By Susan Svrluga, Laura Meckler, Hannah Natanson · The Washington Post (c) 2024
University leaders are bracing for an onslaught of aggressive legislation and regulations amid growing hostility from an ascendant Republican Party that depends less and less on college-educated voters.
For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.
Now that rift has become a rupture.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, many colleges are preparing for threats to research funding, endowments, diversity efforts, student financial aid, visas for foreign students and more.
“I think it’s an extremely worrisome time for universities, extremely so,” said L. Rafael Reif, the president emeritus of MIT.
It’s a dizzying and upsetting place for universities which had become accustomed to reverence for their contributions to society and now find themselves tarred as “the enemy.” The shift is not just political, but cultural, with a hardening skepticism of expertise and academia, rather than faith in research, science and scholarship.
During his campaign, Trump called college leaders Marxists, said schools are determined to indoctrinate today’s youth, promised to root out diversity and equity programs and threatened to tax or even seize entire university endowments. “Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all,” he said last year.
And his vice president-elect, JD Vance, titled a 2021 speech “The universities are the enemy.” Colleges, he argued, do not pursue the truth, but “deceit and lies.”
Some schools are working to address critics on their own: encouraging more viewpoints on campus, increasing financial aid and working to boost career readiness. They are stepping up their defense of the importance of academia to the economy and national security. But they also are looking inward to consider where they may have gone wrong.
After the 2016 election, it was easy to dismiss Trump’s victory as an aberration, said Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. No more. Now, Trump is a force to be reckoned with and discontent with higher education is more mainstream than fringe. So while Roth declared areas in which Wesleyan will defend core principles, he also said universities need to be willing to listen.
“The American people have made their voices heard with their votes,” Roth said.
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What may be coming
Trump and his allies in Congress could go after colleges through legislation and investigation, regulation and rhetoric. While it’s unclear how far Republicans will go, GOP candidates have signaled interest throughout the year in all of the above.
Legislatively, Republicans could make good on threats to raise taxes on university endowments, perhaps via a tax bill that is set for debate next year. They could try to close the Education Department – an oft-voiced Trump goal. That would take away the colleges’ main point of contact and leverage in any administration and potentially some of the programs the agency runs as well. (Legislation to close the department has already been introduced.)
And Congress could act on sweeping GOP legislation to overhaul federal financial aid by, among other things, ending a loan program that aids graduate students and their parents and limiting the amount of money that students can borrow.
Lawmakers might also ramp up their investigations on topics including free speech, campus protests, instruction and whether admissions policies are complying with the Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action.
Last winter, House scrutiny of the pro-Palestinian protests helped spur the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.
“College presidents are right to feel nervous,” said Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Some of the proposals will be difficult if not impossible to do, such as eliminating the Education Department, which would require congressional approval and a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate. But other initiatives are within the administration’s control.
On the line are enormous buckets of federal cash, including financial aid programs and research grants. The government spent $114 billion on college financial aid in 2023, while federal research and development funding at universities totaled $54 billion in 2022.
As a candidate, Trump said he would press schools to fall in line with his ideological priorities. From inside the administration, the Trump Education Department could threaten to withhold federal funding for universities that do not comply with its politics and polices.
Civil rights law bars schools that discriminate on the basis of race, sex and other factors from receiving federal funds, and the incoming administration could pursue investigations against universities that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, or – as Trump put it during the campaign – practice “explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.” They could also threaten funds from schools based on policies around gender – forcing schools, for instance, to ban trans women from women’s athletics.
And universities are expecting rules about how they are to handle complaints of sexual harassment on campus to change for the fourth time since 2011.
Another powerful tool the administration could use to make colleges yield to Trump’s conservatives expectations could be accreditation, a process meant to ensure colleges and universities meet standards to participate in the federal student loan program. The president-elect has already vowed to use accreditation as his “secret weapon” to reclaim colleges from the “radical Left.” He has promised to fire current government accreditors and replace them with people who will require that schools uphold conservative values to receive funds.
“So they can and maybe will weaponize accreditation,” said Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University. “Though if you were to ask a conservative, they might say accreditation has already been weaponized to advance a left-wing agenda – and what we’re doing is using it to correct course.”
The criticism of higher education is shored up by conservative states that are also pressuring public schools along the same fronts.
In Texas, state Rep. Brian Harrison said he was gobsmacked when he saw that Texas A&M University offered a minor in LGBTQ studies. Then he learned about other classes at public universities he didn’t like, including one he said was on alternative genders. One class included, as part of the course materials, a podcast titled “Women in hip-hop push back against the male gaze.”
“Look, you want to study this stuff, that’s fine with me,” he said. “But do it with your own damn money. Not on the backs of my overtaxed constituents.”
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A growing divide
The gulf between Republicans and higher education has been growing for at least a decade. In 2015, Gallup found that about 56 percent of Republicans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in high education. By 2024, that had dropped to below 20 percent. Almost half of Republicans said they have “very little” or no confidence at all, up from about 11 percent in 2015. (Confidence also fell among Democrats, but nowhere near as much.)
At the same time, there’s been a profound shift in voting behavior based on educational attainment.
College graduates used to favor Republicans: In 1984, for instance, nearly 6 in 10 voted for Republican Ronald Reagan. Twenty years later, college-educated voters were evenly divided in the presidential race. And by this year, 56 percent favored Democrat Kamala Harris – one of the few demographic groups where the Democrats did not lose ground compared to 2020.
So Republicans are less likely to think highly of universities, and the people who graduate from universities are less likely to vote for Republicans. Both trends have given the GOP space to go after higher education.
Some say universities created, or at least expanded, the rift with both a liberal mindset and liberal policies – if not outright hostility to conservative thought.
That was the experience of Emanuel Hernaiz, a University of Georgia senior and chairman of the statewide Georgia College Republicans. A few months ago, his campus chapter invited Rep. Mike Collins (R-Georgia) to give a speech, but the legislator was barely through an introduction before student protesters interrupted him, Hernaiz said – and kept doing so every 5 or 10 minutes for the remainder of the event.
“It’s just very indicative of the academic environment, where people who are supposed to be the future of this country can’t even sit in a meeting with people they disagree with,” said Hernaiz, a 24-year-old consumer economics major.
Costs also drive negative perceptions, with the sticker price (which most people don’t pay) for the total cost of attendance nearing $100,000 a year at a few of the most expensive private colleges. President Joe Biden may have deepened the political problem with his aggressive efforts to cancel student debt. Whatever credit he got with beneficiaries, he also drove resentment among some who didn’t go to college that their taxes were bailing out those who did.
Another factor: dwindling trust and new skepticism of expertise.
Federal dollars for research skyrocketed after World War II, driven in part by the space race against the Soviet Union, when the threat was visible and there was bipartisan support for money to drive new discoveries.
But in recent years – fueled by the internet, which allows anyone to broadcast their views on any topic – there has been a societal erosion of respect for authority and expertise, said Ezekiel Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the quintessential aspect of expertise was the university.”
Also, the hostility to diversity and equity policies voiced by Trump has long been reflected in local clashes between conservatives and universities.
In Wisconsin, 36-year-old Nathan Crone, who works in IT and voted for Trump, recalled taking a “diversity course” at Lakeshore Technical College, where he earned a certificate in IT networking. As a veteran who enjoyed traveling to other countries during his military service, Crone hoped to learn about different cultures. Instead, the class “made me feel bad” for being a White, Christian male, he said.
That kind of teaching – overly focused on identity, race, gender and sex in a divisive way – has come to dominate higher education, Crone said.
“I would like to see colleges focus on skills that people can use in their jobs,” Crone said, “not things that are going to divide Americans.”
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At colleges, new fears and new thinking
Universities are reacting in a range of ways to the new politics of higher education – byboth responding to critics and pushing back against them.
Some highly selective schools are tackling college costs by increasing already-generous financial aid packages.
The University of Pennsylvania and MIT, for instance, both announced last month that most students from families earning up to $200,000 per year won’t have to pay any tuition. That threshold covers 80 percent of American households.
At the University of Montana, costs are already low, but the school is working to make sure students see a return on their investment. For instance, its career-readiness programs now begin at freshman orientation and include internships and partnerships to increase chances a student leaves school with a job in hand.
In recent days some schools, concerned about possible changes to immigration rules, have advised international students,faculty and staff traveling over winter break to be back to the country before the inauguration in January.
Many schools are adding training in debate and civil discourse to remind – or teach – students that college is meant to be a place to consider a wide range of viewpoints. Most schools took steps to keep protests over the Israel-Gaza war from becoming as disruptive as they were last year. Some have adopted institutional neutrality statements to avoid giving the appearance of ideological bias,and others, such as the University of Michigan, will no longer seek diversity statements in the hiring process.
And the University of Pennsylvania’s program in Washington is kicking off a multiyear project aimed at rebuilding relations between higher education and government, driven by concerns that the relationship is at the nadir.
Other leaders are speaking up about the essential role universities play in driving innovation, powering the economy, tackling global problems and bolstering national security. Reif, the MIT president emeritus, notes that many critical advances werepioneered at universities: quantum computing, artificial intelligence, CRISPR gene editing.
“Every country in the world envies what we have,” Reif said. “ … Where are the biggest universities in the world? The most advanced, the most well-known, the ones that produce the most Nobel Prizes? Most of them are in America.” Those universities attract tremendous talent from all over the globe, he said.
“That’s not a given – that’s not to be taken for granted,” he said. “It can go away.”
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Danielle Douglas-Gabriel and Scott Clement contributed to this report.