The second Trump administration has shown a notable attack in abruptly cancelling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at elite universities to force major policy changes along the politics of the president.
Trump officials have revoked $400 million in research funding to Columbia University (illegally per expert). They also suspended $175 million in funding at the University of Pennsylvania.
That's probably just a start. They threatened many other schools. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is also looking to change the research funding formula in a way that particularly violently strikes elite universities.
Regime demands for these schools include cracking down on Israeli war protesters in Gaza, banning trans female athletes from women's sports teams, and ending practices of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in admissions and campus life. For Columbia, Trump officials have even requested the Middle East, South Asia and African Studies departments to be taken out of the hands of current leaders. This is a threat to academic freedom from the state.
All this fits into a bigger strategy. The right came to believe that elite universities are one of the leading incubators of “awakening” cultural progressivism. It advances leftist ideas on a variety of issues, makes young Americans social to believe them, and they help progressives dominate the culture.
They believe that winning the culture war requires a more aggressive attack on elite universities.
And Trump officials believe tens of millions of research funding the federal government provides to academic institutions will provide leverage to make this happen.
They are clearly right in this belief. On Friday, Columbia agreed to succumb to various demands made by Trump officials. It included giving campus police new authority to arrest student protesters, and moving the Middle Eastern Research Division away from current leadership. (Trump officials haven't said they'll recover the cancelled $400 million.
All of this is at a cost to the country. One important reason why Republican presidents have never tried anything like this before is that the funding of this research is primarily for scientific and medical research, and not generally “awakening” or political. Until recently, there was a bipartisan agreement that such research funding should not be used to play political games. But now it is used as a weapon in the war on the left and right.
“I think it's going to discipline them if they put universities in contraction, recession, budgetary declines and greater competitive market pressure,” conservative activist Christopher Loufo said recently. He hoped to threaten federal funds to the university in order to place them in “existential horror.” That's exactly what's happening.
How elite universities have come to rely on federal funds and how conservatives perceived this as leverage.
As World War II made the United States a global superpower and the Cold War pitted it against the Soviet Union, the federal government provided a major commitment to funding research to make the United States a global leader in science and technology. Much of that funding went to institutions of higher education, including researcher funding, experiments and other research from researchers affiliated with the university. (Student loans, on the other hand, have become another very important source of federal funding to universities.)
For almost the same long time, elite universities have drawn the rage of conservatives who claim that they are intolerant to the right, while they are addicted to the minds of American youths on their left path. For example, when protests against the Vietnam War and other issues of social justice ruled campus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Richard Nixon monitored the campus. “The professor is the enemy.
Nixon's administration and state government wanted new laws that would punish universities, but “most of these measures have passed and few have been enforced,” historian Ellen Schrecker wrote. There was also a tendency to burn further national debates that conservatives were upset over the events at elite universities.
But over the past decade, elite universities are becoming central to the right story about tormenting America, and conservatives have become more serious about trying to do something about it.
Many on the right have made efforts to be heavily awakened for most of the past decade. This is a movement towards the left of culture, focusing on race, gender and sexuality in the mid- to late 2010s.
University and university incidents, including alleged abuse of conservatives or people with views other than the left, attracted attention in the national media, and similar controversies quickly unfolded throughout American society.
An influential voice on the right argued that “hobbies” were largely created by elite universities. Rufo, for example, was the evolution of legal scholarship schools known as “critical racial theory,” and in order to beat it, conservatives must chase after elite universities.
Meanwhile, blogger Curtis Yalbin has been arguing for years that progressives dominate the country's culture because of the “cathedral.” Elite academic and media institutions distorted reality, with his announcement, setting the scope of acceptable political discourse to fit their preferred ideological frame.
Such an explanation seemed to be faithful to those on the right who were unhappy with the cultural change on the left. It named specific enemies that could be fought as part of a strategy to gain cultural power for rights.
So, by 2021, the then religious candidate (and Yale Law School alumni) JD Vance had insisted that conservatives “have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities of this country.” “Many of the things that drive truth and knowledge as we understand in this country” are fundamentally determined by universities that are “very hostile” to the right, Vance said. Why did he ask, did he make the conservatives accept the situation? Wasn't it time to do anything about it?
Why the second Trump administration ultimately tried to refund the university
The idea of withdrawing federal research funds from universities for excessive badness was kicking during the first Trump administration. Trump even signed an executive order in 2019 that he claimed would do this. However, this turned out to be almost toothless. The desire to punish the university wasn't so strong yet to really cause it.
However, in the early 2020s, new controversy further strengthened the backlash of rights to academia.
The second Trump administration is far more willing to bend the law, blatantly breaking it, and trying to get what they want.
Part of this was a backlash, particularly against medical institutions. During the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine skeptics and other controversy have deepened distrust of rights to scientists and public health experts. Therefore, putting medical research funds at risk no longer seemed so unthinkable to them. Certainly, it was definitely wanted.
As the department's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. currently oversees much of this research spending through the NIH. Kennedy and his allies seem eager to take the wrecking ball to the current state of medical research, not simply willing. (Columbia's $400 million frozen $400 million was funded by NIH.)
Meanwhile, another backlash began in response to the campus' protests against Israeli war in Gaza. While many students and faculty supported the protest, others, including key donors, opposed them, claiming that Jewish students were newly safe on campus. Trump took this as a cause. His threat to Colombia came through his new “Task Force to Fight Anti-Semitism.”
The last reason this attack on the university is happening now is because the second Trump administration is willing to bending and blatantly break the law in order to try what they want.
Analysts say revoking Colombia's funds is illegal. Professor Michael Doorf of Cornell Law School writes that the federal government can cut off funds to punish civil rights violations, but that's only after a long process. Instead, perhaps inspired by Elon Musk's “moving fast, breaking the law” approach, Trump officials just went ahead and did it.
This seems to have worked very well for the administration up until now, as the university appears to be accepting their demands.
Some schools are actively moving forward. Last week, the University of California announced it would remove the mandatory diversity statement from the employment process.
And despite what appears to be illegal for Trump to cancel Columbia's funds, the schools didn't sue in court to stop it. Instead, Columbia chose to seek an agreement with Trump officials. According to Douglas Belkin of the Wall Street Journal, the university feared that the court battle would simply drive Trump's teams and find other legitimate paths to regain those and other funds. (Columbia receives far more federal funds that have not yet been revoked.)
So it appears that Trump officials and right-wing activists have really found ways to effectively use federal funds as leverage to strengthen universities. Such cuts are devastating and the university is deeply hoping to avoid them.
However, a Columbia source in Belkin cited another reason for the school's concession. School leadership “believed there was a considerable overlap between the necessary campus changes and Trump's demands.”
Therefore, the report shows that university trustees and administrators thought the protests in the Gaza War had to go too far and be held back. At least in part, they used Trump's demands as an excuse to make changes they wanted to change anyway.
This is part of a wider dynamic, with previously sympathy for the cause on the left, or at least dislike fighting them – heading to the left. On the other hand, many progressives seem exhausted and disillusioned, no longer fighting back with much enthusiasm. When social justice activists feel that the arc of history is bent in their direction, it is no longer the first Trump administration.
The meaning here is ominous. Trump's research funding horror worked so well that he (and future Republican presidents) would certainly be encouraged to use similar tactics multiple times. Can future federal funding prerequisites follow a conservative agenda? How does a situation where universities are so dependent on federal cash coexist with long-term academic freedom?
