President Donald Trump is claiming generational wins for the Republican Party on the cultural and ideological battlefield of education – which MAGA supporters see as a hostile bastion of liberal power ripe for disruption.
In a move he described as “45 years in the making,” Trump, seated among children at desks in a mock classroom set up in the White House, signed an executive order designed to obliterate the Department of Education.
“It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Department of Education, we’re going to eliminate it,” Trump said, aware that he’s unlikely to get Congress to vote to abolish the agency – but that he can suffocate it from the inside anyway.
Republicans see the department as a hotbed of liberal activism, a source of “woke” social policies on diversity and inclusion and an ally of teachers’ unions, which are a foundation of the Democratic Party. A sense among GOP voters that the department promotes values antithetical to conservative principles was exacerbated by school closures during the pandemic and by debate about how to treat transgender students.
But Trump does not just have K-12 education in his sights as he attempts to use aggressive executive power in his second term. The administration is piling pressure on elite universities over curriculums. It’s cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants as part of its purge of the federal government. And it is provoking fear on campuses with its hardline immigration policies that have targeted several academics and activists.
The approach has caused fears about government interference in higher education and about the suppression of the constitutional right to free speech – which is only underscored when it protects rhetoric that many Americans view as unacceptable.
The crackdown also raised the prospect that an American national jewel – the global power, reach and reputation of scientific research at US college – could be damaged and that there could be a drain of scientific brains and funding to foreign nations. Just last week, for instance, Johns Hopkins University announced that it was cutting 2,000 jobs across 44 countries after it lost $800 million in funding during the effort to dismantle the US Agency for International Development.
Trump takes aim at elite universities
Elite universities especially are braced for an escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign – since they are regarded in the GOP as incubators of liberal protest and mores that the MAGA movement seeks to eradicat
The philosophy was summed up by now-Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School who was at the time a Senate candidate, at a National Conservatism conference in 2021. Vance advocated a campaign against “very hostile institutions” and added: “If any of us want to do the things we want to do for our country and the people who live in it – we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
Such talk concerns historians familiar with the strategy of totalitarian leaders overseas, who target universities and other institutions, such as the press, as part of a broader assault against free speech.
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s earliest acts in his 25-year rule was to drive Western-oriented and liberal democratic influences out of Russian universities as he suppressed academic freedoms. And one of the heroes of Trump’s MAGA operatives is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has long battered liberal institutions like universities. This is part of a playbook that also foreshadowed Trump’s aggressive attempts to co-opt big business and to push executive power to the limit – and sometimes beyond constitutional limits.
The administration’s new front in its immigration enforcement operation at universities was highlighted by the detention this month of Columbia graduate and Palestinian green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead campus protests last year against Israel’s war on Hamas following the October 7, 2023, attacks. The case is only one of several involving students at US universities linked to the Middle East, and Trump has promised a much wider sweep.
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month in a reference to Khalil. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations, meanwhile saw her profile in MAGA world – and nationally – soar after she made alleged antisemitism at Ivy League schools a signature issue. The New York representative’s campaign was instrumental in the resignation of President Claudine Gay at Harvard University – Stefanik’s alma mater.
