There's a Nuclear Option to Fight Trump's War Against Colleges. You Aren't Going to Like It.

Yahoo

04-04-2025

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It's now very apparent that the Trump administration's assault on American higher education is not going to stop. Seemingly every day brings news of a fresh threat—or actual move—to pull federal money from a college or university for blatantly political reasons.
Although these attacks specifically target research grants—which are the main way the U.S. government subsidizes higher-education institutions—they will invariably affect every aspect of the work of higher education. Ian Bogost argued in the Atlantic this week that the Trump attacks will ruin every aspect of college life, extending beyond research labs and even the classroom to the 'entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools.' He paints a picture of stripped-down campuses, with no student services, no social infrastructure, and nothing of the bread and circuses that we've associated with American colleges and universities for over a century.
So here's an idea: Why not get ahead of the curve on that? Specifically, let's start by canceling intercollegiate athletics.
This would be an immediate cost-saving move that would mitigate the pain of the Trump cuts. Despite the glitz on display during events like the ongoing NCAA basketball tournament, college sports are a big money loser for nearly every school that participates in them.
According to the NCAA's own data, last updated in December, the average Division I university loses nearly $17 million annually on its athletics program. The numbers are actually even higher for the schools in the vaunted Football Bowl Subdivision, one of which (not named in the NCAA report) lost a staggering $81.4 million in 2023. The scholar Scott Hirko gathered data for 229 public Division I schools and found that in 2022 just 18 of them had profitable athletics programs. The University of Houston and the University of Connecticut—both of which are NCAA darlings with teams in the men's and women's Final Fours this weekend—nearly tied for dead last in terms of revenue, with net losses exceeding $45 million each.
But the most important part of canceling college sports is not the millions saved but the message sent. It will take months, even years, for Americans, even those currently enrolled in college, to feel the impact of the cuts to higher education. Research labs are closing now, but the loss of medical breakthroughs and technological progress will be a slow-rolling catastrophe, as will the likely triumph of China in the race for academic prowess and innovation. Universities are enacting hiring freezes now, but class sizes won't balloon and majors and departments won't be eliminated until future fiscal years. These are very real problems but not ones that will grab the attention of voters, taxpayers, and policymakers in the short term.
Canceling the 2025–26 athletics season certainly will. Imagine a year without Penn State football, without Michigan basketball, without University of Florida track and field. No NCAA tournament. No Rose Bowl. No College World Series. Slash research and jack up student tuition? Meh. Take away college football? You'll have a few hundred million angry Americans paying attention real quick.
Of course, the NCAA itself will not go along with this plan. Neither will the individual athletic conferences, or most institutions in red states that would have to face down hostile governors and legislatures if they made such a bold move.
But one group can lead the way. The Association of American Universities is a 125-year-old group that represents the 69 most elite research universities in the United States (plus two in Canada). The association has recently made strong statements decrying the Trump administration's cuts to higher education, but it could do a lot more. And it should, considering its prominence and the simple fact that it has the most to lose in the clawback of federal grant money. Indeed, the extent of federal research support is the leading criterion it uses to determine which universities will receive membership in the highly exclusive organization.
The AAU could vote now to collectively suspend its schools' athletics programs for one year, starting this summer. Such a vote wouldn't be binding for the institutions, but it would give them the solidarity and collective voice to back up decisions that would certainly stoke backlash, especially from their alumni and donors.
Now, not all those 69 schools are athletics powerhouses. Very few people will be moved by the cancellation of MIT's football season. But others are: UNC, UCLA, Texas, Mizzou, Oregon—and dozens more. Perhaps most significantly, 15 out of the 16 universities in the Big Ten are AAU members. (Nebraska will get pretty lonely playing by itself.) And those 15 include all the leading institutions in the Rust Belt states that now decide every presidential election and control of the Senate: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Cancel the Big Ten season, with clear messaging about the reasons why it's necessary to do so, and those voters will very quickly become informed about the dire position of American higher education.
Some of my colleagues in higher-education research are very pessimistic about the options available to U.S. colleges and universities in this perilous moment. It seems the schools can only capitulate—as Columbia recently has—or brace themselves for budgetary crisis and a dramatic curtailing of their mission and impact.
But the American higher-education sector is much more than a supplicant kneeling at the foot of the federal government. For better or for worse, it is absolutely central to the nation's economy and society. And a big part of that centrality—one that some of us in academia try hard to ignore—is the spectacle of college sports. College and university sports teams are proudly represented on bumper stickers, billboards, hoodies, and barroom TVs in every city and every state.
All that a small group of university presidents has to do is hit pause on that spectacle for one season. In doing so, they'll save millions of dollars and also broadcast to the nation that a cherished and essential American institution is under attack from its own government.