The Point: Trump and the Assault on Higher Education
2/5/2025
This week’s Point is written by Steve Striffler, a professor of Labor Studies.
Like many of you, we have been trying to make sense of the dizzying (and alarming) array of new policies, proclamations, and orders coming from the Trump administration. That higher ed is being actively targeted is hardly surprising given the last four years. A series of high-profile issues, particularly around DEI and campus protests, have become central to Republican messaging and have made higher ed a target in a way that it was not during the first Trump administration. This unwelcome attention, given momentum by the fact that many within the Democratic party either joined the assault or failed to oppose it, threatens our basic mission.
Not including Trump’s impending order to dismantle the Department of Education, below are a few – though by no means all – of the issues related to higher ed worth keeping an eye on and fighting back against:
Immigration -- On the day of his inauguration, Trump issued a directive that opened up colleges and universities – along with other “sensitive” areas such as K-12, hospitals, and churches – to raids by ICE or Custom and Border Protection agents. In addition to the potential harm to our students, and the possible disruption to campus, this obviously is not going to help the recruitment of international students. It is also worth noting that in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election hundreds of schools, colleges, and universities (not to mention cities, counties, states…) mobilized to demand that campus administrations protect undocumented members of the community – which many campuses actually did. Eight years later such support is severely muted, though hardly absent.
DEI – Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have been under attack for a number of years now. Trump’s election has put that attack into overdrive by declaring such initiatives as potential violations of civil rights laws. More than this, with DEI now being blamed for events as disparate as a bridge collapsing in Baltimore, a plane crash in DC, and antisemitism, it seems clear that opposition to DEI is now being weaponized to target more than the familiar initiatives on college campuses. In the hands of the right, the DEI label has become a dog whistle used to play on racist resentment in order question and undermine the positions, qualifications, and abilities of a wide swath of people, including most notably people of color and women. This onslaught shows no signs of slowing.
Title IX and LGBTQI+ Students – On Trump’s first day in office he signed an executive order declaring that the federal government would recognize only two biological sexes, ordering the federal government to use the term sex instead of gender. The order, in turn, instructs federal agencies to use this definition to enforce laws such as Title IX. Among other things, this rolls back Biden-era efforts to include LBGTQI+ students in its Title IX regulations by barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (even as those regulations were mired in litigation).
Campus Free Speech: Trump signed an executive order aimed to crack down on putative antisemitism, particularly at colleges and universities. The order emanates from a Republican report that accused colleges of failing to protect students against antisemitism while making “shocking concessions” to protesters who set up encampments (in reality, university administrators generally capitulated to threats from the right and squashed protest). Universities seem poised to roll over. Close to home, Harvard recently capitulated to outside pressure by adopting the overly broad definition of antisemitism from the IHRA, which misclassifies instances of anti-Zionism or anti-Israeli criticism as antisemitism. Trump also pledges to deport noncitizens who are “Hamas sympathizers,” which (among other things) is unconstitutional.
Reducing Support for “Minority-Serving Institutions” – Trump reversed Biden policies that provide support for Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Tribal Colleges and Universities. There could very well be more where this came from.
Grant Reviews Suspended at NIH – Perhaps most bizarrely, the Trump administration halted “external communications” at the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services, which resulted in the cancellation of research-grant reviews at NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. The uncertainty caused by the pause created havoc in the scientific community and does not bode well for the future of scientific research in this country.
The Trump attack is coming fast and furious, and thus far university administrators across the country have shown little gumption or capacity for fighting back. Our own administration, which in the past has never been shy about issuing all sorts of statements, particularly those in defense of our students, has (to our knowledge) been radio silent. This makes the role of unions as a defender of public education, students, staff, and faculty all the more important.