Michelle Goldberg
Trump’s Plan to Crush the Academic
Left
Jan. 24, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
Opinion Columnist
Last
year, Chris Rufo, the influential right-wing strategist who spearheaded the
campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., initiatives, told
me about his ambitions for a second Trump presidency. He hoped, he said, to see
Donald Trump’s administration aggressively investigate Ivy League institutions
that, according to Rufo, practice “rampant” discrimination against white,
Jewish and Asian students and faculty members, particularly through D.E.I.
programs, which aim to boost the representation of groups deemed
underprivileged. If they were found to have violated the law, he wanted the
schools put under a federal consent decree, “so that the federal government can
get them into compliance by force.”
More
broadly, he imagined a complete transformation of American academia. “If you
have the full weight of the White House, the full weight of the Department of
Education and a platoon of right-wing lawyers trying to use all of the
statutory and executive authority that they have to reshape higher education, I
think it could be a thing of tremendous beauty,” he told me.
The
model for such a multipronged assault, said Rufo, was Florida, where Gov. Ron
DeSantis created an “enormous improvement in the culture.” One place to see
what this looks like in practice is New College of Florida, where DeSantis made
Rufo a trustee. Once a progressive redoubt, it currently offers classes like
“The ‘Woke’ Movement,” whose course description says, “What has become known
colloquially as the ‘woke’ movement is best understood as a kind of cult.”
Now Rufo, who met with Trump’s education team on
Inauguration Day, is seeing his vision start to become reality. With one of his
first executive orders, Trump set up sweeping investigations into D.E.I. in the
private sector, instructing federal agencies to identify up to nine
investigative targets among major institutions, including colleges and
universities “with endowments over $1 billion,” a category that includes all
the Ivies.
Another
executive order lays the groundwork for deporting foreign students and
professors who engage in anti-Israel activism, something Trump promised during
his campaign. It calls for ensuring that “aliens otherwise already present in
the United States” aren’t hostile to its citizens, culture, government or
institutions, and “do not advocate for, aid or support designated foreign
terrorists and other threats to our national security.”
These
are two of the opening salvos in a campaign to crush the academic left.
“There’s kind of a multifront threat right now as to whether or not you can
express views that are unpopular with the folks in the White House and
executive agencies and continue to enjoy the protections of the First Amendment
on academic freedom,” said Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for
Individual Rights and Expression, which fights both left- and right-wing
infringements on free speech.
Many
Americans, including plenty of people who didn’t vote for Trump, won’t mourn
the end of tedious corporate D.E.I. trainings and have little sympathy for
radical student protesters. “I’ve been talking with executives in Silicon
Valley, investors on Wall Street and administrators within the universities,”
Rufo told me on Thursday. “They’re all telling me the same thing: The
resistance to Trump’s agenda is at an all-time low.”
But
this climate of liberal resignation only makes the administration’s plans more
ominous. Under the cover of rolling back unpopular left-wing excesses, Trump’s
team is trying to assert political control over American higher education, and
it seems to be pushing on an open door.
Some of the coming crackdown will be couched as a reaction
to campus antisemitism. Rufo described critical race theory, post-colonial
studies and D.E.I. as “intimately related ideologies,” of which left-wing
antisemitism is but one expression. “They’re nesting dolls. Antisemitism,
anti-white hatred and the desire to overthrow the West are all built on the
same foundation.” It is that foundation that the administration seems bent on
attacking.
Creeley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and
Expression, predicts that many state legislatures, local officials and
university trustees are going to enlist, either out of enthusiasm or
expediency, in the crusade to bring the academic left to heel. “I think you’ll
see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see
students punished, and I think you’re going to see a pre-emptive action on
those fronts,” he said.
Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On
Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a
definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and
Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its
policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First
Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of
genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov
has — might be subject to disciplinary action.
In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical
School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature
patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard
Crimson reported.
“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak,
from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley.
In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in
line.
