Higher Education Showdown: Trump vs Ivies

A reign of terror is raging through the world of American higher education. The Donald Trump administration is as determined as it is vindictive against what it sees as the political, intellectual and administrative transgression of the liberal conscience of this world. It has been chillingly strategic about dismantling programmes in its arch enemy, measures in diversity, equity, and inclusion. The most recent spectacle has been the battle between Harvard University and the Trump administration, with Harvard pushing back against the federal government바카라�s diktats on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and the government hitting back with restrictions on the university바카라�s recruitment of foreign students and scholars.

In spite of everything, I remain an optimist. As someone who has studied and taught in the US for many years, I believe in the integrity and the robustness of its institutions, and particularly that of its judiciary. As I write this, news has come in that the court has granted Harvard a temporary restraining order on the United States Homeland Security바카라�s attempt to strip the university바카라�s ability to recruit and retain international students, who make up a quarter of its enrolments. Rich and formidable, Harvard may be harder to bully than others, but I believe more universities will push back. They will negotiate with the government, relent to some claims, as Columbia University has done, but also deceive and dissemble wherever they can바카라�such as playing around with trouble-giving terminology in their policy language. I was in the US earlier this year and I saw universities work around DEI initiatives simply by removing words such as 바카라�gender바카라�, 바카라�race바카라�, 바카라�diversity바카라� etc from their statements and websites, but not essentially changing the function of these offices. The hope is to work around agents of the government, placate them with neutral terminology, but carry on with as much of the work with DEI as before.

I want to believe that these days of intense destruction and helplessness, too, will pass. But on the same note, it feels impossible to believe that the world of American higher education and research will ever be the same again. It just doesn바카라�t feel realistic to imagine that we바카라�ll see any more of the great American century of global leadership in academic excellence and innovative research.

Universities Without International Students, Researchers and Collaborators?

Such a reality is unimaginable. Just think about the way these great universities evolved. Clark Kerr, the legendary president of the University of California, identified the three institutions which converged to make the modern American university: The British undergraduate college, the German research university, and the American land-grant college. If the land-grant college embodied the institution바카라�s practical value to the local community, the undergraduate college experience provided its populist element, through fraternities, Greek life, football, and pastoral care-driven pedagogy and residential life.

The advent of the German research university model in the US in the 1880s provided the final element바카라�the elite value of high scientific and philosophical research. The parochial, locally sponsored institution finally attained a cosmopolitan stature and a global reputation. Through the 20th century, and particularly since the Second World War, it was the elite appeal of fundamental research coming out of the American university that drove its global reputation, pushing it up the ranking charts worldwide. But the American university has shaped a formidable combination of contradictory strengths for over a century바카라�the populist, the practical, and the elite, which kept one another in check as well as fortified the system collectively.

Institutions Without Popular Support

But over the last couple of decades, an unlikely consortium of forces has destroyed this enabling nexus between the populist, the practical and the elite that upheld the American university as the world leader in higher education and research throughout the 20th century. Skyrocketing tuition has come to erode the practical value of college, justifying only the preparation of a handful of lucrative professions to the exclusion of the whole range of disciplines.

The rising costs have been traced both to the withdrawal of government support as well as the increasing corporatisation of the university through the appointment of managers and vice presidents and the corresponding adjunctification of faculty. Popular support, particularly from the alumni, has rapidly declined in a drastically polarised nation, and most intensively since the breakout of the Gaza protests on university campuses. The resignation of the Harvard President Claudine Gay was largely spearheaded by a campaign by powerful conservative alumni, such as the influential social media action by Christopher F. Rufo. And all of this has been happening against the larger backdrop of a large section of the American public바카라�s loss of faith in the power of college바카라�to achieve social mobility, to get a job, or to improve their lives in any way. In the absence of the popular and the practical, the elite has only come to alienate people. Most crucially for now, pro-Zionist forces among both Jews and Christians are very strong and influential in the US, and Israel has always been a lightning rod that is now on fire. And the universities are burning.

Trump바카라�s Opportunism

The fact is that as president, Trump has inherited this climate of pervasive mistrust and disenchantment with institutions of higher education that have been both deep and wide across the US for some time now. Of course, he has manipulated and exploited it in a way only a powerful populist dictator can바카라�but this mistrust and disenchantment had started to take shape long before his ascendancy. The optimist in me refuses to give up the hope that America바카라�s institutions will push back, and the nation will survive this initial phase of shock, shackle and burn that this new government has unleashed on its universities. The cynic in me worries that the larger climate of disenchantment with college, which has helped to legitimise Trump바카라�s chainsaw massacre, will not change even if and when this initial onslaught is over.

Losing Faith in Higher Education?

The most terrifying fact is that this is probably the worst time in history to lose faith in higher education. Not that there was ever a good time for this loss. But as a wide variety of jobs and skills become irrelevant with the invasion of machine intelligence in the coming years, a sizeable section of the workforce will need ways to retrain and re-educate themselves. AI will do a lot of things for us, and massive wealth will be produced for a tiny number of oligarchs, whose core is occupied by the techno-feudalists. But just the way digital culture and social media created a false sense of mass empowerment while turning the masses into unsuspecting markets for the techno-feudalists, we now know that AI will eventually perfect this exploitation where the immense economic benefits of machine intelligence will be sucked up by a tiny minority of cloud capitalists.

Nothing feels more ominously ironical in the face of this reality than the drastic cuts to the US Department of Education engineered by the newly formed DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk. The decimation of the federal umbrella over education carried out by the arch cloud-capitalists of our time is meant to leave education and related funding to the whim of the states, which is exactly a far-right fantasy. In that reality, how committed the Red states and federal granting bodies will remain to the cause of research and higher education will be a grim guessing game.

A Cold, Machine Future

The obsolescence of higher education, in the popular American mind, while rooted in several substantial historical factors, looks all set to be finally catalysed by a phenomenon we now know well in our post-Truth world바카라�the crafty stimulation of mass anger by multi-billionaire oligarchs. In reality, for the vast majority of people, urgent questions about life, skills, and employability will depend on constant and innovative re-education. But the clever stimulation of popular resentment against the perceived elitism of higher education only leaves the masses to the mercy of oligarchs who have aced the populism game. But I worry that in the inhuman world of patterns and algorithms trained only to maximise profits for the techno-feudalists, there will be no mercy for humanity.

(Views expressed are personal)

Saikat Majumdar is professor at Ashoka University and senior fellow, Institute of Advanced Study, Budapest

This article is part of Outlook Magazine's June 11, 2025 issue, 'Living on the Edge', which explores India바카라�s fragile borderlands and the human cost of conflict. It appeared in print as 'Poisining The Ivy.'