Universities can expect a frontal attack if Trump returns

John Aubrey Douglass, 30 October 2024

With the 5 November presidential election, voters in the United States are about to determine the fate of the nation’s higher education system and the vitality of its scientific community.

Outside of this election, there are many challenges facing higher education, including demographic and enrolment declines in many states and ongoing concerns over rising tuition fees and student debt. There is also an erosion in trust and a questioning of whether higher education is meeting the utilitarian needs of society and worth the cost.

This feeds into a political divide where many Republicans, and a conservative social media machine, see universities and colleges as elitist, intolerant and dogmatic environments – never mind the fact that some 42% of all enrolments in the US are in two-year community colleges. Almost two thirds of Republicans polled see America’s higher education institutions as having a negative effect on the country.

The tragic events in the Middle East resulted in large-scale protests and encampments at many of the brand name universities and colleges, with a relatively new dynamic: adamant and sometimes violent conflicts featuring student against student, faculty versus faculty. This too translates into a larger negative view of higher education, with political consequences.

At the same time, national security issues, including academic espionage, are also playing a role in people’s perceptions of universities. Some are exaggerated, but some are not. We also have the Supreme Court ruling to end affirmative action in admissions at both public and private institutions and other court cases that are eroding institutional autonomy in areas such as the selection of students, the hiring of faculty, tenure and what is taught.

But these challenges for US higher education, some long in the making, others new, will collectively pale in comparison to the likely frontal attack that institutions will face if Trump returns to the White House. The following provides a dystopian but possible future.

Trump 1.0 and higher education

As I wrote previously in University World News and in other publications, one way to project Trump’s plans for higher education, and those of his loyal enablers who would join him as members of his administration, is to review what he attempted during his presidency. Here’s the Trump 1.0 agenda in a nutshell.

Trump pursued an isolationist and win-lose view of international relations that was, and remains, confrontational.

For higher education, this fed into anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies that led to visa restrictions for international students and faculty from selected Muslim-majority nations, as well as an attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy initiated in the Obama administration to allow undocumented students who came to the US as children to enrol in higher education without fear of deportation.

As part of the agenda to dismantle the so-called ‘deep state’, Trump sought to cut student loan programmes and reduce funding for Pell Grants that support low-income students.

He also proposed each year of his presidency to dramatically reduce funding for academic research that would have severely diminished the nation’s science and technology capabilities. This included large cuts to the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Much of this agenda related to a desire to cut government spending while at the same time offering a massive tax cut to largely upper-income Americans.

Most of Trump’s 1.0 agenda, such as deep cuts to academic science, faced stiff opposition from Congress, including many Republicans who, in the past, saw funding science conducted at universities as a form of corporate welfare and key to the nation’s technological competitiveness.

But another and major reason why much of this agenda failed was that Trump and his cabinet and staff were politically and administratively disorganised, more fuelled by emotion and rhetoric than an understanding of how government works in the realm of higher education, as I documented in a previous book.

A potential red state and federal convergence

Before discussing what a Trump 2.0 administration might mean for higher education, an influential variable is the agenda of lawmakers in largely ‘red’ or Republican-dominated states and similar efforts by their counterparts in Congress.

In some states, we see a reflection of the playbook found in autocratic nations and in illiberal democracies: laws to restrict academic freedom and the reshuffling of institutional governing boards with loyalists who are put in positions of authority to appoint presidents and administrators, influence faculty hiring and promotion and do the bidding of conservative governors and lawmakers.

In Florida, for instance, the legislature passed a Stop WOKE Act, which attempts to eliminate diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) programmes, limit and shape teaching about racism and invites students to monitor what faculty are saying in the classroom and elsewhere that might be deemed in violation of a changing rubric of acceptable speech.

There’s even a claim by Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis and his legal team that faculty in public universities don’t have the right to free speech, that their speech is state speech, and therefore subject to censorship and other possible consequences.

A proposed Republican amendment in the House of Representatives to the 1965 Higher Education Act outlines a path for accreditation authority by state lawmakers, as well as transferring authority from the US Department of Education’s main responsibilities to other federal agencies or to the private sector, including federally subsidised student loans.

A proposed ‘End Woke Higher Education Act’ passed by House Republicans mimics the language of Florida’s legislation and is meant to withhold federal funds, like financial aid, if a university or college is deemed to offer offending courses.

The Senate, where Democrats currently have a thin majority, has blocked these and other Republican efforts. But House-led hearings have repeatedly demonised higher education leaders, in part leveraging the challenges campuses have faced managing opposing pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters and encampments last autumn and into the summer.

A Trump 2.0 scenario

If the electorate allows Trump to return to the presidency, we will likely see an extreme and more sweeping return of his policy agenda for higher education, plus a convergence of the attacks on university autonomy currently being pursued by red states.

Part of the dystopian scenario is a more organised and expansive notion of a president’s executive authority. As outlined by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 formulated by Trump’s past associates, his presidency should claim a wide range of authority under what is termed the ‘unitary executive theory’ – powers never before claimed by a president.

The current conservative Supreme Court has hinted support for this novel interpretation and made a recent ruling that a sitting president has immunity for illegal acts.

What might this mean for American higher education and its science capabilities? Let me count the ways, some of which are the implications of Trump’s larger policy plans and others specific to higher education.

• Rhetoric with consequences: We can anticipate further vilification of the higher education community that includes their inclusion in the ‘deep state’ and even harsher rhetoric that academics and their leaders are part of what Trump calls ‘the enemy within’.

Trump has repeatedly denounced science, and the scientific community, as politically biased, and said that global warming and climate change are a hoax perpetrated by technocrats and leftists. Anti-science, anti-intellectualism, these themes are not entirely new to American politics, but the echo-chamber of social media and conservative news outlets has created a new era of doubt and cynicism with real consequences.

Before he was picked as Trump’s running mate for vice president, JD Vance offered his assessment: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The answer, for Vance, Trump and their supporters is aggressive federal intervention.

• Sweeping deportations and visa restrictions: Trump promises mass deportations of the undocumented as well as foreign citizens who are in the US legally, including students from Muslim-majority nations and possibly other foreign nationals. This will likely include renewed efforts to end DACA.

Federal officials might also deport international students and possibly university and college faculty and staff who are foreign nationals on H-1B visas. Eerily recalling the plots of earlier autocratic regimes, this deportation plan includes deputising local police officers as well as the national guard to make raids, the building of holding camps and skirting due process hearings.

Graduate students from China would be one likely target for deportation. Some faculty could also be vulnerable. At major universities, such as the University of California, Berkeley, some 18% of faculty are foreign nationals, reflecting the US’s ability to attract talent from throughout the globe – one reason for the nation’s leadership in science and technology.

Would Trump seek to severely limit H-1B visas, as well as short-term visas for scientists and others to be at US universities and colleges? Perhaps not, but he could selectively target universities and colleges he deems unfriendly to his agenda, or who voice criticism.

Bans on visas granted by the State Department would severely alter the flow of students and faculty that help diversify higher education institutions – not to mention the income for institutions and the overall, largely positive impact on the nation’s economy that these students bring.

More generally, Trump’s isolationist policies would send a chill throughout the world that the US is no longer a society that welcomes talent and expertise beyond its borders. It would also exaggerate an already emerging neo-academic Cold War in which geopolitical divisions are altering talent mobility and research collaborations, hindering science and the ability to address global problems and challenges.

• Student financial aid: The efforts to expand student debt forgiveness by the Biden administration will end. There is also the likely phase-out of income-driven repayment plans first initiated during the Obama presidency.

If his previous presidency is an indicator of future policy, Trump’s administration will attempt to cut Pell Grants or set new limits for access to them and shift federal direct loans back to the private sector with likely higher interest rates.

Some version of this agenda is in the House Republicans’ current College Cost Reduction Act, which would do away with time-based debt-forgiveness and would introduce a complex system requiring colleges and universities to refund the federal loan debt of past students who fail to repay their debt.

Trump’s previous administration also proposed cutting in half federal funding for Work-Study programmes, which provide an important path for students to work on campus.

• Accreditation: It is likely that a new Trump administration will attempt to reorganise the national system of college and university accreditation, which is viewed by many conservatives as invoking left-wing ideological requirements, like DEI, and supporting shifting accreditation to states to then set their own accreditation standards.

Transferring this authority to, for example, lawmakers in Florida or Texas would create a powerful tool for subjugating public and private institutions to particular political whims at a new scale.

As Trump has said on the campaign trail: “When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”

• Dismantling the Department of Education: It is not clear if Trump will end the Department of Education, or simply shift most of its responsibilities to other departments, for instance, the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department.

Project 2025, which Trump has not officially endorsed but seems a harbinger, proposes shifting federal student aid grants and loans to the Treasury Department. These policy changes, plus the reorganisation of the current national accreditation process, would result in a Department of Education with largely no significant portfolio of responsibilities.

• Research funding: Besides a cavalcade of anti-science rhetoric, there are no stated plans by Trump on the funding of scientific research.

Reflecting the administration’s agenda under Trump’s previous presidency to decrease government domestic spending programmes in part to pay for tax cuts, it seems likely we will see plans to severely cut funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a return plan to end the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Budget proposals to Congress in the previous Trump presidency sought cuts that ranged from 18% for the NIH and 31% for the Environmental Protection Agency.

It is likely that the Trump administration will work to cap indirect cost rates for university research to the rate universities accept from private organisations, creating a significant financial burden for these institutions. This reform, in the words of Project 2025, “would help reduce federal taxpayer subsidisation of leftist agendas”.

Programmes to train scientists and clinicians to work in developing countries would be on the chopping block along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Global Health Center. In short, the US’s science diplomacy efforts would likely be greatly diminished.

Even if Congress does not go along with massive cuts to academic science, Trump could claim the power to selectively impound funds. Climate change research or perhaps the scientists who contradict the administration’s orthodoxy could see cuts and retribution.

• National science capabilities and data: One objective of Project 2025, as well as what is called the America First agenda, is to replace traditional non-partisan directors, like those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Science Foundation and Department of Environmental Protection, and similar positions of authority over federal agencies, with Trump political operatives who would selectively choose not to enforce legislation and agency policies and seek to purge the ranks of civil servants.

To achieve the latter, there is a plan to reclassify some 50,000 civil servants who have some level of employment protection, many of whom are scientists or provide support and collect data important for scientific research, as political appointees.

As in Trump’s time in the presidency, one could also anticipate limits on access to federally collected data determined again by the political priorities of the administration.

• The revenge agenda: Then there is Trump’s revenge agenda. This includes the threat to use the Department of Justice to go after his personal list of enemies. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Department of Justice cases would be targeted against individual faculty as well as administrators.

The revenge agenda, as inferred earlier, might also include selectively withholding or impounding funding from a university or from specific programmes, as well as using the authority of federal agencies, like the Office for Civil Rights, to selectively target institutions deemed not to be following evolving Trump rules, regulations and predilections.

There are plenty of other concerns. For example, Trump, JD Vance and their loyalists have outlined plans for ending the tax-exempt status of private colleges and universities, and for taxing college and university endowments to fund an imagined federal online university supposedly free of ‘Woke’ dogma.

A difficult future

Under Trump, higher education in the US will face a difficult future, featuring an aggressive and intrusive federal government, erosion in funding with no alternatives, a cavalcade of political litmus tests and a decline in the US’s science and technology capability.

I would be remiss, however, not to note the self-inflicted wounds of America’s higher education institutions and some of its academic communities. Political activism has sometimes replaced scholarly inquiry and reflection in the classroom and in academic research. These institutions need to reflect on the appropriate balance of academic freedom with free speech and redefine diversity to include differing and legitimate viewpoints.

In the wake of the protests over the escalating war in the Middle East, higher education leaders are revisiting their roles as non-partisans, and how their campuses can be better open spaces for civil debate. There is also room for improved and more sophisticated communication with the public on important scientific findings and the value for money that colleges and universities provide.

Chaotic and shifting environment

Democrats retaining a majority in the Senate or achieving this in the House would present major hurdles for Trump’s legislative agenda which, thus far, has not received any significant pushback by Republicans. But, under the ‘unitary executive theory’, much can be accomplished via executive action, some of which would face legal challenges, but with the damage done in the interim or long term.

Might there be serious compromise or moderation of some or many parts of this agenda? Let’s hope so. But under many different scenarios, one can easily imagine a chaotic and shifting environment for US colleges and universities that will be extremely difficult to navigate.

And once the agenda begins, campus demonstrations and upheaval will surely follow. This possible dystopian story for American higher education is, of course, just one part of a larger worrisome political play: a populist movement led by a demagogue that espouses a neo-nationalism agenda to erode US democracy and dismantle civil liberties, and who seeks vengeance on his enemies.

John Aubrey Douglass is a senior research fellow and research professor of public policy and higher education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, Goldman School of Public Policy, at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, in the United States. He is the lead author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education (Johns Hopkins University Press). This article is based on a discussion between John Aubrey Douglass and Robert Shireman on a potential Trump return to the White House and the impact on US higher education and science. Watch the discussion here.