How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target
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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The swiftness and the severity with which the Trump administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many people, not least to university presidents and faculties from Harvard to UCLA. But for conservatives, this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming. Staff writer Emma Green has been speaking with influential figures in the administration and in the larger conservative movement about why they decided to wage this battle and how they mapped it out for Trump's return to power. Trump versus Harvard, if we can boil it down to that, is nothing less than a conservative campaign to change the way private and state colleges operate.
Emma Green's reporting appears in The New Yorker this week. Emma, how has the education agenda changed from the first Trump administration to the second? Because so much has changed.
So for this story, I spent a lot of time talking to both administration officials who work for the president now, but also people who were in that first Trump administration. And the thing that all of them have said is that they wish they had gone farther. Their perception was that their job was to come in, change some of the stuff that Obama had done that they didn't like, put some policies in place that could make incremental progress forward. But they were coloring within the lines. Even one of these officials who I talked to who was an advisor in the first administration in the Ed Department said that the things that they were doing now in 2025 would have been unthinkable in 2017.
For example? Yeah.
So, for example, taking on a school like Harvard aggressively to say, we believe that you have violated your federal contract with us. You've had this rampant anti-Semitism. That's a violation of federal statute, but it's also a violation of your agreement with us. We're going to freeze literally hundreds of millions of dollars. That kind of muscular approach... to higher education, and trying to aggressively step outside of incremental change to this idea of paradigm shift in the sector. That's the huge shift.
Well, we'll get to the question of, quote unquote, rampant anti-Semitism, whether that's a reality or that was a battering ram used by the Trump administration. But tell me this, how much of what we're seeing now, would you say, is a reaction to to perceived overreach on social justice issues and diversity coming out of the Biden years and before versus a real long-term strategic plan on the part of Trump and his circle.
I think reaction is definitely a good word for it. And that tracks with how President Trump got reelected in 2024, the sense of backlash to where our culture had gone. And I was talking to this advisor in the education department who had worked under the first Trump administration. And he spoke about living through those Biden years and watching things like, for example, Leah Thomas win the NCAA championship. The swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania. And I think that unbridgeable worldview is really important because it shows why the Trump administration has been able and willing to act this aggressively in the higher ed sphere. They see higher ed as the common theme in all of this cultural change, and they see that cultural change as being extreme, something that needs a really muscular response.
A crucial person in your piece, who I didn't really know much about at all, is a woman named Mae Mailman, who you interviewed. And she turns out to have had a singular role in this new administration's approach to higher education. Tell me about Mae Mailman.
She was a policy deputy for Stephen Miller. She left her former role in the administration at the end of the summer, although she's still advising them on the university deals. One of the things that she was responsible for coordinating was this higher education agenda. So she would take the policy directives from the Domestic Policy Council, the White House, the president, and she would make sure that there was this coordinated effort across the different agencies.
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