Trump & Academic Freedom: A US Higher Education Crisis

“We informed the administration that we will not accept the agreement they proposed. The university will not abandon its independence and constitutional rights […]. We act with the conviction that a fearless and free search for truth frees mankind, and with faith in the enduring value that American colleges and universities carry our country and the world, ”the 31st president of the university, Dr. Alan Garber, addressed such a message in mid-April. Other addressees of the text were US President Donald Trump and his officials.

Garber’s appeal was published on Monday, and three days earlier, on Friday April 11, the university received a “letter of happiness” by signing three federal departments at once: the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health and Social Services, as well as the management of general services.

Officials demanded:

• carry out the reform of management with increasing the role of the leadership and a decrease in the influence of students;
• revise the policy of hiring teachers and taking students to “strengthen conservative views”;
• conducting an external audit of all university programs for their “ideological capture” and anti -Semitism;
• excluding everyone who is “hostile to American values ​​and institutions”;
• prohibition of programs of diversity, equality and inclusion;
• strengthening disciplinary measures against students and teachers who “violate order” on actions;
• the introduction of a three -year federal audit supervision of the university.

The unconditional fulfillment of the requirements resembling reactionary reforms in Russian education from Alexander III should have become a condition for continuing federal financing. Taking two days off for reflection, Harvard in the person of Alan Garber refused. A few days later it turned out that the letter was probably sent by mistake, or at least prematurely, but by that time the federal financing of long -term programs of the university in the amount of $ 2.2 billion was already suspended.

The uprising of professors

“Harvard’s statement confirms the opinion common in the most prestigious universities and colleges in our country that federal investments are not related to responsibility for compliance with civil law laws. It is time for elite universities to take this problem and make significant changes if they want to continue to receive taxpayer support, ”the special interdepartmental commission for combating anti -Semitism in universities and colleges created by Donald Trump in February said in this subject.

A letter of April 11 is not one of a kind. Back in March, the Ministry of Education demanded from 60 leading American universities, including Harvard, to protect Jewish students from the encroachments of the missing activists, threatening the suspension of funding. To confirm the seriousness of its intentions, the department preventively terminated several agreements on federal grants. Then, without exception, the recipients did not dare to argue with the state and behaved flexible.

Harvard president was also originally determined to solve the case with the world. Garber personally flew to Washington several times, met with Republican senators, stopped partnerships with the Palestinian Birzeit University, fired the leadership of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies-his program was “not sufficiently balanced”-and closed one of the Harvard school programs, representing a “unilateral view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict”.

Attempts to blossom the state did not work – it turned out that the requirements of the new authorities go far beyond the fight against anti -Semitism and are essentially aimed at subordinating and restructuring the entire system of higher education in the country. In addition to freezing federal grants, Harvard Donald Trump demanded to deprive the university of tax benefits. In addition, the country continues a real hunt for foreign students noticed on the missing actions. According to the INSID Higher Ed, more than 1,700 people were detained and, bypassing standard procedures, they were transferred to temporary content centers, while their visas were canceled.

In such an environment, Harvard was the first of the American universities to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration, demanding to restore funding in full, to withdraw the requirements for officials and henceforth prohibit the government in the internal affairs of the university.

“The government did not reveal – and is not able to identify – no rational connection between the problems of anti -Semitism and medical, scientific, technological and other studies that it froze and which are aimed at saving the lives of Americans and maintaining the positions of America as a world leader in the field of innovation,” the lawsuit said.

Alan Garber emphasized his Jewish origin and intention to deal with anti -Semitism and hatred in the walls of the university with all seriousness, but also made it clear that the university would continue to stand on its own, “defending the values ​​that made the American higher education by a lighthouse for the whole world.”

In response, the representative of the White House Harrison Fields expectedly stated that “Harvard does not fulfill the conditions for access to taxpayers” and that “federal assistance to such universities is coming to an end”.

More than 200 chapters of leading universities and colleges, including Princeton, Columbian and Washington Universities, signed a letter “against unprecedented state arbitrariness and political intervention that jeopardize American higher education”. In support of Harvard, the American Association of University professors, who also filed a lawsuit against the presidential administration, and a number of world scientists, spoke.

“We all agree that students must comply with the law, but the administration’s letter gives us little reason to believe that its concept of violation of the law will not be interpreted so widely as to include legal, peaceful disagreement,” wrote Harvard professor of psychology and the author of world bestsellers Stephen Pinker. In a joint article with a professor of public administration Tarecom Masud, written on behalf of the Harvard Academic Freedom Council, he emphasized – he encroaching on the basics of the constitutional system with his interference in the affairs of the Trump universities.

Penis as a social construct

The conflict between the conservative part of the American society and the university environment, mainly Levoliberal, who voted behind Trump, has long been smalling. Many ideas, full of humanitarian faculties – about structural racism in American society, that the gender is only a social construct that is not related to the biological sex – did not cause the conservatives nothing but irritation. The conflict was aggravated in the mid-2010s, in the era of BLM, which was actively supported by universities, a surge of interest in LGBTK culture, the spread of the abbreviation Dei (diversity, access, inClusion-diversity, equality, inclusion), incurred not only in the new rules for hiring in corporations and a set in prestigious Universities, but also on television screens. The camp of opponents of this Woke revolution was full-prominent writers (Joan Rowling), bloggers and public speakers (Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro), public intellectuals (Jordan Peterson) joined him.

In 2017–2018, a philosopher from Portland University Peter Bogosssyan, together with his colleagues, James Lindsay and Helen Placro, published in leading sociological magazines 19 obviously nonsense, but corresponding to the latest Woke trends. In their texts, they proposed to treat transfoby with anal stimulation, add elements of astrology to the programs on astronomy in order to make the first “less sexist”, force white students to sit during lectures on the floor so that they would better feel guilty for the slave of their ancestors, as well as consider “conceptual penis, isomorphic, performative toxic toxic masculinity”. All articles were unhindered by a scientific examination and were published by confirming the alarming assumptions of the authors of the experiment – the social sciences in the West have really big problems.

Against this background, the trust of American society in the university environment as a whole was significantly reduced.

In 2023, when the missile protests flared up in university campuses, Project 2025 was published, a kind of anti-Woke manifesto on the reconstruction of the American state, the authors of which under the new administration were in leading roles. Among other things, it was proposed to ban Dei programs at universities, revise the financing of universities promoting Woke ideology, to eliminate the “critical racial theory” from educational programs-in a word, much of the fact that Trump is trying to implement in practice right now. When, in April of the next year, students of Colombian University, protesting against Israeli’s actions in Gaza, literally seized several buildings and entered into direct confrontation with the police, and on social networks, videos with the persecution of Jewish students were distributed, Donald Trump took advantage of the situation for his own election campaign. He stated that he was pleased to observe the defeat of the students of students, and called the march of Kukluksklanovites and other near -footing organizations in Charlotsville in 2017, ending with the death of one and injuries of dozens of people, “real trifles” compared to missile protests.

Despite the fact that in the ranks of the protesters there were many students from Israel or with Jewish roots, Trump made a fight against anti -Semitism one of the key elements of the campaign, promising his sponsors to discard the missing movement “25-30 years ago”. Once in the White House, he almost immediately started fulfilling his promises – on the basis of ministries of justice, education and healthcare, he created a united operational group to combat anti -Semitism, sent tens of universities and colleges, began to freeze federal financing of universities and announced a real hunt for protests. It soon became clear that “opposition to anti -Semitism” was nothing more than the reason for a large -scale attack on the entire system of higher education in the country.

“In some cases, their requirements not only contradict the constitutions, but also do not have legal grounds,” says Jamil Jaffer, professor of the law of Colombian University, in an interview with The Economist. He indicates that Article VI of the Law on Civil Rights of 1964, which officials refer to and which really prohibits organizations receiving federal financing, discriminate against racial or national features, does not imply automatic introduction of sanctions. “Measures to restore order” should be introduced after a thorough investigation and touch only specific programs within which violations occurred. Moreover, they cannot serve as the basis for suspension of financing in general.

Free universities of a free society

“Within three quarters of the century, the federal government allocated grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to pay for work, which, along with the investments of the universities themselves, led to innovations in many areas of medicine, engineering and science,” Alan Garber reminded in his appeal to the Harvard community.

The result of an informal pact, concluded after the Second World War between the American government and universities and implying state funding while maintaining complete academic freedom, almost fifty Nobel prizes became Harvard alone. University scientists have developed methods of genetic diagnostics (Walter Gilbert), learned to treat children with innate deafness (Zheng-Wi-Wi-Wi), opened revolutionary methods of therapy against diabetes (Joel Habener), clarified the quantum-wave nature of the light (Roy Glauber)-the list can be continued for a long time.

In parallel, scientists had to defend their independence from government attacks, which began long before Trump. In the mid-1950s, in the era of McCartism and the fight against the “red threat”, the Prosecutor General of New Hampshire Luis Wayman investigated the activities of several prominent activists and university teachers for their relations with communists. Under the powerful state press was economist Paul Suisi, teacher of the University of New Hampshire. Having refused to cooperate with the investigation and answer the questions of the Whiman and his people, he was sentenced to imprisonment, but he went on bail and appealed. In the framework of this case, the judge of the US Supreme Court Felix Frankfurter, Harvard graduate and professor of law, issued a conclusion by which Suisi was fully justified.

“Free society depends on free universities,” Frankfurter wrote then, creating an important precedent for relations between universities and power.

In 1961, General Dwight Eisenhower, the former president of Colombian University and the 34th President of the United States, wrote in his last appeal to the nation from the White House about the increased role of federal funds in conducting expensive research and warned about the associated potential danger to academic freedom of universities.

“Universities, which historically served as a source of free ideas and scientific discoveries, survived the revolution. Partly, due to the huge costs associated with this, the state contract often replaces intellectual curiosity today, ”Eisenhower said, urging him to be seriously attributed to the prospect that the state would try to feed scientists and manipulate them.

Five years later, in the midst of protests against the war in Vietnam, the Republican Ronald Reagan, who ran for the post of Governor of California, really intervened in higher education. He made a promise to “restore order in Berkeley” by one of the slogans of his campaign. Reagan really introduced the National Guard into the campuses of the leading research university, fired President Berkeley Clark Kerra, who refused to suppress protests by force, and reduced the university’s financing by 20%.

However, it never occurred to Eisenhower, nor Reagan that it was possible at once, contrary to the law, to completely freeze the state financing of the largest universities, facing not only the independence of the academic environment, but also dozens of vital research. For example, at the University of Colombian alone, it was necessary to suspend the project to use artificial intelligence for early detection of cancer, cancel scholarships for beginner oncologists. The Harvard was threatened with a project in which scientists were looking for methods to slow down the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The topic applies to almost 7 million Americans.

Elephant tower attack

Now everyone is waiting for the decision of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts. If the judge refuses Harvard to satisfy the claim and confirms the right of the presidential administration to freeze financing, the university may try to get out of the situation at the expense of the huge enduum – a fund formed by numerous targeted donations. Its size reaches $ 53 billion, only slightly inferior to the budget of the state of Massachusetts. However, this fund breaks up into 14,000 mini-funds, for each of which the donors-private individuals or companies-defined specific goals, say, the maintenance of the aquarium in one of the buildings, a sports team or the payment of increased scholarships. It is extremely difficult to use these funds for another purpose, if at all, it is possible. Therefore, in the field of fundamental research, the university depends so much on budget funds. It is unlikely that the court will support Trump: federal legislation directly prohibits the president of the country to give the tax service similar instructions.

Loss in the court of the richest university of the country will become a science of other, less wealthy universities, forcing them to surrender under Trumpovsky pressure. Harvard’s victory, on the contrary, gives the resistance an additional impulse, but will hardly force Trump to abandon his anti-Woke program.

Professor of the University of Rutgers, president of the American Association of University Professors Todd Wolfson, even before Trump’s attack on Harvard, called his policies regarding universities “the greatest encroachment on academic freedom of speech and institutional autonomy, which we observed since McCartism.” Historian Ellen Schrek, the author of the book “No Elephant Tower: McCartism and Universities” believes: what Trump does is much worse than McCartism. In her opinion, both repressive movements arose as a result of attempts by influential conservatives to turn the progressive social and economic reforms of the previous era. However, unlike McCartism, which was focused on the political activities of individual professors,

The attack undertaken by Trump affects almost all aspects of higher education – from audiences and laboratories to curriculum and personnel decisions. At the same time, the university environment is much less influential today than it was half a century ago.

“The current wave of threats and attacks can actually destroy the American system of liberal higher education, which we know it, and is aimed at this,” says Ellen Schreker.