Higher Education Under Nascent Fascism

Institutions of higher education, particularly the highest level R1 research universities, are Crown Jewels of American life. They are innovation factories fueling the growth of entire industries. They are centers of creative endeavors in the arts, music, and literature. They are generators of international soft power through collaborations and training and hosting of foreign students and scholars. They still function as engines of upward mobility for generations of young Americans, providing a promise of lives better than their parents.

However, because they encourage evidence based critical thinking, they run afoul of right wing authoritarians, who have little tolerance for independent minds. This administration, whose two leaders Trump and Vance are fans of Hungarian strongman Victor Orban and his crackdown on higher education, has gone after R1 universities since the inauguration.

I share the view of President Obama, in his recent conversation at Hamilton College: universities must find the courage to stand and use emergency funding from their endowments or creative financial moves to fight this administration head on, and they need to do so together. This will take bold moves by universities, which they must carefully explain to their constituent communities, which include using or borrowing against their endowments, and suspending activities not central to the core mission of the universities, such as intercollegiate sports.

It has been three weeks since Columbia University, under acting President Katrina Armstrong, capitulated to Trump’s demands upon them in order to receive $400M in scientific research funds that were being held back. Allegedly, with no underlying investigation, Columbia had allowed pro-Gaza protests to be accompanied by antisemitic behavior, which, of course, cannot be taken lightly. No student or staff should be fearful of stepping on their campus. But the Trump demands were extraordinary, effectively imposing the will and control of this capricious President on Columbia without any due process, and without regard to the fact that the grants were issued as legally binding contracts between the university and federal government. Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter said recently “this administration cares about antisemitism as a kitchen cabinet or a spoon.” Notably, the Trump demands involved activities centered on non-science departments, but the primary recipients of the blocked funds were in life sciences, showing it was about leverage, not principle. This is not a partisan issue, at least with reasonable parties across the political spectrum. As conservative columnist Rikki Schott said recently on Bill Maher, despite the problems of universities, “I do not want to live in a world where the president of Columbia University is the President of the United States.”

The result of Columbia’s surrender? Prof. Armstrong has resigned and returned to her lab, to be replaced by trustee and alumna journalist Claire Shipman as interim president. The Trump administration have indicated the actions she proposed did not go far enough, and none of the $400M have been released. Just yesterday it was announced that all NIH funding - $700M - to Columbia has been frozen. This is all too predictable. Trump is a bully, and bullies thrive on continued humiliation of their victims. Moreover, Trump has proven throughout his life that his word is meaningless, consistently stiffing contractors as a businessman, grifting with his brand tacked onto failed condominium projects or faux universities, refusing to pay cities for costs from his campaign rallies, and tearing up agreements with other countries he himself negotiated when he regards them as unfair.

Columbia was a test case. Trump is now emboldened, and he is going after other Ivy League institutions. Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and Penn (the alma mater of Trump and Musk) are in his cross hairs now, for varying reasons. $9B of funding is at stake for Harvard; the Trump administration has frozen $1B to Cornell and $750M to Northwestern. The bully logic is clear, too: if you can take down the most elite private institutions with huge endowments, then you can scare all the rest of the universities down the line. The Trump administration has prepared a list of 60 colleges and universities across the country that they say have done too little to protect Jewish students.

It is not just antisemitism weaponized against universities. Cutting the National Institute of Health indirect cost rates directly impacted the R1 universities in a harmful way, inhibiting the ability to support research activities on campus, and many universities have suspended or severely limited graduate admissions in biomedical related fields as a result, with some departments rescinding offers that have already been made. Any scent of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities on campus draws the attention of an army of Roy Cohn-like Trump acolytes to pressure the schools or cancel grants; as a result, major universities like Ohio State have eliminated top administrative positions aimed to increase DEI. If any foreign students have publicly spoken out in political ways the administration does not like, they are finding their F1 visas withdrawn or worse, such as being grabbed off the street like Tufts student Rumeyza Ozturk, who wrote a pro-Palestine op-ed in the student newspaper.

If anything is clear from the Columbia experience, it is that capitulation does not work. The Trump administration will not relent in their effort to control and/or wreck universities.

I understand the extraordinary pressures Armstrong, and now Shipman, are under to satisfy the competing interests of the constituencies under their own roof as well as big donors, and to balance that against the dire consequences of losing such an enormous amount of research funding. I understand that there are laws in effect to prevent university leadership from lobbying; obviously, they could lose their 501C3 status if they are not careful. I also understand that while Columbia’s $15B endowment provides some potential backstop against the $400M in lost funds, many of those monies are specifically tagged towards activities, departments, or buildings on campus, and not easily fungible for other purposes.

Still, as the example with Columbia illustrates, you have to fight the bully to preserve yourself.

What can be done? First, the R1 universities and other schools targeted by Trump must stand together. There are already class action law suits against broadly cut or frozen research funds. All R1 universities should file amicus briefs in those suits if they are not already co-plaintiffs. Faculty at U Mass Amherst, one of the targeted institutions, have drafted a letter calling on the leaders of these institutions to join together in opposition to Trump. To date this letter has received signatures from over 2800 faculty at the sixty schools, and over 1800 from allies at other institutions. Nearly 2000 members of the National Academies of Engineering, Medicine, and Science have signed a letter calling out the crisis for science caused by the Trump attacks on funding.

When Trump goes after individual universities like Columbia, there is a strong legal case to be made, and Columbia lawyers said this to their administration. But law suits take time, and Trump and his lawyers are masters of kicking the legal can down the road. So, there is a need to generate funds to cover research activities in the interim.

Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, noted that schools with huge endowments like Harvard and Columbia can tap into those in times of emergency. This is a five alarm fire in academia. A detailed discussion of the Harvard endowment suggests about 20%, roughly $10B, can be drawn on for these purposes.

Besides direct use of endowment funds, other approaches exist; for example, Princeton University is considering issuing short term bonds to raise capital for bridging funds to keep research moving. For state universities with smaller endowments, appeals can be made to the state governments to help keep activities moving until the legal cases move through the system. This will give the necessary backstop to proceed with lawsuits.

But there must also be action on the legislative front, and that cannot be directly done by the universities for the reasons mentioned above. How can the universities reach their communities who can in turn call their Congressional representatives to pressure the Trump administration from Capitol Hill?

To me, it makes sense to suspend activities non-essential to core research and education missions of the universities, and to use this as a teachable moment for the broader constituencies outside the university. Tops on that list are intercollegiate sports. Notably, there is an extraordinary overlap between R1 universities and NCAA Division I sports universities, as the figure above shows.

As the College Football Playoff illustrated in January, and the recently concluded NCAA March Madness tournaments for men and women showed, most Americans associate universities with their highly visible sports programs, and they are a bonanza for broadcast television and marketers. They also provide visibility for individual universities which may have some benefit for donations (at least when their teams win) and for applications from students across the country. They give a free advertisement to participating universities during games about the educational and research activities on campus.

What they do not do, despite widespread belief, is generate direct revenues for the university. They most often lose money or break even at best. And the top programs are very expensive to run. Consider Ohio State, a perennial national title contender in football, winner of the championship this past season. For FY2025, they had direct revenues of $254M and expenses of $292M. While there is certainly a multiplier effect from the sports programs, the sustained funding from research grants has a bigger economic impact on the university and the central Ohio community. NIH funding last year to Ohio State was $245M, and the flagship university of the Buckeye state received $477M altogether. The multiplier effect of the graduating students working in high paying jobs or creating new businesses is clearly large.

How to reach the citizens? Universities must explain that the core functions of research and education are under existential threat from this President, and that if the university goes down, so will the sports. Suspending sports will get the attention of the media, local politicians, Congress, and the broadcast and marketing industries as well as professional sports that rely so heavily on the athletic programs to provide entertainment and talent.

It is of course, unfair that young athletes could bear some of the burden for the actions of the Trump administration, and sporting events unify the student body. But while there are 190000 Division I athletes, there was an enrollment of at least 1.8M graduate students in 2022. But asking student athletes to not play for a while so that hope for these graduate students is not murdered seems a small price to pay.

If the universities go the Columbia route, it will not stop. Trump and Vance have made their ambitions clear. In his Agenda47 Videos for his campaign, Trump suggested going after elite private universities through fines, suits, and taxing their endowments private universities to create an “American Academy,” which would be online, free of charge, and funded by the assaults on the existing academy. Vance, as Senator, proposed increasing the endowment tax from 1.4% to 35%. 

These are difficult times, and despair is contagious. But, as former Vice President Kamala Harris noted, so is courage. May all of us in the broad university community be so positively infected.