority in the Senate by picking up at least two seats in West Virginia and Ohio. Control of the House remained unclear as results continued to trickle in.
A second term for Trump will look different than his first. Critics and allies alike suggested throughout the campaign that he would be less constrained by bureaucratic norms in realizing his aims, including mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Another possibility might be a scaled-up version of Trump’s 2017 travel ban, which restricted entry to the United States for those from half a dozen majority-Muslim countries and affected many international students and scholars.
The former president has also promised to withhold recognition for accreditors as a lever to force colleges to adopt policies favored by conservatives.
As protests against the Israel-Hamas war have escalated on campuses, Trump has mused about punishing colleges that fail to protect Jewish students and deporting “pro-Hamas radicals.” Republican lawmakers have spent the past year chiding a handful of highly selective colleges for, as they see it, letting antisemitic incidents and protest chants run unchecked.
College leaders spoke out against some policy actions by the first Trump administration, including the travel ban. At least two dozen institutions have adopted policies of institutional neutrality in the years since, meaning they do not comment on political issues of the day.
Harris at Howard
Harris’s alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., played host to her election-night headquarters, marking the first time that a presidential candidate has spent the pivotal evening on a college campus.
Early in the evening, the atmosphere at Howard was akin to an HBCU homecoming, with a live DJ, a gospel choir performing the Black National Anthem, a fraternity and sorority step show, and several line dances. Many students saw the night as a watershed moment for HBCUs.
Nibal Atta, a Howard senior, was inspired by the fact that she and Harris shared a major at Howard. ”It motivates me,” Atta said. “Because I know that a lot of the students here are also very capable of holding high positions.”
By early Wednesday, election prospects looked less rosy for Harris, and the vice president did not end up speaking. The co-chair of Harris’s campaign made brief remarks around 12:45 a.m. telling the crowd that she would address the nation from the campus later on Wednesday.
Not all students were pleased about Harris’s presence on campus. Howard’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter released a statement condemning Harris’s support for Israel. “Tonight, we should remember that the American settler-colony’s electoral system will not save us regardless of the results of the election,” the group wrote.
Officials at Howard and other colleges in the D.C. area were wary of potential political unrest and beefed up campus security. On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Capitol Police arrested a man who carried a torch, a flare gun, and “smelled like fuel.”
At American University, four miles north of the White House, students in a nonpartisan voter-engagement group held a last-minute event on the main quad. Charli XCX’s chart-topping album, Brat, blared in the background. (In July, when Harris became the Democratic nominee, the artist declared on X that “kamala IS brat,” sparking a social-media movement for progressives.)
“We are horny for democracy on campus,” said Emma Godel, one of the organizers.
“At a school like this, Election Day is our Super Bowl,” added Alyssa Levin, the group’s co-president.
Levin planned to attend post-election campus wellness events, which included “relaxation activities,” “cozy blankets,” and painting. “I’m just gonna try to stay in tune with what’s going on,” Levin said. “But I’m going to protect my peace as much as I can.”
Colleges across the country have organized similar events for students. On Wednesday, Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy will provide students with a “self-care suite” featuring a Legos station, “milk and cookies,” and coloring and mindfulness activities. The events have drawn the ire of conservative activists, who say such efforts “treat adults like fragile children.”
Half a dozen blocks from the White House, about 100 people gathered in a bar for a uniquely academic election-night festivity: a lecture. Michael Bailey, a professor of American government at Georgetown, delivered a two-hour presentation on the pitfalls of polling. Top pollsters had predicted the race as a toss-up, with Harris edging Trump by a slim margin.
The professor took the audience through a chronology of faulty polling methods, including a series of mid-20th century “freakouts” over quota sampling. He flashed the now-iconic photo of Harry S. Truman touting the erroneous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline. One of his presentation slides read: “Random sampling is dead(ish).”
For current polls, Bailey told the audience, a major flaw is non-responses from younger voters. “Young people,” he said, “they’re a disaster.”
In an interview, Bailey predicted that “in four years we’re gonna talk about polls in a very different way, perhaps based on what happens tonight.”
How Students Voted
College students in Pennsylvania made headlines on Tuesday for flooding polling sites. Extra voting machines were rushed to some college-area polling stations to combat over five-hour-long lines. MSNBC reported that Lehigh University’s president waited for four hours to vote.
Students at Temple University waiting in a long line were given water bottles by Paul Rudd — one of a few Avengers cast members the Harris campaign sent to excite Pennsylvania students on Election Day.
Both Trump and Harris targeted student voters by speaking at Pennsylvania colleges in recent weeks. In 2020, when Biden flipped the state by less than 2 percentage points, voters under 30 supported him by a 27-point margin.
Early survey results from the Associated Press suggested that nationally, half of voters under 30 supported Harris, compared to six in 10 who supported Biden in 2020.
Some University of Pennsylvania students expressed uncertainty about their vote for president. While Ana Lin Richardson, a senior, voted for Harris, she wasn’t happy about it. She said she disapproved of the vice president’s stance on the war in Gaza, which Richardson views as a genocide against Palestinians.
“I could never vote for Trump, but if I don’t vote for Harris, it’s technically a vote for [Trump],” Richardson said. “My hand does feel forced.”
Hyniff Collins, a Penn junior, never considered himself a Trump supporter in the past, but he decided to vote for him this cycle due to his religious views on abortion.
As Collins wrestled with his decision, he questioned Trump’s spread of misinformation about the 2020 election being stolen. While he believed Trump’s remarks were problematic, he was confident that the peaceful transfer of power to the next president would be upheld.
“I got swayed by this idea that our systems are good enough to curtail anyone who is mad for power and to have faith in those systems,” he said.
A mile from Penn, members of the Philadelphia Young Republicans in “Make America Great Again” hats crowded into a dimly lit bar. Sounds of clinking bottles and cheers filled the room with every cable-TV prediction signaling a possible Trump victory.
Attendees said they were concerned about the economy, foreign policy, and immigration, and were unhappy with the Biden administration’s approach to those issues. However, many said they disagreed with Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 election and said they hoped for a peaceful transfer of power in January.
Nicholas Salerno, a recent graduate from Temple and lifelong conservative, said the last four years had been a “disaster.” He was particularly frustrated by Biden’s push to cancel some student debt, an issue he believes should not be the responsibility of taxpayers.
As Trump took the lead in several swing states, Reagan Reese, a Penn junior, said she was excited about the possible national reaction to a Republican victory.
“I feel like it will be kind of satisfying just to see the outrage,” Reese said. “At the end of the day, if you really identify that much with a politician, you really need to evaluate yourself as a person.”
College-age voters have traditionally not turned out in large numbers, but that started to change in the 2020 election, with an estimated 50 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds casting a ballot.
Some students said they booked last-minute flights to vote in person after not receiving their absentee ballots by Tuesday, according to videos circulating on social media. Many hailed from the swing state of Georgia, where as many as 3,200 Cobb County absentee ballots were not mailed out until late last week due to higher demand and equipment failures, according to election officials.
Georgia’s Supreme Court ruled Monday that mail-in ballots had to be received by 7 p.m. Tuesday — overturning a lower court decision that would have accepted ballots until Friday as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.
