Donald Trump is attacking what made American universities great

The conservative counter-revolution began with a secret memo, at least as the tale is often told on America’s political left, with the mix of fear and envy characteristic of the conspiracy-minded. In the summer of 1971 Lewis Powell was an eminent corporate lawyer, soon to be nominated and confirmed for the Supreme Court, when he drafted a confidential proposal for the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell laid out a costly, co-ordinated, years-long programme to counter the left’s influence in the media, the courts, the boardroom and, above all, universities. “There is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source” of an intensifying assault on free enterprise, he warned.

The memo seems dated now, though not because the conservative institutions that Powell envisaged have become part of the political wallpaper or the matters that preoccupied him have faded away. The alarms Powell was ringing about Marxist faculty and “ideological warfare” against “the values of Western society”, and even about the specific influence of Herbert Marcuse and Eldridge Cleaver, can be heard, if anything, more loudly half a century on. What seems dated is Powell’s reasonableness. Liberal thought, he cautioned, was “essential to a balanced viewpoint”; conservatives should just insist on the same chances to speak that universities accorded communists. “Few things are more sanctified in American life than academic freedom,” Powell observed. “The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties.”

Did political imagination fail Powell, or did principle get in the way? Whichever the obstacle, it is not impeding Donald Trump. Like a bully going from table to table in the school cafeteria, he is muscling his way through the Ivy League, threatening or withholding federal grants to force ideological change, impounding money meant for the sciences to insist on changes in the humanities or even athletics. His most recent target is Princeton University. On April 1st its president, Christopher Eisgruber, disclosed that the government had suspended dozens of research grants to the college. He said it was not clear why.

Princeton was not among the ten universities listed for review by Mr Trump’s task force on antisemitism, the main reason the administration has given so far for its crackdown. But Mr Eisgruber has been unusual among college presidents in speaking up to defend higher education. In mid-March, in an essay in the Atlantic, he called the administration’s cancellation of $400m in grants to Columbia University “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s”. He is also chairman of the board of the Association of American Universities, which on March 31st issued a statement warning that “the withdrawal of research funding for reasons unrelated to research sets a dangerous and counter-productive precedent”.

Universities are so vulnerable to Mr Trump for a reason they, and America, are so strong. After the second world war, the government hit upon the idea that America could lead the world in innovation by sponsoring university research, an investment that has yielded countless breakthroughs and the best research universities in the world. The partnership was premised on the principles of academic freedom developed in the first half of the century and endorsed in 1957 by the Supreme Court, which found that “to impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation.”

Mr Trump sees no need to honour the terms of that partnership. Thus Harvard risks losing up to $9bn in federal grants and contracts because the administration accuses it of not protecting Jewish students and of “promoting divisive ideologies”. Hoping to head off Mr Trump, Harvard had taken such steps as pushing out two leaders of its Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, but he was not mollified. The administration has also suspended $175m in grants to the University of Pennsylvania because, three years ago, it allowed a transgender woman to compete on its women’s team, in compliance with intercollegiate regulations.

The administration does not appear to have the law on its side. By statute, the government is supposed to hold a hearing and then submit a written report to Congress of a legal violation before cutting off funds—and even then it can cut off money only to the specific noncompliant programme. But Mr Trump certainly has politics on his side. He knows how to pick his culture battles. Elite universities, which have become engines of inequality in American life, would not have been sympathetic targets even before their campuses were swept by identitarian politics and then protests over the war in Gaza. Now Harvard’s own president says he has been the victim of antisemitism on the job. Baiting Democrats into a defence of fancy colleges would further pigeonhole them as the party of the wealthy and credentialed. The failure of university presidents to speak up for one another—with such honourable exceptions as Mr Eisgruber—is making each more vulnerable.

Biology 101

But Mr Trump seems unlikely to stop with the Ivy League, and who knows how extreme his demands may become. His executive order of March 27th demanding an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution may offer hints. Mr Trump singled out a sculpture exhibition for representing America, along with other societies, as having “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement”. Which, of course, it did. Even more shocking, he condemned the exhibition for promoting the idea that race “is not a biological reality but a social construct”. To promote the idea that race is a biological reality is to nurture the feedstock of racism. It would be a dark day indeed if America’s great research universities were ever tasked with that project. ■

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