How US Universities Became So Vulnerable to Government Threats

As Donald Trump’s administration slashes and burns its way across the nation’s top campuses, American higher education faces the most serious crisis in its existence. During earlier episodes of political repression such as McCarthyism, academia’s main casualties tended to be the careers of individual professors whose political activities displeased the powers-that-be. The institutions that fired and blacklisted those faculty members emerged from the witch hunt largely intact. Now, the entire academic world is a target. Trump is even wielding the government’s most powerful weapon by threatening to withdraw federal funding from the whole sector.

No school is immune. From community colleges and for-profit institutions to the Ivy League and the Big Ten, the loss of Washington’s dollars would decimate or seriously damage most colleges and universities. Without that money — primarily for scientific research and student aid — higher education would be unlikely to survive in its current form. Even the MAGA juggernaut’s other weapons, like banning foreign students or withdrawing accreditation, have financial consequences.