The Face of Trump's Assault on Academia

The Trump administration is attacking universities on multiple fronts, notably by withholding research funds, going hammer and tong after Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs to a degree that many universities (hello Ohio State) are surrendering in advance, and pulling visas from both foreign undergraduate students and graduate students.

At first, it was easy to chalk this up to the general slash and burn philosophy of the Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), Elon Musk’s ad hoc group of hackers and hacks that have been clear-cutting department after department. But Elon’s crew runs with chain saws, and these cuts to higher education have a surgical precision. Whoever was behind this had a clearly thought out strategy to attack revenue sources for colleges and universities. They had studied these institutions and figured out the leverage points.

So, who is the evil genius behind this? It is looking more and more like Chris Rufo is the guy. Above is his face. And it turns out, he also has an Achilles heel, which it appears Harvard has figured out. More on that below.

Precision Cuts

First, let’s examine the evidence that the cuts were precise and thought out efforts to hurt universities’ bottom lines and engender dissent.

The first sign of precision is dropping indirect cost rates to 15%, first at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and then the Department of Energy (DOEn). This was a clear shot at university administrations. It also showed some inside baseball knowledge, who knew that foundations have low indirect cost rates (usually 10%) and negotiated federal rates are much higher. It is no secret that indirect costs are large; when I began my career at Ohio State in 1986, they were 45%, which shocked my young brain, and when I finished at UC Davis they were nearly 60% (which barely registered as a blip given my career long mindset). Faculty love to complain that while these are supposed to cover things like lab costs, hazardous wastes, that in their perception services have dropped, administrators have risen in number, and grants just don’t go as far as they used to. All of which may be true-there could be a value in lower indirect costs, but a precipitous drop to 15% with no discussion is not a reasonable approach to that debate.

Second, withdrawing visas also hits colleges both on revenues and implementation of research grants: undergrads from abroad pay premium non-resident tuition at state universities and receive less financial aid at private schools. Hence, they are a key part of academic business models in an era of shrinking state support and a diminishing pool of domestic applicants. Graduate students actually implement the research programs that are funded, and there is no secret that for years there have been insufficient numbers of domestic applicants for science and engineering PhD programs.

Third, whoever devised the strategy knows that universities have become highly dependent upon federal research funding, and that it goes predominantly to the sciences and engineering. NIH funding to universities, for example, was about $30B last year, while the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was $211M, 150 times less. Conversely, most of the students and faculty who have drawn conservative ire in the Gaza protests and DEI scrums are in the humanities and social sciences. So the architect of the plan understood they could drive a wedge between the “hard sciences” and engineering and the humanities/social science sides of campus with this strategy.

Enter Rufo

Back to the villain of this piece. Chris Rufo, as you may remember, is the architect of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) backlash, which has been remarkably effective at shutting down or hampering decidedly NON-CRT activities in K-12 programs across the country. Rufo knew well that CRT is an advanced framework developed to expose and study institutional racism in society, but by conflating CRT with ordinary American history programs that reveal massacres, slavery, racism, and genocide in our nation’s past, and associating DEI frameworks in all manner of organizations with CRT, he appealed to the white replacement mania on the right. All over the country, conservative leaning people suddenly hated CRT, saw it everywhere, and could not at the same time really describe accurately what it was. In the wake of the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests, Rufo began to get an audience at the Trump White House in 2020.

Rufo was rewarded for his efforts by Ron DeSantis, who named him to the New College Board of Directors. New College was a fascinating liberal arts college run by the state of Florida that prior to the DeSantis/Rufo overhaul, attracting students from all across Florida looking for an alternative university education. Past tense is appropriate here. With his zealous colleagues, Rufo and the board did away with Gender Studies, denied five faculty tenure, fired the president, closed down the office of DEI on campus, and wound up driving 36 faculty from the small school. Students arriving to the new landscape in the fall of 2023 had a hard time finding courses to fulfill their major studies, and many transferred out (Hampshire College in Massachusetts was a beneficiary).  

When the protests on Gaza hit campuses in 2023 and 2024, Rufo sprang into action again, pelt hunting for University presidents who had been overly coached by their legal teams in public appearances to provide tepid, halting responses to questions about antisemitism on campus.  His biggest trophy was Harvard President Claudine Gay, who had been hit hard by her lackluster Congressional testimony over whether Jewish students had been sufficiently protected in campus protests, and then was further rocked by allegations from Rufo and his followers that she had plagiarized others work. Gay, the first Black woman president of Harvard, was forced to step down. The presidents at Columbia and Penn also stepped down amidst the swirling controversy. In right wing circles, Rufo’s star rose higher.

This was lifted to new heights with Trump being re-elected in 2024. Rufo began to meet with the transition team, and openly propose attacks on the Ivy League universities.

Rufo and Trump 2.0

Fast forward to the first few months of the Trump administration.

Rufo’s fingerprints were all over the efforts to dismantle the Department of Education (DOEd), so much so, that New York Times conservative columnist Russ Douhat interviewed him in early March to discuss this plan. Towards the end of the interview, here is the big reveal:

This emerges from a context of curtailing student loans, another source of revenue for universities, and discussing how market forces can “discipline” universities. It is not tied to research funding at universities, but a month later this emerged in the Daily Podcast with Michael Barbaro, titled “The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack US Colleges.” Barbaro asked Rufo about the above quote in the context of research funds being denied elite universities like Columbia and Harvard. Rufo said this:

This confirms that there was a strategy, that Columbia was the test case, that the initial Columbia response was exactly what they were hoping for, and that the plan was to export this to ALL universities, as Rufo confirmed:

Wow. Rufo really believes strongly that the Higher Education industry needs shrinkage, that it is perfectly permissible to leverage scientific research grants which make up a huge amount of the funding he is talking about there (about $55B was appropriated for research in 2024 across all departments).

Rufo’s Achilles Heel

And therein lies the basis for a counterattack on Rufo and the Trump administration.

Rufo is a formidable adversary. He clearly does lots of homework on the things he attacks. But in this case, he is out of his depth. Later in the podcast, Barbaro asks a key question and followup (emphasis on the key exchanges)

Rufo is out for blood, but clearly does not give a damn about the sacrifice of scientific research he is invoking with this and has not thought about it. This is why Harvard’s response, on the Research Funding web page, is brilliant. They point out what is being cut out by Trump holding the research funding includes critical studies on cancer, heart disease, obesity, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, infectious diseases, and organ transplantation. People care about their health, even with a backlash against elites emerging from the COVID pandemic.

Also, while philanthropic support for research has increased with time, at major R1 universities, it is still considerably smaller than federal support. Harvard, for example, received $686M in federal support last year, the vast majority from the NIH. The total external support was $1B which suggests at most about $300M from foundations. Princeton received $298M in research funding in 2023 (with no medical school, the funding is far less than Harvard) of which $221M came from the Federal Government, and $43M from foundations.

Regarding Rufo’s assertion that Princeton can raise private dollars to replace federal ones, well, not really. Network theorist Albert-László Barabási and colleagues have studied the rise of philanthropic funding over time, and find that it is significant, but that

1. Philanthropic funding tends to reinforce elitism and track federal grants.

2. Philanthropic funding is more locally oriented, (e.g., the Gates foundation gives 10x more funds to Washington state recipients than other states)

3. Philanthropic funding is stable and relationship driven, which rewards established researchers in given fields but not necessarily new ones or scholars changing subfields within a discipline.

My own experience with private funding checks with these findings. In addition, the focus of foundation funding in my experience tends to be more narrow; for example, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has very specific interests in materials science and biological sciences at the cellular level. Nowhere do you find the breadth of research topics covered by the federal government, which also has more tolerance for researchers changing subfields within a discipline. The first part of my career was spent studying materials with strongly interacting electrons. The second half involved a switch to biological physics. I was able to find entry points at the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense for the the biological work.

The Authoritarian Linkage

One final point is that there is a common thread linking these higher education attacks with authoritarian regimes. Like JD Vance, Donald Trump (and apparently Vladimir Putin), Chris Rufo is a fan of Victor Orbán.

Rufo has been hosted by an Orbán-centric think tank in Hungary, and received $35K to deliver two lectures in Hungary on CRT and “LGBTQ+” propaganda. Rufo has defended his transparency on these lectures, though some have raised concerns about violation of foreign agent registration act (FARA) law. He also has praised Orbán directly for “using muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends.”

Conclusion

Rufo is clearly the guiding intellectual force behind the Trump attacks on higher education. What is clear is that no one expected Harvard to stand up for themselves, placing the products of federally supported research front and center in their defense. I also don’t think the administration is prepared for the emerging unity among a broad coalition of universities preparing to push back, from this AAUC statement from college presidents, to the faculty driven call for a NATO like mutual defense pact amongst universities. This kind of coalition amongst powerful, world renowned institutions was not really a possibility in the small country of Hungary where Orbán accreted power. I am eager to see where we wind up in the next few months.