Hands Off Our Campuses: Our Universities Are Not Political Canon Fodder
Cornell v. Harvard, 2019 // Photo Courtesy: Kenneth C. Zirkel via Wikimedia Commons
President Trump has long been an adversary of academia. During both of his campaigns, claims that universities were silencing conservative voices, engaging in unfair admissions processes, indoctrinating students, and undermining traditional American values became familiar refrains. The perceived elitism of the nation’s oldest, most esteemed institutions—conveniently, the very institutions who brought out world-class scholars to criticize his policies—bred resentment and hostility among his base. And since even middle-of-the-road Americans are increasingly distrustful of higher education, waging a war against the Ivy League was an obvious political move.
But since Trump’s inauguration in January, that war has extended beyond rhetoric and rallying cries into concrete executive orders. In recent months, the Trump administration has exercised extra-constitutional authority to bully universities into acquiescing to his demands. He has infringed upon the IRS’s independence by demanding they revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status. He has violated universities’ First Amendment rights by using the federal grant money to change administrative practices and collegiate principles. And he has eroded fundamental rule of law by ordering international students to be removed from their homes and deported without due process. In claiming to fight censorship of conservative views, he is attempting to create a system that actively censors opposing ones. Apparently, while ‘silencing’ right-wing voices violates the First Amendment, cracking down on voices from the Left protects the country. But this begs the question: what is it being protected from?
Federal funding freezes have shut down programs essential to national stability. Experts have predicted that Trump’s decision to pause research into food security and climate resistance will lead to a rise in food poisoning. Cancer research at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University have been threatened. Graduate offers have been rescinded, causing pipeline issues for the next generation of researchers. The impact of universities extends beyond their student communities; attacks on their programs are attacks on the Americans who rely on their innovations.
Only an authoritarian leader—one who demands subservience and sees disagreement as an existential threat—benefits from the destruction of higher education. And when his base rallies around anger, hatred, and fear, universities are trapped in a no-win scenario—punished whether they challenge authority or try to remain neutral.
In a House committee hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) grilled the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania; though nuanced, their largely evasive answers struck a stark contrast with Stefanik’s indelicate but direct questions. There are valid grievances with how universities have handled issues of discrimination and accountability, and the presidents’ inability to speak plainly only deepened public frustration. This hearing revealed that when it comes to holding universities to account, a bipartisan public already dismayed with higher education has little patience for winding answers, legal jargon, and “depending on the context.” But (rightly so) it’s not in the nature of academia to be absolutist: this trio of scholars fell into a trap set for them by politicians who speak the language of headlines.
In Trump’s brute war on education, entire universities are reduced to a narrow group of administrative officials. The messy, democratic reality of higher education—thousands of faculty members, students, researchers, and staff engaged in inquiry, discovery, and debate—is erased, transforming complexity into caricature. This makes it easy for politicians to justify sweeping cuts and interventions: by framing universities not as a public good but as a threat, dismantling it becomes an act of patriotism. It’s a strategy as old as authoritarianism—delegitimize, isolate, and punish.
Universities are far from perfect. They can be exclusionary, slow to adapt, and politically insular. But the answer is not to destroy them. The answer is to defend the core idea that education serves the public, that knowledge production should be protected from partisan interference.
Our universities are not political cannon fodder. They are the best of America—the reason we have organ transplants, electronic computers, CAT scans, MRIs, DNA sequencing, Google, and so much more. They are the places where facts are interrogated until truths are uncovered. The right to prove, through research and experimentation, what is fact cannot be acquiesced to a politician who wants to bend truth for his political gain. Universities are not toys for politicians to stoke hate for and stake promises on.
If the far-right succeeds in eroding public trust in knowledge, if the narratives they spin become the narratives we accept as truth, the future of innovation, democracy, and progress itself will be compromised. A society that no longer believes in expertise, evidence, or intellectual rigor is one that cannot solve its most urgent problems. Innovation withers when science is politicized. Democracy falters when citizens no longer share a common understanding of fact. Progress stalls when public discourse is driven by conspiracy, resentment, and misinformation. And when that happens, we don’t just lose our universities. We lose the very foundation upon which free and forward-thinking societies are built.