{"id":134478,"date":"2025-04-21T01:15:01","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T01:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/the-trump-harvard-showdown-is-the-latest-front-in-a-long-conservative-war-against-academia-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:15:01","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T01:15:01","slug":"the-trump-harvard-showdown-is-the-latest-front-in-a-long-conservative-war-against-academia-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/the-trump-harvard-showdown-is-the-latest-front-in-a-long-conservative-war-against-academia-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

President\u2019s attack on universities echoes efforts by Reagan and McCarthy \u2013 but experts say \u2018we\u2019re seeing much worse\u2019
The showdown between Donald Trump<\/a> and Harvard University<\/a> may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.
It\u2019s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reagan<\/a>, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the rightwing scraps to seize more control in a manner that is \u201cpart of a standard playbook of authoritarianism\u201d.
Trump reacted furiously this week after the president of Harvard University, the US\u2019s oldest, richest and most prestigious college, refused to acquiesce to demands<\/a> that would have given the government control over whom it hired and admitted, and what it taught.
But the anger was not just that Harvard had refused to roll over. It was that the move represented, for the time being, a step back for the Trump administration<\/a> in what some believe is part of a wider attempt to overhaul US democracy at large.
\u201cIt\u2019s as dangerous as anything I\u2019ve ever experienced in my lifetime,\u201d said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors.
\u201cThey\u2019re attempting to undermine and destabilize and ultimately control higher education. And at one level, it\u2019s an assault on higher education, at another level, it could be seen as prevalent to a full-on assault on democracy. So I think this is a threat to the future of the United States of America, and because of this country\u2019s role in the world, a threat to the entirety of the globe at this moment.\u201d
The government said on Monday it planned to freeze<\/a> $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard, hours after Alan Garber, the university president, said Harvard would not accept<\/a> a series of demands made by the Trump administration<\/a>. The demands included appointing a White House-approved external body to \u201cto audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity\u201d, and that Harvard \u201cimmediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs\u201d.
Garber said the government\u2019s edicts \u201crepresent direct governmental regulation\u201d of the school\u2019s independence and constitutional rights.
\u201cNo government \u2013 regardless of which party is in power \u2013 should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,\u201d Garber wrote in an open letter, which was hailed by the left and by college professors concerned at the capitulation of other schools.
Yet, as evidenced by Trump\u2019s emotional post<\/a> on Wednesday, the government\u2019s assault on universities is unlikely to stop anytime soon, particularly if he is to emulate the kind of strongman leaders, such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orb\u00e1n<\/a>, he has praised in the past.
\u201c[People in the Trump administration] have read their history, and they know that authoritarian regimes often target higher education as an independent sector and society, and aim to undermine it because of its role in creating an educated populace that could stand up to all forms of authoritarian rule,\u201d Wolfson said.
\u201cAnd so this is part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism: to attack and to attempt to control or destroy higher education.\u201d
The move against universities has echoes of the efforts by the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy in the middle of the 20th century to root out people he accused of being communists and Marxists. And like McCarthy, Trump\u2019s efforts \u2013 led by a group of loyalists including the White House deputy chief of staff and head of policy, Stephen Miller \u2013 go beyond just universities. Trump has targeted some of the biggest law firms in the US with executive orders, prompting many to cave<\/a> and pledge hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work to causes backed by the Trump administration.
\u201cThe Trump administration is following the playbook of totalitarian dictatorships elsewhere in the world. It is trying to use the force of law to intimidate independent civic society organizations, so that opposition to its policies is impossible,\u201d said Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and co-chair of the university\u2019s Council on Academic Freedom.
\u201cThis new incarnation of the American right wing, with complete fealty to a single man, and an unprecedented attempt to disable civic society institutions like law firms and universities, is quite extraordinary.\u201d
The Trump administration has framed its move on Harvard and other colleges as an effort to crackdown on antisemitism, following protests against Israel\u2019s war on Gaza, and as a move against alleged civil rights violations on campus. Few outside of the rightwing sphere see that as a good faith argument.
\u201cAs a Jewish faculty member, I\u2019m sensitive to antisemitism on campus, and it does exist and it should be combated. But the claim that Harvard is a bastion of antisemitism is just wild hyperbole. Three of our last four presidents who\u2019ve served longer than a year have been Jewish. The fourth was married to a Jewish professor,\u201d Pinker said.
Harvard has found itself in the Trump administration\u2019s crosshairs because of its status as the best known of America\u2019s universities, one of the eight esteemed Ivy League schools. Thousands of influential figures across politics, media and business attended Harvard\u2019s grand campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of those who didn\u2019t go to Harvard still tend to take an interest in its affairs.
\u201cWe\u2019ve got between 4,000 and 5,000 higher education institutions in the US. The Ivys always make headlines. The major cultural commentators in this country are obsessed with the Ivys, and have been for a long time. These are things that sell papers, they get a lot of clicks and a lot of attention,\u201d said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of US colleges and universities and the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.
\u201cThe other thing, too, is what happens at your regional state public flagship university often follows from the trends that are set at the Ivys. Not only do they generate a lot of headlines, they are influential in that way.\u201d
Just as Harvard\u2019s existence predates the founding of the US, rightwing antipathy towards universities has been brewing for a long time. When Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California in 1966, he used anger towards anti-Vietnam student protesters for political gain: one of his main campaign strands was a promise to \u201cclean up the mess at Berkeley\u201d \u2013 the state\u2019s flagship university.
Reagan\u2019s tactics bear echoes of Trump\u2019s. Ray Colvig, UC Berkeley\u2019s chief public information officer at the time, told the university\u2019s news service<\/a> years later that Reagan \u201cwanted to establish a special process to select faculty in several disciplines\u201d.
\u201cIn other words, he wanted to set a political standard for appointing faculty members. This idea was widely opposed, and it went away,\u201d Colvig said.
Reagan wasn\u2019t the first to take on the universities. Shepherd said efforts to set up rival, conservative universities, date back to the 1920s, while McCarthy\u2019s war on higher education came later. Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, wrote in the Nation recently that the Trump administration\u2019s efforts were \u201cworse than McCarthy\u201d, and Shepherd said Trump\u2019s attacks were \u201cmuch more accelerated\u201d than the communist-paranoid senator\u2019s tactics.
\u201cMcCarthyism, in the 1940s and 50s, the idea was to identify specific professors, hardly ever students, always faculty, and have them fired. Today, we\u2019re seeing much worse than that. These are attacks on entire programs and departments. So entire departments like Black studies or DEI initiatives. It\u2019s also not just relegated to the professors. We\u2019re seeing students with their visas revoked being literally plucked off the streets,\u201d Shepherd said.
Trump hasn\u2019t just targeted Harvard. Columbia University caved to a series of demands<\/a> from the Trump administration in March, as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding<\/a>, while the White House has announced<\/a> funding freezes to other schools including Brown, Northwestern, Princeton and Cornell.
Harvard taking a stand is one of the first signs of a fight back \u2013 even if it came after it was reported in March<\/a> that the leaders of the university\u2019s center for Middle Eastern studies were forced out, a move seen by critics as an attempt to appease Trump \u2013 and academics and others hope it could begin a resistance<\/a>. It is likely to require a group effort to avoid the right wing\u2019s goal for higher education in the US: universities that are in effect government-controlled, and where freedom of speech and thought is restricted.
\u201cThe right don\u2019t want students to hear about the legacy to slavery. They don\u2019t want them to hear about structural inequalities,\u201d Shepherd said.
\u201cThey don\u2019t want to hear why billionaires are bad. They don\u2019t want to hear, from the sciences, about climate change. They want a nice, friendly experience where the most students ever get to debate is the differences in Aristotle and Plato.
\u201cThey don\u2019t want the actual debates that we see unfolding on campuses today.\u201d<\/p>\n

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President\u2019s attack on universities echoes efforts by Reagan and McCarthy \u2013 but experts say \u2018we\u2019re seeing much worse\u2019The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":134479,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}