The MAGA assault on US universities has begun in earnest

And it appears that the universities are going to passively surrender

I wrote about MAGA’s coming assault on US higher education in the first week of the new administration. Here’s a brief update.

Within two weeks of the new regime taking office, the National Institutes of Health lost its director and deputy director and the new leadership announced that NIH was axing overhead costs on research grants — the operational lifeblood of large research universities. (Like everything else Team Trump has been trying to do, this effort caught up in litigation, through who knows whether the Trumpniks will pay attention to adverse rulings.) Should it move forward, these moves will kill the golden goose of US biomedical research.

The regime has also been threatening to withhold federal funding from colleges that do not kill programs at odds with the MAGA agenda, including abolishing DEI efforts and banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. Two new fronts were opened last week with a direct targeting of Columbia University, ostensibly because of its coddling of Gaza protestors last year — including the demand that it place one of its academic departments in receivership. And on Friday, the regime announced investigations into 52 universities as part of its DEI crackdown. All of this entails a viewpoint-based assault on academic freedom that is unprecedented in American history, way beyond even McCarthyism — though, as my friend John Aubrey Douglas wrote a couple of years ago, it is a standard part of the modern authoritarian playbook.

In an interview this week with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Bollinger, former Dean at the University of Michigan Law School and longtime President of Columbia University, lays out the stakes:

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as the people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the startegy is to create and illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize the universities, and you’re on your way.

We’re beginning to see the effects on universities, and it is very frightening.

Five brief observations:

1. The MAGA axe is falling on all fields whose Wissenschaft is at odds with the ideological agenda of some faction of MAGA. This includes not just definitionally “woke” departments like ethnic and gender studies, but will envelop the whole of the humanities, as well as biomedical research and climate science.

2. True to its nativism, the new regime seems especially keen on reining in transnational scientific collaboration. Furthermore, as MAGA closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become physically impossible (not to mention intellectually indefensible, as John Quiggan says).

3. As of yet, there appears to be little if any coordinated pushback against any of this, either politically or even as an industry. If you look at the websites of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the International Association of University Presidents, the American Association of Colleges & Universities, or other similar organizations, you’d have no idea that anything untoward is happening. Incredibly, despite the unabashed way MAGA telegraphed its intention to do all of this, university leaderships appear to be totally unprepared. What I take this to mean is that it’s going to happen, more or less unopposed.

4. I expect that the evisceration of US research universities will spell the end of the long US dominance of research publications. It will also hasten the collapse of peer review — already in trouble for several reasons, including the replicability crisis and a business model predicated on free labor from US academics — as the standard quality control mechanism for scholarship.

5. It is a sign of the times that several French research organizations and universities are now beginning to offer landing spots for US academics who find they “can no longer pursue their activities in their country of origin due to wars, political persecution, or censorship.” This may save a few individual careers, but obviously it’s not going to work for more than a tiny fraction of the half million+ ladder rank faculty in the country.

These are just ongoing field notes from the front, so I don’t have any big conclusions around this, so I’ll just repeat what I’ve been saying on this topic for years:

In 1933, German research universities were by every measure the greatest in the world. This intellectual power was in turn a cornerstone of German industrial and ultimately military might. In a few short years, however, using tactics not dissimilar to the ones listed above, the Nazis destroyed them — not least because the universities themselves went along with what was being done to them (Selbst-Gleichschaltung, as it was known). And nearly a century on, German universities have still not recovered, despite many proposed efforts — and neither has Germany’s prestige or power.