The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
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Who is Christopher Rufo and what is his role in the critique of higher education?
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the past five years, the activist Christopher Ruffo has spearheaded the conservative critique of and direct assault on critical race theory and DEI.
Ruffo is likely the reason your conservative uncle knows the phrase critical race theory to begin with. He's the reason that Trump became obsessed with it as a buzz term for pretty much anything to do with race.
organizing remarkably effective campaigns against government offices, corporations, and especially American universities.
After weeks of intense scrutiny, Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned today. Critics allege she plagiarized some of her academic writings. Chris Ruffo led a coalition of mostly right-wing opponents in a plan to remove Gay as Harvard's president.
Ruffo wrote scalped after Gay was forced out. In the process, Ruffo has become an influential voice in the ear of the Trump administration as it turns his strategy into a wide-ranging government crackdown on higher education.
The Trump administration canceling $400 million worth of grants and contracts for Columbia University.
$175 million at UPenn. $9 billion at Harvard. $790 million for Northwestern. And dozens of grants at Princeton University reportedly totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
On Wednesday, we spoke about that crackdown with the president of Princeton University, Today, we ask Rufo just how far it will go. It's Friday, April 11th. Chad, Chad, you guys hear me? Is that Chris? Can he hear me? I can hear you. Well, Chris, welcome to The Daily. We appreciate you making time for us. It's good to be with you. I'm curious, Chris, what it's like for you in this moment to watch this activism that I know you've pursued for so many years come to such full fruition under President Trump. Because in so many ways, your vision for how to challenge what universities in this country have become seems to have been adopted by the White House.
Yeah, I mean, it has been a journey. And some of the moments in the past few months have had a surreal feeling. I've been working on these issues for five years. At the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting. And now, fast forward five years, some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly... become reality. They become policy. They affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds. And so that's a great feeling. I think as an activist, there's really nothing better than seeing the ideas that you fought for against the odds triumph and become reality.
I mean, just to put a fine point on the specificity with which what you have been advocating for is now happening, I was really struck by something you told my colleague Ross Douthat from the opinion side of the Times not so long ago. And I'm going to quote you here. This is what you said. A medium or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, unless we change what we're doing, we're not going to be able to meet our budget for the year. They're going to have to make, you said, really hard decisions. I mean, that is what is now happening to universities under President Trump.
Well, it could happen to a larger number of universities. But what we're seeing right now is, in fact, a prototype of that strategy. And if you take Columbia University as really the first trial of this strategy, we've seen an enormous payoff. And so what I'd like to see and why this is a medium and long-term goal is I'd like to see that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector. All of them. And I would like to see, in addition, a modification in about $120 to $150 billion a year from federal taxpayers to universities used as leverage to extract significant reforms and to reduce the size of the sector itself. I think that is what is coming. It's going to come either through the market mechanisms, but I think it could come even faster with good policy.
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