Adam Harris
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
It's like, if you're going to say that you're going to investigate anti-Semitism with like a vigor that no one has ever investigated it with before, and you... Remove half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights that actually investigates anti-Semitism. The thing to do wouldn't be to remove people who are investigating those complaints.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
The thing would be to beef up that staff so that they didn't have 20, 25 cases on their load, so that they could have those five to 10 complaints they were really focusing on.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yes. And, you know, it's interesting, over the last several years, right, last couple of decades, actually, there's been this argument that Institutions don't teach students how to think. They teach students what to think. That's what conservatives say. That's what conservatives say, right?
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
It was one of the first things that Betsy DeVos said when she became the education secretary was that colleges are teaching students what to think as opposed to how to think. And in some ways, this effort— is actually trying to do that. It is trying to teach students, this other stuff is out of bounds, right? But this is the acceptable sort of curriculum for your class.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
These are the acceptable things that you can say. And even if they're not saying it explicitly, institutions are taking it as such. We've already seen some colleges, such as High Point University, when that Dear Colleague letter came out that said, make sure you're not using race or using sort of discriminatory language in any of these things.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
They sent out a letter to their faculty, to their staff, and said, remove all of these. They gave them more than 40 words and said, remove them from everything. get rid of them in your PowerPoint presentations, get rid of them in your curriculums. They ended up walking that back. But you see the sort of chill that that already starts to have when administrators are thinking,
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
I don't want to lose my funding. And so I'm going to go ahead and say, let's just get rid of all of that in our curriculum.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
So it's difficult to detect a trend there. There is a way that you can sort of have a veil of legitimacy on any investigation. And so if you have received a complaint from a school of anti-Semitism, You can say that, okay, that's going to be the school that we're going to investigate.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And knowing that all it took was 14, you know, 15 days for the administration to go ahead and remove all of, you know, $400 million of Columbia's funding, those institutions may be more likely to say, whoa, let's like do whatever they're saying for Columbia to do. Let's go ahead and do that.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, so for an institution that is, say, more tuition-dependent, they rely on the students paying their tuition and that tuition helping them to meet payroll. Title IV funding is incredibly important because if you are not allowed to take loans from students, if you are not allowed to get Pell Grants from students, then a tuition-dependent institution is going to go out of business.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
For bigger institutions like Columbia, these are institutions that have federal grants from the NIH, that have federal grants from the Defense Department, that have USDA grants, that have grants from the Education Department. So it's very varied, and the tentacles are all through the federal government. Yeah.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And so there's this idea that's sort of been bubbling up that, well, these institutions have big endowments. Why don't you just start using that? There's a fundamental misunderstanding about endowments. That's not just like fungible money that you can say, oh, well, that's $50 billion. We can spend $10 billion and make up for it tomorrow because most of that money is tied to very specific things.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Say a donor made a $400 million donation to the School of Fine Arts. If you start using that for payroll generally, you can guarantee you're never going to receive a single dollar ever again because people can't trust you to be good stewards or faithful stewards of that money. They can also sue you. And so there are some colleges that are just, you know, from 30 to 40 percent of their students
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Budgets really kind of come from the federal government. But that's not to say that like this is a completely foreign system, right? This is – there is not a successful higher education system in the world really that is not – sort of subsidy-driven, that doesn't receive significant government subsidies.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
So there's been a lot of sort of internal back and forth at institutions. You haven't really seen many public responses in part because there's a sort of keep your head down and hope that it's not you. You know, some of the, you know, smaller institutions, maybe public institutions, are
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
For some of the public state institutions, they're trying to fight like things that are going on in their own states, right? Consider a place like Ohio where they have a bill that's supposed to reform higher education. Florida, Texas, North Carolina, all of these states, there's this big federal thing that's going on.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
But you also have these state reforms, whether that's to tenure, whether that's to – sort of established a conservative center on campus, whatever it may be. They're also thinking about those issues as well. And so a lot of presidents are in sort of a keep your head down, try to avoid being noticed. And if it's happening over there, then it's not happening to us.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And we're already thinking about our budget for the next year, as opposed to a cohesive pushback to say, this is an attack on higher education more broadly rather than these singular institutions.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
I do, because we've seen institutions in the last few years be pushed into these policies that say that... These policies where they say they won't make public statements about political events, right? In Ohio, in that bill, it said that public colleges can't make statements about partisan or ideological statements outside of celebrations of, like, the United States and the flag, right?
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Like, really sort of jingoistic, patriotic statements. And... Pushing back doesn't have to look like being – like a president being out in the streets. But it does look like reaffirming your institutional principles and living up to your institutional principles, right? Because a principle is only a principle when it's tested, right? And a belief is only – you only actually have a value in like –
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
make public that value when that value is under attack. And so if higher education doesn't believe in the principles that it was founded on, then institutional leaders should remain silent. But if they do, then there's a kind of obligation there. It's one of the reasons why they get paid so much.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
I don't know if it's a fully fleshed out view, but they have pointed to certain institutions and said, this is what it could look like. Those institutions are Hillsdale College, the College of the Ozarks. You know, I actually went to the College of the Ozarks when Pete Hegseth was speaking.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And there was this really, you know, a sort of telling quote that he gave during his speech was just like, you know, I went to Harvard, I went to, you know, the Ivy League institution. Those places have lost their way. This is the sort of place that's doing it right, right? This is the future. And you look across the student body, it's... majority white and not even like a slim majority.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
It's students who, when I spoke to them, talked more about the idea of it being a A place where they could go and not have to have a ton of loans on the back end of going to college. But it was also a place that has – it's the only college in the country with a vice president of patriotic activities.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Every student is required to take a patriotic education course where it's like a mix of current events and the founding documents alongside like military training. And it's not a military school, right? So it's – I don't know that there's a fully fleshed out idea, but I know that there are institutions that they point to as examples of what a college should be.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And there are also places that they can point to like a new college now and how to make that happen.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And if it's not a sort of fully fleshed out one to this point, it is much further along than it was when Orban launched his assault. I think one of the other things that was really interesting about that piece that Ruffo wrote was that he talks about the ways that things seem normal.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
By normal, right, you— He talks about like, oh, people talk about it as if it's like an economic backwater or, but, you know, business goes on as usual. But there is this like quiet, administrative, instructional war that's going on in education, sort of reshaping things.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And so it's like, make everything seem as normal as possible while also launching this assault that transforms the way that a country fundamentally works.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, he argues effectively that one of the more significant things and a thing that wasn't necessarily understood broadly at the time was the way that Orban undertook this effort to sort of reshape institutions both publicly and privately to create a sort of conservative elite.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, well, Rufo says that they're facing some of the same issues that conservatives in the United States are, right? The sort of rejection, as he calls it, rejection of sexual difference. the sort of liberal creep into the sort of more general institutions.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And Rufo really finds surprising the ways that Orban was able to successfully combat that in his creation of that new sort of conservative elite in Hungary.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, it's sort of take it back, bend it to your own means, strengthen what they believe are the sort of cultural foundations, right? He talks about family life. He talks about Christian faith. He talks about historical memory. And what a lot of conservatives feel that they've lost is that control of historical memory, right?
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
When you think about some of the history curriculums that have been attacked over the last several years, it has been because those curriculums are a sort of fundamental reassessment of of the position of some of our most celebrated figures in American public life.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
In a lot of ways, yes. We're only 60-some-odd years into the idea of a multicultural democracy, right, since the Civil Rights Act. And a lot of people feel that we lost something when we moved into that era. And so effectively, some of this is trying to reclaim that visage of that sort of pastoral past that we lost.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah. So, So Christopher Ruffo is a conservative activist who, around 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, started looking into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. And he started writing a bunch of blog posts and articles that really examined the DEI in several different areas.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
He would pull some of the most jarring examples and sort of use those as a way to indict the entire apparatus that has grown up out of the civil rights movement. But by September of 2020, some of those articles, some of what he said on TV gets to President Trump during the end of his first term.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And that really launches this broader interrogation that we've seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, well, around December, actually, there was a piece that came out in the Washington Examiner by a conservative, you know, education scholar, Maxi Eden, who argued that Lyndon McMahon could do a couple of things upon being confirmed as the education secretary in order to overall higher education and to ensure that institutions sort of got into line.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And one of those things, he argued, was to take a prize scalp. A prize scalp. A prize scalp. And that's a quote unquote. And he said that institution would be Columbia University. that the administration should go after Columbia as hard as it can. If Columbia did not comply, it should remove its Title IV funds.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
If Columbia did comply, then they should find another way, or they could find another way to remove funding from the institution. And so when one of the first institutions to receive a big hit on their funding, $400 million from Columbia, the first thing that came to my mind was, oh, this is a part of the playbook that they talked about in December.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, well, over the last, you know, year and a half, really since October 7th, when students started protesting the war in Gaza, Columbia has become the sort of poster child for the ways that higher education is doing things wrong, right?
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Out of control. You know, the student protesters are controlling the institution. The leadership doesn't really have a wrangle on its faculty. There were criticisms of the curriculum. All of these things. And Columbia, right, and most Ivy League institutions aren't necessarily places where people are going to jump to defend them, right? These are places that have... multibillion-dollar endowments.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
When people say that they don't trust higher education, they don't mean their local community college. They don't mean the public regional down the road. They mean Harvard and Columbia because it seems like an unattainable place where the elites are developed anyway. And so... Over the last two years, really, you've seen these attacks on Columbia and how they've handled anti-Semitism on campus.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Or you've seen attacks on Columbia and what they're teaching to students. And the imperfect plaintiff nature of Columbia makes it easier to say, well— Everyone has said you're not handling this well, so let's go ahead and remove your funding. And it would be one thing if they sort of stopped at Columbia.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
It would be one thing if they came into office, did a long investigation into what's going on, because that's typically what happens, right? As someone who's covered the education department for the last, you know, seven, eight years, anytime you have a Title VI investigation in cases of discrimination, those typically take months, if not years, to complete.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah. So in that piece that I mentioned from December, the argument was you remove the funding from Columbia in order to scare other institutions into compliance. And if those institutions don't immediately comply, then they also know that, well, I can get my funding taken away, too. We have seen now $150 million away from Penn within days, right?
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
At least paused at Penn within days of launching or announcing an investigation there. And so it's really these timelines just don't necessarily comport, one, with the way things are done, but they also don't comport with a proper or legitimate investigation given the amount of staff they have now at the Department of Education.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, so there are a couple of various—it was interesting because the administration has gone farther than just saying, hey, you need to get everything in check, right? Figure it out, Columbia. They've actually given them a list of things that they could do in terms of disciplinary measures for students.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
They said that one of the academic departments needs to be put under sort of academic receivership, meaning that someone comes in from outside of the department to serve as the chair and sort of look over their curriculums and things like that. So there are these sort of very specific guidelines for what can and cannot be said on campuses.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And once you start restricting speech in one manner, that sort of means you can restrict speech in a lot of different ways. So if you say, well, you can't have these sort of pro-Palestinian protests in a specific area, and if you do, then we're going to take your funding away.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
There are a lot of things there that are reminiscent of the ways that southern governors used to say that students at Alabama State couldn't have sit-ins, otherwise they were going to remove the funding from Alabama State College, right? It's adjudicating specific behaviors and speech that students are making, which is really a threat to all of the principles of an institution.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
When an administration can come into an institution and say, you have to do this very specific thing. These are the policies that you have to implement. The principles of shared governance, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of a sort of free system of higher education really go away. And those same principles that are sort of the bedrocks of our democracy, right, the
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
The First Amendment is literally about free speech. When those sorts of things go away, it becomes a very dangerous environment that limits what people can say and do.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Yeah, yeah, I think, so that vision that Rufo discussed sort of happened in Hungary, where they're sort of trying to get back to the cultural traditions, the cultural values that the nation had, those sort of ideas of Christian faith, the ideas of sort of family life. In the same way, it sort of embodies that notion of make America great again.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
And so the question has always been, well, when exactly was America great? And over the last several years, there has been an argument that has built up in conservative circles that America was great. better off in terms of these ideas of personal liberty and the freedom of association before the Civil Rights Act was signed.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
That this sort of administrative state that has built up to enforce the rules of the Civil Rights Act. So you think about things like race-conscious admissions, which was just voted down at the Supreme Court. You think about these reassessments of curriculums, which prior to 1960s were legally allowed to obscure and or omit the contributions of African-Americans, of natives, of Mexican-Americans.
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
You consider the programs that were meant to diversify the workforce more generally. Those are some of the programs and things that conservatives are trying to attack in certain ways by saying that they basically discriminate against white people, that it's reverse discrimination to include those policies, which is why you see attacks—a part of this—
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
alongside that $400 million from Columbia was that broader letter, that dear colleague letter that said, hey, if you use race in scholarships, in hiring, in your sort of faculty committees, in your student groups, in any of these things, then we're going to investigate you and you are going to be in violation of Title VI. And when an institution hears you're going to be in violation of Title VI,
Radio Atlantic
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
they will start thinking, we're going to get our funding taken away in the same way that Columbia did. And so this push to eliminate the Department of Education runs alongside this broader push to get higher education under control, right? These are sort of parallel tracks that end up forming a double helix, right? They go right together.