In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large. Comparing universities to the sci-fi totalitarianism of “The Matrix,” in which parasitic machines have seized control of reality itself, he said, “So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country is fundamentally determined by, supported by and reinforced by the universities.” Why, he asked, have conservatives consented to such intellectual tyranny?
Vance, then a Senate candidate, described being at a donor event and talking to a supporter about the absurdity of encouraging kids to take on debt to go to colleges that will brainwash them. The supporter asked, “What’s the alternative? I don’t want my kid to become an HVAC specialist,” installing and repairing heating and air-conditioning systems. With that attitude, said Vance, “we’re going to continue to empower the colleges and the universities that make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.”
Put aside, for a moment, the hypocrisy of this message coming from a man catapulted into the highest strata of American society by Yale Law School. The striking thing about Vance’s speech was its deep hostility to the entire academic enterprise, not just the so-called woke parts. He wasn’t talking about making more room for right-wing ideas in universities or even dreaming of taking them over. He wanted to destroy it all.
And now he’s part of a government taking steps to do just that. I’ve written about Donald Trump’s plan to crush the academic left, but it increasingly looks as if he and his allies are targeting academia more broadly, including the hard sciences that have long enjoyed bipartisan support. “I think the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities however possible,” Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at New America, a public policy think tank, told me. “It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain.”
This is the context for the Trump administration’s attempt, currently being challenged in court, to slash research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The details sound technical and very boring: The new policy would limit reimbursements for schools’ overhead expenses to 15% of grants’ value, instead of the 50% to 70% that universities often receive now. But if this goes into effect, the damage will be tremendous.
As H. Holden Thorp, the editor of Science, wrote, for every dollar spent on academic research, roughly another dollar is needed for lab equipment, support staff and systems for managing grants. Right now, the government funds a big chunk of these indirect costs, with universities picking up the remainder. If the government reduces its contribution to 15%, universities could try to close the gap by raising tuition and eliminating departments, but it wouldn’t be enough. Crucial research projects, including those investigating cures for devastating diseases, would have to be scaled back or jettisoned altogether.
These cuts could hit some Trump-voting states particularly hard. In Alabama, North Carolina and others, universities are among the biggest employers, which is why some Republican senators are at least gingerly objecting to the new reimbursement rules. But that’s only one reason the administration’s full-spectrum war on academia defies rational self-interest. The post-World War II system of government-funded research universities has fueled American scientific and technological dominance, but our continued preeminence is in no way assured.
China, after all, continues to invest strongly in its universities. “Part of our decline as a culture and economy would be our disinvestment in higher education,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “Maybe we’ll just invest in World Wrestling, but I don’t think that’s going to mean that other countries and other cultures won’t continue to invest in the capacity of their citizens to learn in such a way as to create new modes of living, new modes of fighting disease, new modes of creating companies.” To torch America’s advantage in these realms seems like madness.
But there’s a lot of madness in the air these days. In December, Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute published an article about how Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive whom Trump nominated to be secretary of education, could give the “college cartel” the “body slamming they deserve.” One of the first items on Eden’s list was capping the reimbursement of indirect research costs at 15%, exactly as the Trump team is trying to do. From there, Eden proposed that McMahon “should simply destroy Columbia University” — home, among other things, to one of the best medical schools in America — as a warning to other schools about the price of tolerating anti-Israel protest.
Ultimately, however much some in the Trump administration want to gut American universities, Carey doesn’t think they’ll fully succeed. These are deeply rooted institutions, some older than the Republic itself, many with powerful constituencies. After four years of Trump, he said, “they’ll still be there, but they certainly could be weakened. The quality of their work could certainly be diminished in ways that will take time to recover from.” Their weakness could be an opportunity for others. Eden suggested that Trump take steps to make it easier to start schools like the anti-woke University of Austin, “and even newer ones that no one has dreamed up yet. Musk University?” But why stop there? Trump University could be due for a comeback.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
