As lunch ended in the private dining room outside the Oval Hall on April 1, President Donald Trump launched a surprising proposal: What if the government simply canceled all the dollars of the nearly $ 9 billion promised to Harvard University?
The administration campaign to eliminate the “Woke” “Woke” ideology of university campuses had forced Columbia University to sign a deal. Now the White House was keeping an eye on the oldest and richest university in the country. “What if we never paid them?” Trump asked casually, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussion. “Wouldn’t it be cool?”
The moment highlighted the aggressive approach and to this which continues to shape one of the most consequent policies of the new administration. Trump and his main advisors are exercising control over huge sums of federal research money to change the ideological inclination of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intended to perpetuate liberalism.
The effort was energized by the campuses against Israel’s response to the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas, demonstrations during which Jewish students were sometimes victims of harassment.
Task force
Shortly after taking office, Trump formed the task force to combat anti-Semitism, which is examining prominent universities in search of possible civil rights violations and serving as an entry to press schools to reevaluate their policies.
The group is supported by the influence of Stephen Miller, who is Trump’s office deputy chief of staff and the president’s domestic agenda architect.
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The opaque process is destabilizing the campuses across the country, leaving elite institutions, accustomed to operating with relative freedom in relation to Washington, stunned by a forceful political attack that is in the forefront of a larger cultural battle.
The task force includes about 20 administration officials, most of which the government has not publicly identified, citing potential safety risks. They gather each week on a rotary list of federal agency headquarters in Washington to discuss university campus discrimination reports, review universities subsidies, and prepare discoveries and recommendations for Trump.
In a parallel road, some powerful advisors in the West White House, including Miller, moved separately to obstruct the financing of large institutions without formally passing through the task force. These advisors spoke in particular about overthrowing a high profile university to signal their seriousness, two people said with the conversations. And they have partially suspended research financing for more than double schools than the task force.
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This report on the internal operation of the Higher Education Pressure Campaign is based on interviews with more than two dozen administration officials, university leaders and external counselors on both sides. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations because they feared retaliation against their campuses.
Columbia in Harvard
The White House got an initial victory with the capitulation of Columbia last month to a list of requirements that included the hardening of disciplinary policies and the installation of a new supervision of the Middle East Studies Department, southern Asia and Africa at the university. Since then, Trump administration has expanded its focus to six more of the country’s most exclusive universities, including Harvard.
When Trump discussed in particular the interruption of all payments to Harvard, the task force had begun a funding review. This led the administration to send to the university a list of requirements on Friday (11), including that it brought an external “to audit those programs and departments that most feed anti-Semitism harassment or reflect ideological capture.”
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The government also insisted that Harvard would change hiring and admissions in departments where “diversity of views” lacks and “immediately close” any programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Harvard said on Monday (14) that he would not give in. The university president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in an open letter that most of the administration’s requirements “represents a direct government regulation of ‘intellectual conditions’ in Harvard.” The university, added Garber, “will not give up its independence or renounce its constitutional rights.”
In a separate letter, two external lawyers representing Harvard informed administration officials that the university “is not prepared to agree with requirements that go beyond the legal authority of this or any administration.”
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Hours later, the task force announced the suspension of more than $ 2.2 billion in subsidies and contracts for Harvard. The scope of the administration campaign is now about to expand. The Department of Education warned 60 universities that they could face repercussions on pending investigations on accusations of anti -Semitism.
Loss of confidence
The impulse comes at a time when public trust in higher education has plummeted in the last decade, according to a Gallup survey in July. The fall was driven mainly by concerns that colleges are promoting political agendas, not teaching relevant skills, and costs, showed the research.
However, university leaders were stunned by the rapid attack, without a clear sense of how Trump administration chooses its targets, based on which criteria is formulating penalties or how to defend itself.
Many see the effort as a widespread attack on academic freedom, designed to crush the influence of higher education. “I have never seen this degree of government intrusion, invasion of academic decision -making – nothing like that,” said Lee C. Bollinger, who spent 21 years as president of Columbia and more than five years leading the University of Michigan.
For their part, Trump Administration officials and their allies say they are trying to hold a system that receives about $ 60 billion in federal research funds each year, while educating about 15 million undergraduate students.
“We are not just seeking to file lawsuits-we want to compel a cultural change in the way American Jews are treated at university campuses,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi, a member of the task force, in an interview.
Left Battle
But the effort went beyond approaching anti -Semitism, with schools being the target of diversity programs and support for transgender athletes. In the view of some of Trump’s closest counselors and the main donors, leftists have controlled the most powerful institutions in America, including higher education pillars, and recovering power is fundamental to the future of Western civilization.
“Universities seem to have all power and acted as if they had all power, and finally we are revealing that we can achieve this where it hurts,” said in an interview Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who defends the strategy.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump looked from his panels in rallies and described a nation he saw as full of conservative discrimination. And for him, nowhere political injustice was as widespread as in university campuses managed by “Marxist manic and lunatics.”
Weeks after starting his third presidential candidacy, Trump announced a “freedom of expression policy initiative,” promising to cut dollars from federal research and support for student loans from universities involved in what he widespread as “censorship activities or electoral interference.”
Six months later, he complained about “racial discrimination” in higher education, suggesting that universities were becoming increasingly hostile to white students. He promised to open civil rights investigations in schools that promoted diversity and reinforced these threats when the Supreme Court rejected the affirmative action in university admissions.
At the same time, Miller, Trump’s longtime counselor, was working on similar issues at America First Legal, the non -profit organization he started during the Biden administration. The group sued New York University and Northwestern University, accusing them of discriminating on white men.
Trump turned more intensely to combat anti -Semitism as a political cry after October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants led an attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, which was the deadliest day for the Jews since the Holocaust. The war in the Gaza track followed, as well as months of protests, particularly among pro-Palestinas students in university campuses.
Thousands were arrested as they occupied the dean’s offices, harassed Jewish students, raised improvised camps, and interrupted graduation ceremonies.
In the campaign, Trump characterized the protests in personal terms, stating that “furious lunatics” were manifesting on the campuses to distract central immigration issues for his campaign. “To all universities presidents,” Trump said in a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, “win the radicals and recover our campuses to all normal students.”
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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