What is happening to higher education in the U.S. right now is not reform. It is destruction

Globe and Mail

23-05-2025

Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. She is an associate professor of political science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University.
I first set foot on a university campus in 1999. I knew absolutely nothing about the purpose of higher education, other than that my parents, neither of whom obtained a university degree following high school, insisted that I needed to go. I didn't do any campus tours in advance because I didn't know that was what prospective students were supposed to do. I couldn't afford to participate in frosh week once I got there. I had a full scholarship that covered tuition but not the cost of my dorm room, so I worked 35 hours a week at three part-time jobs, and never quite had enough time to do the course readings, study for exams, or attend the public lectures of renowned thinkers.
But I loved it. I loved getting lost in libraries, the lectures and the labs, the all-nighters, the seminar discussions that continued for hours at the campus bar, new beginnings each September and years that were divided into semesters rather than weeks or months.
I loved it so much that I never left. I have worked at or attended some of the best universities in the world – my current employer, McGill University, but also the University of Toronto, Northwestern University, and Harvard University. I spent a decade mired in the system of higher education in the United States, at both public and private universities. I've taught students who came from more wealth than I'll ever see, and those who shared my table at Christmas because they had no home to go to. I've heard lectures by Nobel Prize winners and former presidents. I have seen the future of scientific research, innovation, expertise, entrepreneurship, law, politics, and the global citizenry co-exist – sometimes tenuously – on the social microcosm of the college campus.
Universities have faced varying and somewhat perpetual crises over the decades, but the recent showdown initiated by the Trump administration is an unprecedented inflection point. In a matter of months, the system of higher education in the United States has been completely upended. There are valid critiques to be made of universities, especially in terms of cost, access and value, but what is happening right now is not a careful process of thoughtful, nuanced reform. It is vindictive, ideologically driven destruction.
It began with Columbia University, which had US$400-million in federal grants and funding cancelled in early March. The Trump administration then cut millions of dollars from seven other elite universities, including Northwestern, Brown University and Cornell University. Dozens of others have received notice from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights that they are under investigation for 'antisemitic harassment and discrimination.'
The guise of combatting antisemitism on college campuses is a complicated cover for a far-reaching ideological assault. In March, US$175-million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania was suspended because the university allowed a transgender athlete to compete on the women's swim team.
A few weeks later, the Trump administration issued a letter with a list of demands for reforms at Harvard, including merit-based hiring and admissions, allowing admission data to be audited by the federal government, and initiating an audit of 'viewpoint diversity' and of programs, including the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.
After Harvard refused to capitulate, federal officials froze more than US$2-billion in funding and later threatened to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status, even though federal law prohibits the President from directing the IRS to conduct investigations.
Finally, on Thursday, the Trump administration revoked Harvard's Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification – meaning international students, which make up 27 per cent of the school's population, can no longer enroll at the university.
Meanwhile, more than 1,800 international students had their visas suddenly revoked or lost their legal status to remain in the United States – a decision that was later reversed. Before that happened, some fled, fearing deportation. Others were abducted off the street by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Canadian Association of University Teachers advised professors against non-essential travel to the United States. Some of my colleagues have cancelled speaking engagements, because it's not worth the risk. My discipline's largest and most significant conference, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, will be in Vancouver this September, and organizers are scrambling to attend to the concerns of visa- and green-card holders who fear they will not be allowed to return home should they leave America.
Most recently, President Donald Trump's proposed budget cuts TRIO programs, which assist low-income and first-generation students and students with disabilities access and succeed in postsecondary education, slashes the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (both of which already had thousands of grants worth billions of dollars in research funding cancelled), and eliminates the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Conservative commentators have long held the view that universities have been ideologically captured by the left and are now indoctrination factories of 'radical-left' ideologies. Some disciplines are considered intractably left-wing (women and gender studies, African American studies), while others either happen to allegedly be the exclusive domain of leftists (music, the arts and humanities) or are the subject of profound skepticism and hostility from certain segments of conservatism (science, climatology and medicine).
A less generous interpretation of the Trump administration's attack on higher education would note that one of the most important voting trends in the United States (and other Western societies, including Canada) is educational polarization. Analyzing the available interview and survey data from the 2024 election, data scientist David Schor told The New York Times: 'The lower your political engagement, education level or socio-economic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are.' To put it bluntly, a reduction in college graduates would electorally benefit Republicans. And, of course, there's also a touch of Trumpian retributive-style politics at play here; the President is both resentful and reverent of the elite club of the Ivy League, which has never truly accepted him as one of their own.
Regardless of the contrived or sincere rationale, as Vice-President JD Vance stated, echoing Richard Nixon before him, universities are now the enemy, and these attacks are popular among the conservative base. A Gallup Poll from 2024 showed that Americans are evenly divided among those who have a great deal of confidence in higher education (36 per cent), some confidence (32 per cent) and little or no confidence (32 per cent). This is a rapid decline in confidence from 2015, when 57 per cent had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and only 10 per cent had little or none.
Look, universities are a lot of things. Universities are employers, corporations, gatekeepers, landlords and governing boards. They are social spaces and innovation incubators. They are a public good, gentrifiers of poor neighbourhoods, a brand, a symbol, a lightning rod, a neoliberal façade, bureaucratic hierarchies, mysterious tuition fees and the citizenry in the making. Universities are research hubs, student pubs, generational legacies, and a kind of liminal space where students become the people they will henceforth continue to be, leaving the college campus, hopefully, with more knowledge, a critical eye, skills (both hard and soft) that make them employable, an understanding that the world is vast and complicated, and a love of learning.
Moreover, the benefits of higher education are rarely immediately apparent. Only 14 per cent of Americans have professional or graduate degrees, and so those who attend a university (approximately 38 per cent of the American population over 25) are only on college campuses for a short time, making it difficult to see patterns over time or the importance of long-term investment for society-improving outcomes. High-quality research, I find myself constantly reminding my students, is supposed to take a long time because you search, hypothesize, test and analyze, and then you do it all again, just to make sure.
The current siege on higher education is an attempt to radically alter what universities can and should be in a democratic polity. Their reliance on indirect and direct government funding and their role in producing the country's intellectual and political elites make them an easy target, but universities are important to democratic life precisely because of that which makes them both myopic and unique: They are centrally concerned with the pursuit of knowledge.
This is why the attack on universities is a page out of the autocrat's handbook. We have seen this happen over the past decade or so in Hungary, Turkey, Russia and Brazil: regimes where liberal democracy is either a façade or deeply in crisis. The core mission of the university is to enable open and free inquiry, where denizens can exchange ideas and opinions, debate and contest those of others, engaging with the full, rich tapestry of viewpoints – even controversial ones – without fear of retribution, exclusion, or threats to lives or livelihoods. The climate of fear that the Trump administration has created, certainly for international students and faculty who are terrified of abruptly devastating visa revocations, but also for any whose research has been identified as maligned with the administration's views on diversity, gender, expertise, inequality, or science, is also a time-honoured intimidation tactic of dictators and demagogues.
The American system of higher education is far from perfect. There are thousands of books and articles that detail deeply entrenched (but not insurmountable) challenges of higher education, including: issues of accessibility; astronomical tuition fees and lifelong student debt; declining state funding and increasing state interference; the heavy reliance on poorly paid and precariously positioned adjunct professors to teach core undergraduate courses; the exploitative mess of college sports; opaque admissions processes; asking would-be students to chart their life course at 18; for-profit colleges that prey on low-income families; the unspoken affirmative action of legacy admits; labour and workplace concerns; falling and racially disparate graduation rates; the replacement of universities' roles in social mobility with one of wealth consolidation; and much more. The explosive campus protests and pro-Palestinian encampments last year put a harsh spotlight on the contentious collision of academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, prompting blistering moral and intellectual scrutiny of universities' ethically indefensible investments in weapons manufacturing.
Universities nevertheless serve a vital role in democratic life. In his book What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald Daniels, the former dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and the current president of Johns Hopkins University, argues that universities in fact have a duty to promote and protect democratic values. The nearly 4,000 postsecondary institutions in the United States, which will educate an estimated 19.5 million undergraduate students this year, are also stalwarts of democracy in at least four critical ways: (1) social mobility, or launching talented individuals up the socio-economic ladder; (2) civic education, or educating citizens to be active participants in democratic processes; (3) stewardship of facts, and the creation and dissemination of knowledge; and (4) pluralism, the cultivation of meaningful exchanges of beliefs, ideas and opinions across our human differences. In authoritarian regimes, it is the educated classes that push for democratization, and which help new democracies to stabilize and endure.
Both the targeted degradation of democratic norms in the United States and Republicans' attack on higher education – especially tenure protections, curricular content, and academic freedom – have been years in the making. State legislators have introduced dozens of 'gag orders' that prevent professors from teaching about structural racism or gender identity, weakened or attempted to eliminate tenure protections, stripped power from faculty in shared governance models, and sometimes have even meddled in hiring processes. In Ohio, where I taught for several years, the state legislature recently passed Senate Bill 1, which requires course syllabi be publicly available, mandates student evaluations of professors' biases, eliminates DEI trainings, scholarship, and programs, and creates post-tenure evaluations, prohibits faculty strikes, and sets rules around teaching 'controversial beliefs' such as climate change, electoral politics, marriage, or abortion.
The institutions hit the hardest in these battles will not be the Ivy League or selective liberal-arts colleges with their billion-dollar endowments; rather, it will be the state schools, already facing enrolment contractions and in perpetual financial crisis as states slash funding. It already is the state schools, in Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Florida and elsewhere, that Republican-controlled legislatures have fashioned the conservative blueprint that President Trump is now nationalizing. These are the institutions, with their dedication to serving a wide array of students from less privileged backgrounds and from less accessible communities, for which the promise of higher education as a key pathway to social mobility has been actualized more than any others.
What is now required is the one thing that universities are not exactly known for: bravery. As Mr. Daniels puts it, 'Our institutions of higher education can be neither indifferent nor passive in the face of democratic backsliding.' This is an opportunity – fair enough, one forged from constant political chaos and pending societal doom – for universities to be courageous, bolstered by the fact that for once, there is an unprecedented interest convergence across public and private universities, minority-serving institutions and selective liberal arts colleges, as well as the millions of students, staff, faculty and administrators who believe that the pursuit of knowledge is worth defending.
We Are Higher Ed, a coalition of faculty across the United States, was organized in the aftermath of the American election out of an acute sense of vulnerability on the part of racialized and queer faculty. It has since grown into a community of resource sharing, of strategizing, and resistance. When I spoke with some of the organizers, they emphasized that the Trump administration's cuts, lists, orders, cancellations and overreach are an unbridled attempt to dismantle academic freedom and decimate the entire endeavour of higher education across disciplinary, institutional and state boundaries. And it can get worse, still; should the Trump administration choose to cull or eliminate the US$120-billion in grants, work-study funds or low-interest loans that currently assist approximately 13 million students who attend university, small and medium-sized colleges and universities that are heavily tuition-dependent will simply cease to exist.
The silver lining is that, urged by individual faculty members and coalitions like We Are Higher Ed, universities are beginning to fight back. There are several formal declarations of a united front in higher education, including the Big Ten Mutual Defense Compact initiated by professors at Rutgers University, and a similar proposal from 250 land-grant and public universities spearheaded by faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There are dozens of lawsuits pending and there will likely be many more. In April, hundreds of university and college presidents and other educational leaders signed a statement condemning the Trump administration's 'unprecedented government overreach,' 'political interference,' 'undue government intrusion' and 'coercive use of public research funding.' With over 650 signatories, it is an astounding act of unity and resistance, especially considering the way that this administration targets and punishes those who President Trump perceives to have challenged him.
'Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust,' United States Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren wrote in 1957. 'Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.' Academic freedom is not a luxury or liberal trickery – it is the cornerstone of democracy. The university is a lot of things, but it is fundamentally a public good. Universities exist for the benefit not just of those who, like me, cherish the moral responsibilities of conducting ethical and empirical research and teaching generations of lifelong learners, but for the entirety of society. However, the current political climate of ideological interference, restricted scientific research and punitive and retaliatory measures threatens elite universities and could devastate non-elite institutions that serve middle- and lower-income families. President Trump's siege on higher education undermines American democracy itself.