This Is How Universities Can Escape Trump's Trap, If They Dare

New York Times

14-04-2025

Almost three months into the Trump administration's war on universities, and a year and a half into the Republican Party's organized campaign against the presidents of top colleges, it is clear that antisemitism and D.E.I. are mere pretexts for these attacks. Like much of what this administration does, the war on higher education is driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. Trump is building a mafia state, in which the don distributes both money and power. Universities are independent centers of intellectual and, to some extent, political power. He is trying to destroy that independence.
There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump's will, and it requires more than forming a united front. They must abandon all the concerns — rankings, donors, campus amenities — that preoccupy and distract them, and focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Intellectuals have adopted this strategy to fight against autocrats in other countries. It works.
Because Trump views everything as transactional and assumes everyone to be driven by profit, he has approached universities the same way he approached law firms and, arguably, countries: by deploying devastating financial threats against each one individually, to compel compliance and prevent coalitions. Trump could have started by imposing a tax on universities' endowments, a move that almost certainly would enjoy broad popular support. That, however, would presumably affect every major university, which could prompt them to band together. Research grants, which are specific to each university, are an ideal instrument to divide and weaken them.
His first target, Columbia University, acceded to his demands within two weeks of losing $400 million in grants and contracts. When Columbia's first sacrifice didn't bring back the money, the university made another: its interim president, Katrina Armstrong. That didn't satisfy Trump, who now reportedly wants Columbia to agree to direct government oversight. He is also brandishing financial threats, separately, at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern — and still there is no sign of organized resistance on the part of universities. There is not even a joint statement in defense of academic freedom or an assertion of universities' value to society. (Even people who have no use for the humanities may see value in medical schools and hospitals.)
It shouldn't be this easy to cleave universities from one another, but, so far, it seems to be easier even than making law firms compete for the don's business and favor. This may be because law firms define success in a way that is at least marginally closer to their ideal function (helping to uphold the rule of law) than the way universities define success is to their ideal function, which is producing and disseminating knowledge. Most prominent American universities, most of the time, measure their success not so much by the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the world as by the size of their endowment, the number of students seeking admission and their ascent in rankings by U.S. News & World Report and others, which assess the value of a university education in part by looking at graduates' starting salaries. As for professors, while universities do compete for the best minds, they more frequently compete for the loudest names, in the hopes that these will attract the biggest bucks.
In conversations with my colleagues on these pages, I have compared the universities' current predicament to the prisoners' dilemma, the game-theory model in which two people accused of a crime have to decide to act for themselves or take a chance and act in concert. It's a useful model to think about, but it doesn't quite fit. The universities are not co-conspirators: they are competitors. And they want more than to return to the status quo ante: They want growth. They might even want to win the research funding that the other guy lost.
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