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Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented attack on US universities. How far will it go? Will it trigger a brain drain? And could other countries replace what’s lost? I discussed this with Lee Bollinger, former president of Columbia, one of America’s leading schools and the first target of the attack. To indicate Columbia’s level of turmoil, consider that since Bollinger’s departure in 2023, after a 21-year tenure, two more presidents have left.
If you haven’t been following the drama, here’s a summary. Citing pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus, the Trump administration stripped the university of $400mn in federal funding last month for supposedly permitting antisemitism. It is threatening dozens of others with similar measures and has already cut billions in funding for scientific research. It is now reviewing $9bn in federal funds for Harvard. And some normally tax-averse Republicans in Congress favour much higher taxes on the endowments of rich colleges.
The attack takes the form of “rightwing woke”: restrictions on supposedly racist speech and the “cancellation” (or abduction) of offenders such as the Columbia graduate and permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil, arrested and jailed for protesting over Gaza. The government has told hundreds of foreign students suspected of campus activism to self-deport. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” secretary of state Marco Rubio told journalists in March.
Why was Columbia Trump’s first target? One theory is that he has a personal grudge against it. Around 2003, when Trump was offering Columbia a property for about $400mn, Bollinger decided not to buy it. Trump didn’t forget, still branding him a “total moron” in 2010. Might Trump feel Columbia owes him $400mn, I ask Bollinger? He demurs: “I can’t imagine that somebody would hold that in their mind.” He thinks Columbia was targeted because it’s in anti-Trump New York and was the supposed “epicentre” of pro-Palestinian protests, even though the university cracked down on protesters last year.
Bollinger, a free-speech scholar, says “the playbook of authoritarianism” includes attacking the press and universities. Trump has also gone after judges, lawyers, civil servants and regulators. Bollinger rejects the parallel with 1950s McCarthyism, which attacked Hollywood, universities and civil servants. Joseph McCarthy “was only a senator”, he notes. He “didn’t have the power of the executive branch and seemed targeted more at individuals than institutions”.
A better comparison might be with authoritarian leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who have stifled universities. Scholars such as Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley go further, calling Trumpism “fascist”. They aren’t sticking around to watch — all are leaving Yale for the University of Toronto.
Bollinger wants universities to unite and fight the government’s assault in court. There’s little sign yet of that. Columbia’s initial response to the attack was to cave. Very few universities have uttered a peep in solidarity. Bollinger diagnoses a national naivety about authoritarianism.
How does it end? “I am not naive. When facing a determined and hostile government, you are unlikely to win,” Bollinger says. “They can make life unbearable for universities.” Ominously, Trump seems to value very little that universities do. Federal funds for research that Trumpians like, such as space travel, could be reallocated to corporations.
This is a crisis for the US, but also the world. The American university system, with its 1.5 million professors, is the best resourced in global history. It rests on America’s unique selling point: wealth plus scale plus intellectual freedom plus immigration. (Leading scholars are disproportionately immigrants.) Trump is curtailing freedom and immigration.
This system can’t be replicated outside the US. Only democracies can support free academic enquiry, and none has a remotely comparable university system. There have been more news articles hailing Aix-Marseille University’s offer of “scientific asylum” for American scholars than the 15 academic posts it hopes to fund. Only superstars such as Snyder can easily find berths abroad.
Bollinger says: “I do not see a brain drain. People are in the American university system, and they think leaving is pretty risky.” Universities such as Columbia, with its 87 Nobel laureates, are global public goods, reliant on the American ecosystem. Much of their research couldn’t be done elsewhere. Bill Clinton called the US “the indispensable nation”. For universities, it is.
Email Simon at [email protected]
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