Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation
The New York Times
Many in higher education worry Trump’s efforts to bend academia to his will could end American leadership in research and science. Universities are not finding many allies to defend them.
In October 2023, three days before Hamas fighters attacked Israel, Columbia University’s new president stood outside Low Library and posed a foundational question.
“What,” she asked, “does the world need from a great university in the 21st century?”
The president, Nemat Shafik, argued that the world required much. Rigorous thinkers who were grounded in the age’s great debates. Researchers whose breakthroughs could transform societies. Universities that extended their missions far beyond their gates.
Seventeen months later, Dr. Shafik is gone and the Trump administration is offering a far different answer. The ideal Dr. Shafik described, much of it historically bankrolled by American taxpayers, is under siege, as President Trump ties public money to his government’s vision for higher education.
That vision is a narrower one. Teach what you must, defend “the American tradition and Western civilization,” prepare people for the work force, and limit protests and research.
“I have not experienced, across 46 years of higher education, a period where there’s been this much distance” between the agendas of university leaders and Washington, said Robert J. Jones, the chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
