If the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric against universities sound vaguely familiar, that may be because they’ve already happened elsewhere. Over the years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has dismantled his country’s higher-education system; cracked down on diversity, dissent, and critical thinking; and cast academic institutions as dangerous. So what does that mean for the future of higher ed in America? Further reading: Ian Bogost on “The End of College Life” Anne Applebaum on “America’s Future Is Hungary” Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What recent events have put universities in the spotlight?
The woman's name is Rumeysa Ozturk, and she's a graduate student at Tufts University. The people approaching her are federal agents. They arrested her after the State Department revoked her student visa. Just before that, ICE arrested Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. He'd been a leader of student protests. The administration said that amounted to supporting Hamas.
Chapter 2: Who are the students facing deportation and why?
They claim his student visa was revoked.
Other students targeted for deportation. A fellow at Georgetown also arrested. A grad student from India who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa. Columbia was threatened with losing $400 million, and then they agreed to some demands. Harvard is now also under review for roughly $9 billion.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of the Trump administration's actions on universities?
And there are dozens more universities on a list suspected of using racial preferences or of, quote, forcing women to compete with men in sports.
Your population doesn't want men playing in women's sports. So you better comply because otherwise you're not getting any federal funding. See you in court. Every state. Good, I'll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.
I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. The administration tells one story about its attack on universities, that they're protecting students against anti-Semitism, protecting traditional women's sports, going after unfair racial preferences. But our guest on the show today says that's just what's on the surface.
Adam Harris, who's a senior fellow at New America and who also covered education for The Atlantic, argues that the administration has a much more ambitious, grander plan. And it starts with a pilgrimage to Hungary. Adam, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Sure. So, Adam, about a year before Trump is elected, a conservative activist named Christopher Ruffo decamps to Budapest, writes a dispatch called Orban's War, referring, of course, to Hungarian PM Viktor Orban. And it turns out to be kind of a roadmap in a surprising way for this moment, what we're seeing politically and particularly with universities. Yeah.
What is Ruffo's argument in that essay?
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.
Okay. And this came, it seems like, as a revelation to conservative intellectuals. Like, because Hungary is not an analogous country, but it seemed like a place that you would pilgrimage to learn things. So what was revelatory about this?
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Chapter 4: How does Christopher Rufo's essay relate to university policies?
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.
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.
It's interesting because I think of conservatives in this moment of their ascendance as anti-intellectual. This is a slightly different view where they're viewing the university as a source of a lot of decline, say decline of Western civilization. So instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, it sounds like the vision in this essay is no, take it back.
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?
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.
So it's actually incredibly ambitious.
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Chapter 5: What is the conservative viewpoint on the education system?
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.
Ugh. So, okay. Okay. I'm starting to understand how this fits more broadly into Make America Great and what the attack on universities is actually about. So, we haven't said yet who's Christopher Ruffo and how did these ideas start to spread?
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.
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.
And that really launches this broader interrogation that we've seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity.
Okay, so it's diversity principles, but it's also diversity principles as filtered through universities.
Yes.
But it's essentially creating an intellectual roadmap, like of all these executive orders, these things that Trump is putting together, there is a grand idea behind them.
Yes, there's a grand idea behind them.
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Chapter 6: How does funding relate to compliance in 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.
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.
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.
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.
And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table.
Okay. So if it wasn't, it didn't go through the usual process. It didn't seem to be about what they said it was about. So you as someone tracking this, what do you think it was about? Like why remove Columbia's funding? What was that first move about?
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?
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.
Okay, so they're not following the rules of a proper investigation. They're just trying to get universities to comply. But comply with what?
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Chapter 7: What does 'academic receivership' mean for university governance?
Right, because they could find examples of anti-Semitism. They could find examples of other kinds of discrimination. But it's obviously not what you're actually after if you're eliminating the office. Exactly. You know, it is what, as you're talking, what's chilling about this is that I do, in fact, associate... higher education with the opening of the mind and the broadening of the views.
Like, that is what I think university is for. I mean, that is what education in the U.S. does. So it would be a profound shift to think of education as inculcating a very narrow or particular set of content, you know?
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?
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.
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.
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,
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.
Now, the administration created a task force and there is this growing list of universities that are on, up for investigation. Is there any criteria? Do you see any pattern in the universities? Because it does seem to include both elite and less elite, you know, big city schools, small schools. Like, can you detect anything different in what they're looking for?
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.
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Chapter 8: What are the dangers of limiting speech in higher education?
So that they won't come after us. So that they won't come after us. So merely putting a university on the list, and actually maybe even the arbitrary nature of the list, actually spreads the fear more widely. Maybe this is what I'm realizing now. It's a very common tactic. Because if you just put Harvard and Columbia on the list, then other places wouldn't have to worry about it.
But if you spread it far and wide, then everybody follows your orders. Okay, that's obvious. So we've laid— I see now very clearly putting the pieces together, putting the bigger picture together of how they're scaring universities. I want to know what's happening inside the universities and how they're responding.
As someone who doesn't follow higher education as closely, it's not that clear to me how important this funding is or how reliant universities are on federal funding.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
That's interesting. I think of universities as the United States as having a largely private university system, and that, you know, I'm always jealous of overseas, how they have more public universities. I never quite put together that, in fact, there is a strong interdependence between public institutions and universities of all kinds. So now I see why that makes them extremely vulnerable.
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