Why are American universities receiving such a thrashing from Trump? A torrent of policy changes has delivered disruption and dizzying uncertainty to every campus. For academics, it feels like the fog of war.
Trump’s ideologues had their pile of Executive Orders all ready to go this time, as the champagne glasses were packed away at the end of Inauguration Day frolics. They had been gearing up for years to take the United States firmly in a neofascist direction, with rapid fire ‘shock and awe’ tactics. They had learned their lesson from Trump’s previous, chaotic term in office, when precious time was wasted and the big MAGA project stalled.
This time, the juggernaut is well oiled and moving fast against all cultural institutions. Law firms hit for perceived disloyalty; media companies pressured into legal settlements that have no merit; public service broadcasting defunded entirely. The Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts has been hijacked by the new Chairman, Donald J. Trump, who promises ‘no more woke,’ and is being renamed after him. The museums of the Smithsonian Institution are upended, by one Executive Order calling for ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History’ to root out ‘all traces of wokeism’ about slavery at the National Museum of African American History, the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum.
But the universities are the meat in the MAGA sandwich. The message has been hammered home, that college campuses have become ‘ivy-covered North Koreas.’ Selected to set an example for all the others, Harvard is a dramatic case of neofascist cultural policy in action. America’s oldest university will face millions of dollars in federal funding cuts. Marco Rubio will obligingly revoke its eligibility to host international students, who make up a huge chunk of its enrollment and its revenue. It began to push back and sue the government, earning widespread praise – in contrast with Columbia – for heroic resistance.
But that’s not the full story. Harvard has demoted scholars in its Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended its partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and cancelled all programmes focussed on Palestine. In July, it suddenly suppressed the entire issue of its prestigious Harvard Educational Review at the printing press. Invited scholarly papers on Palestine studies, such as Nakba denialism and the evolution of the term ‘scholasticide’ were shredded. Someone in the Provost’s Office called it ‘anticipatory compliance.’ It delivered a high voltage shock across the entire higher university sector.
Trump’s university walloping has been misanalysed as an attempt to ‘flood-the-zone,’ a mind-numbingly stupid slash-and-burn rampage through the centres of elite privilege. The angry crusade against the Ivy League is commonly seen as spewing from the frustrated conspiracy-addicted level of Trumpism, a howl of revenge from below. But there is more to it than that.
Firstly, there is the regime’s fascination with Viktor Orbán, whose version of fascism, what he calls ‘illiberal democracy,’ has got a firm grip on Hungary. It captures the imagination of Trump’s team. It offers them a model for their assault on American higher education. The new crop of far-right ideologues, like Max Eden, Curtis Yarvin, and Christopher Rufo, most of them educated in the very elite universities they are now lambasting, didn’t have to invent their tactics from scratch.
These culture warriors operate on a different level from the MAGA faithful in the rearguard of Trump’s base. They draw on the most powerful think-tanks on the far-right, especially the Heritage Foundation, with its annual budget of $100 million, creator of Project 2025, and the Claremont Institute, with its range of publications, including the infamous magazine IM-1776, which regularly showers praise on dictators and puffs racist ideologues. In Hungary, they saw up close how Orbán created the ideological armour that neofascism needs so that it can grow and take power. They studied how he framed higher education in Budapest as a dangerous foe, standing in the way of a new political order that would save Western Civilisation from its own internal rot.
Orbán’s first move was to ‘stamp out wokeness’ by forcing the closure of gender and women’s studies in Hungarian universities. He coerced the Central European University to quit the country entirely (it relocated to Vienna), then he took control of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which allocates research funding. After that came a restructuring of the governance of universities, to strip out all evidence of critical thinking, dissent or diversity, generally referred to in far-right circles as ‘Cultural Marxism’.
Public universities will now be governed by self-perpetuating boards composed of Orbán loyalists. This has two ‘illiberal’ consequences. It removes funding decisions from public scrutiny, and it takes away the public-sector protections for staff. The Academic Freedom Index says Hungary has suffered a ‘dramatic’ decline in academic freedom.
The bridgehead for Americans into Orbán’s ‘illiberal democracy’ is the Danube Institute, working closely with the Heritage Foundation to cultivate far-right soft power through seminars, summits, residential training courses, fellowships, glossy publications and podcasts. An essential part of its work is to launder certain words and phrases from the far right into mainstream political discourse. JD Vance is a big admirer. He agrees with Orbán that ‘professors are the enemy.’ The US could learn a lot, he says, from how Orbán deals with campus protest and ‘left-wing domination of universities.’ Vance was silent, however, when Orbán’s test-of-strength ban on street protest was challenged in June by 100,000 protesters marching through the streets of Budapest in the annual Pride March.
Trump’s flunkies have another resource to draw upon: the old Cold War conspiracy theory about the threat of ‘radical Marxism’ to American life, an imagined leftist power structure that unites the state, universities and the media. Long established in the far-right since the Bolshevik Revolution, dusted off by the carbon industry bosses for the Tea Party shenanigans, ‘Cultural Marxism’ is now at full throttle in MAGA. It projects a shadowy Jewish-led enemy that never stops trying to take over the US and accelerate the rot consuming Western Civilisation. In his election manifesto last year, Trump promised to ‘remove all Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats’ and root out ‘the Marxist maniacs infecting educational institutions.’ It is worth noting that Hitler made similar use of ‘Cultural Bolshevism,’ to attack modernist art in Weimar in the 1930s and force German universities into alignment with Nazi ideology.
There remains a question about the Silicon Valley billionaire class who decided to back Trump and build out the neofascist movement with their outsized power. Some, like Peter Thiel, have been railing against democracy for a long time, extolling the virtues of dictatorship and neo-monarchism, wanting to be taken seriously as intellectuals. Others, like Marc Andreessen, joined Trump only when it looked like he would win. These tycoons fascinate their followers with visionary possibilities for an awesome post-democratic future.
Their contribution to the neofascist effort is based not just on highly focussed greed, but from monopoly control of massive digital infrastructure, some of them counting their users in the billions. For these authoritarian libertarians, the apocalypse is just around the corner. They form a relatively small cadre, perhaps no more than a few dozen, and they dominate Trump’s cabinet. But they push aside the MAGA-cap wearing rear guarders in the neo-fascist movement , whose Christian nationalist spokesman Steve Bannon protests occasionally against ‘the lords of easy money,’ creating tensions in the uneasy alliance supporting the Trump regime.
In the tight oligarch circle, there is a growing belief that democracy is an inefficient way to make decisions, compared to the algorithms of an enlightened dictator. In a more equal society, with a political system less corrupted by money, these billionaires would be regarded as cranks and intellectual wankers, and would keep their views well concealed, as the Koch brothers did when they manipulated the Tea Party protests against Obama.
Despite benefiting from university education, the tech-fascists believe that universities are ‘inculcating Communist propaganda’ into young people. Ironically, everything that has made them what they are, including the vast fortunes they have accumulated, rests on a base of science produced in universities. Silicon Valley was built around Stanford University 30 years ago, with a massive injection of public money into a handful of Palo Alto companies, channelled through the Pentagon. Their scientific pre-eminence now allows them to expand into high-tech arms manufacturing. With unfamiliar names like Palantir Maven Smart Systems and Andoril, new AI companies can now track immigrants across the United States in real time and share the technology with Israel to track human targets and test new weapons in Gaza. With a wink from Trump and their tight hold on AI technology, they are loosening the grip of the defence industry’s traditional companies, like Lockheed-Martin, on lucrative military contracts.
So how can these educated ultra-libertarians possibly support the deeply anti-scientific catastrophe that the regime has in store for universities, which will, if it is allowed, block knowledge, censor history and criminalise teaching about race and gender ? The answer emerging from the tiny circle of tech-fascists, people who flog wild ideas from sci-fi, like sea-steading, transhumanism and colonising Mars, is that in the new apocalyptic age, they will have a country of geniuses working in data centres under their command and won’t need universities. Rather than seeing this brave new world as deeply dystopian, these lords of easy money see it as ‘truly awesome.’
So what are students and staff to do? The collective power of the encampments taking action against the Gaza genocide created consternation in the establishment. The backlash began under the Biden administration, but the Trump administration has taken the repression to new, frightening levels. Behind all of this is a deep fear from those in power – the ruling class remembers how resistance to the Vietnam War on campuses played a major role in turning the tide of public opinion against the war. If students and staff can continue to organise and resist the harsh repression, they may be able to push back against Trump’s agenda.
It is already happening. Faculty unionisation has been surging on college campuses and both students and academics are organising themselves to oppose Trump’s unrelenting assault. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), for instance, is using the law to make public some of the regime’s tightest secrets, like the detail of how immigration policing works covertly and illegally to produce a chilling effect on campus speech. The first major trial of Trump’s second term, AAUP versus Rubio, challenges his ideological deportation policy in the courtroom, something his lawyers fought hard to avoid.
Senior officials have had to answer lawyers’ detailed questions about how the agency identifies deportation targets. They use a list of 5,000 people profiled anonymously by a pro-Israel outfit called Canary Mission. In the upside-down world of anti-Palestine bigotry, even using the phrase ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is seen as calling for the genocide of all Israelis and therefore a terrorist crime. The Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House takes a personal interest in seeing the files of victims denounced by Canary Mission. These people are then promptly arrested and deported. None of this information would have entered the public domain without AAUP action.
The AAUP is also piling unified academic pressure upon university presidents to protect scholars at risk, to remind them what happened in the Red Scare of the 1950s, when administrators buckled under pressure from politicians and monied donors, betrayed their colleagues and purged academics accused of Communism. A current flashpoint in union organising is the actions of the chancellor of the entire Florida Public Higher Education system, who buckled under political pressure from the MAGA governor Ron De Santis. Florida went much further than the law required, vetting all course content for ‘anti-semitism bias,’ to demonstrate what the union correctly calls ‘anticipatory obedience.’ As the AAUP puts it to its members, in a call to action, it is the university’s responsibility to defend higher education as a public good. This means not surrendering to attacks from Trump’s regime but vigorously and loudly opposing them.
Note: Thanks to Cory Doctorow for coining the useful term ‘enshittification’ in Chokepoint Capitalism.
Farrel Corcoran is an author and retired academic of Dublin City University.
