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The right is winning its war on education

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The second Trump administration has shown remarkable aggression in abruptly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at elite universities — in an effort to force them to make major policy changes in line with the president’s politics.

Trump officials revoked $400 million in research funding to Columbia University. They’ve also paused $175 million in funds to the University of Pennsylvania.

They’ve threatened dozens of other schools. And the National Institutes for Health (NIH) is also trying to change its research funding formula in a way that would hit elite universities particularly hard.

The administration’s demands on these schools include cracking down on protesters of Israel’s war in Gaza, disallowing trans women athletes from women’s sports teams, and ending the practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in admissions and campus life. For Columbia, Trump officials even demanded the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department be taken out of the hands of its current leadership — a threat to academic freedom from the state.

All this fits into a larger strategy. Right-wingers have increasingly come to believe that elite universities are one of the main incubators of “woke” cultural progressivism; that winning the culture war requires a more aggressive attack on top schools.

Trump officials believe the tens of billions of dollars in research funding the federal government provides academic institutions gives them leverage to make this happen.

They are apparently correct. 

Columbia agreed to give in to various demands, though Trump officials haven’t yet said they’ll restore the revoked $400 million.

All this comes at a cost: This funding is largely for scientific and medical research. Until recently, there was bipartisan agreement that research funds shouldn’t be used to play political games. Now, though, it’s being used as a weapon.

Many on the right have spent much of the past decade seething about the Great Awokening — the leftward move of the culture around race, gender, and sexuality in the mid-to-late 2010s. Influential voices on the right argued that “wokeness” was in large part created by elite universities.

This claim seemed to ring true to those frustrated by the leftward cultural shift. It named a specific enemy that could be fought against, as part of a strategy for gaining cultural power for the right.

So by 2021, then-Senate candidate (and Yale Law School alum) JD Vance was arguing that conservatives “have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” 

The idea of pulling federal research funding from universities due to excessive wokeness was kicking around during the first Trump administration. Trump even signed a toothless executive order he claimed would do this back in 2019. 

In the early 2020s, though, the right’s backlash against academia intensified, due to three factors.

One, a backlash against the medical establishment that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic. Two, the backlash to campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Finally, political conditions have changed: The second Trump administration is far more willing to bend — and blatantly break — the law, to try and get what they want.

For instance, the revocation of Columbia’s funds, analysts have said, is illegal. Still, all this seems to be working out quite well for the administration, as universities appear to be conceding to its demands.

Despite the seeming illegality of Trump revoking Columbia’s funds, the school didn’t sue to stop it. Per the Wall Street Journal, the university feared a court fight would spur Trump’s team to find other legal avenues to take back those or other federal funds that had not yet been revoked. 

It seems that Trump officials and right-wing activists really did figure out how to effectively use federal funds as leverage to coerce universities. Such cuts would be devastating and universities deeply want to avoid them.

But the Journal cited another reason for the school’s concession: The school’s leadership also “believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”

University trustees and administrators, according to this reporting, believed the Gaza war protests needed to be reined in. At least in part, they were using Trump’s demands as an excuse to make changes they wanted to make anyway.

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