How Trump is reshaping elite universities

Reporter Francie Diep on the effort by the conservative movement to fundamentally alter higher education in America

This week, Brown became the third elite university to strike a deal with the Trump administration, agreeing to a range of concessions — including on women’s sports, preferential admissions, and the handling of antisemitism — in exchange for the restoration of federal research grant funding. The news follows a $221 million settlement by Columbia University, which agreed to many of the same concessions, as well as a separate deal in which the University of Pennsylvania committed to limiting transgender athletes in sports. Harvard University has thus far refused to settle and is currently in court.

To better understand what the administration is demanding from these universities — and why some institutions have agreed to deals that have outraged many of their faculty and students — we spoke with Francie Diep, a senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, who has been closely covering these developments.

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Why is Trump going after these universities? What does he want from them?

I do not know what he personally wants from them. But it seems clear that the conservative movement has a lot of complaints about universities. They feel like the culture is too woke — transgender student rights, for example, are something they want to roll back. They have problems with diversity, with efforts to diversify the faculty and student body in terms of racial minorities. They've said a lot about antisemitism on campus — universities not protecting their Jewish students.

There's a big package of grievances that conservatives have about higher education, and they have taken a heavy-handed approach to trying to change that culture. And it started on day one of the second Trump administration.

I saw in the Brown agreement that the university will adopt the government’s definition of “male” and “female” and remove any consideration of race from the admissions process.

Yeah.

What has the response been from within the universities? Are people really outraged by this? Or is there a feeling like, ‘thank God, someone is finally coming in to set things straight?’

There might be a greater diversity of opinion on campus than you might think. There are certainly people — faculty members, administrators, former administrators like Larry Summers — who feel that the culture at universities has gone too far in terms of making campus life more comfortable for, for example, underrepresented racial minority students, or students who are the first in their families to go to college.

Then there are researchers who just want to do their research, and they want the universities to make any reasonable deal so they can restart research that they think is really important.

On the other hand, if you look at the big faculty groups, like the AAUP, the sentiment there is generally that the government is trampling on academic freedom. Even the more conservative voices on campus don’t really like the way the Trump administration is going about these changes on campus.

And complaints about higher ed haven’t just come from the right. They’ve come from the left, as well: about affordability, the elite colleges’ endowments, how the elite colleges aren’t serving enough normal people. Maybe that made higher ed more vulnerable to becoming a part of the culture wars, that everybody was a bit unhappy with it.

What is the leverage that the Trump administration has here? What do these universities risk losing?

The government has so many levers. One big one is federal funding for research. Colleges get a whole bunch of money from the government. This is something that dates back a long time. There’s sort of a compact that arose between higher ed and the government in the 1950s.

This idea was that the government would offer a lot of money to universities to do research, and the universities would then do research that private companies would be unwilling to do because it's not so immediately profitable — but it would lead to discoveries that are helpful to everybody in the United States. So the government has been giving a lot of money for research to universities for a very long time, and that was one thing that I think most people took for granted.

This government also threatened student financial aid — another long-standing norm that arose between the government and higher ed, which is that the government would provide these student loans so that a wider swath of Americans could go to college. Again, this is something that people took for granted.

They are also targeting the ability to enroll international students, which is something that some colleges rely on for tuition. And then there are endowments. A few universities have really large endowments, and those have special tax rules. They're not taxed very much. But the power of taxation lies with the government. And if Congress wants to tax universities more, they can — and they’ve been trying to do that.

The government has a lot of levers, because there's been this intertwined relationship between the government and higher ed in the US. It was founded on this idea that it's worth our money to do this, because universities provide so many benefits to American society. But clearly the conservative movement does not think so.

It does seem like there is this larger movement by the Trump administration to go after institutions and reshape them into more of a conservative vision. They’re going after the media. They're going after big law. It seems like an attempt to essentially transform these elite institutions.

Certainly in higher ed, that is their goal. The quotes from people in the Trump administration who work on higher ed make it clear. They want to change university culture to fit their own values.

Columbia and Brown both settled. I know there are a lot of factors as to why. But what were the reasons they gave? Did they feel they had no choice? This is a decision they knew a lot of their faculty and student body would find abhorrent.

Well, one, Columbia has done layoffs. I can’t remember if Brown has too. But a lot of the top universities have done layoffs, which is not something we have seen in recent years. We have seen a lot of layoffs in the middle of the pack kind of colleges, ones that are under pressure from their state governments, or who are just not enrolling enough students. But it’s surprising and unusual to see them in elite colleges.

I mean, nobody likes doing layoffs. It means less research, less teaching, less of the stuff that you consider central to your mission. So if a deal gets you to not have to do more layoffs, and not have to cut your institution more, that's a motivating factor. Whether or not these universities felt like they had no other choice, I can't say. But we do know they were under a lot of pressure.

What are you hearing from the people who support these deals?

Both outsiders who think this is a great decision and Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, frame this Columbia deal as protecting academic freedom. They say that the government does not have control over curriculum, hiring, admissions — the core academic freedom things in the university. But there are faculty members who are worried that despite this framing, and what's on paper, the government nevertheless could still later meddle in hiring, curriculum, and admissions. Because the terms that do exist, in their eyes, open the door to that kind of meddling.

I know there is this DEI component in which Columbia, for one, cannot try to achieve race-based outcomes, diversity targets, quotas, or anything like that. Is this going to change the makeup of the student body of these schools?

That is a good question. The schools will say that making race-based decisions was already illegal, and they were not doing it anyway. So you would expect maybe there won't be much of a difference. The terms of a couple of these deals, though, do restrict the consideration of race beyond what the Supreme Court has required.

So in the Supreme Court decision, if you have an applicant who talks about, ‘these are the hardships I overcame in my life, which included racism, and these are the lessons I learned,’ you can still consider that. The wording of these deals suggests that you can't even do that.

I want to go back to the antisemitism claims. We went through a period where there were pro-Palestinian students protesting on campuses, and there were Jewish students who complained that they didn't feel safe. I think a lot of people on the left thought claims of rampant antisemitism were overblown given that these protesters were not, in most cases, attacking Jewish students. And they were obviously standing against what they saw as a genocide.

I think some students’ fears and feeling uncomfortable and not welcome on campus were real. And we've seen that in testimony they've given before Congress. Harvard did a really long report on antisemitism on campus. (They also did, at the same time, a report on anti-Muslim bias on campus.) Harvard community members talk there about specific things that made them feel either unsafe or unwelcome. That is real. But whether withholding research funding and overhauling universities is the right response — many in higher ed don’t think so.

I guess it seems like a double standard when you have folks who are so sensitive to the feelings of Jewish students but who are, at the same time, determined to eliminate programs meant to be sensitive to the feelings of students from other backgrounds.

In the last couple decades, colleges have really tried to open their doors to a greater swath of students. These are students who were underrepresented — low income, first generation, racial minorities. And as these colleges did this, they realized, ‘we have to make this campus culture, which historically served white boys and men, more welcoming to those students.’

What makes one student feel comfortable and welcome is not always going to make another student feel comfortable and welcome. When you would talk to university administrators about that five or six years ago, they'd say, ‘no we can make this campus welcoming to everyone.’ And I don't think a lot of times they did really grapple with the fact that sometimes what makes one student feel comfortable may make another feel excluded. And how do we balance that? That’s a tough thing to do.

Now we're in a place where some people within higher ed, within the government, feel like the university has gone too far in accommodating the comforts of one type of student over another. If you talk to people who are really up in arms about antisemitism on campus, one comparison they’ll make is, ‘if this were black students, the university would be swooping in to save them, but because it’s Jewish students, they’re not doing that.'

So we’ve come to a place where some people think that the university has gone too far in accommodating the needs of one type of student, and now we’ve swung the other way. Whether administrators believe in their hearts like this is the right thing to do, I don't know. But they’re clearly being motivated by the federal government to prioritize certain Jewish students’ concerns over those of, for one, Palestinian or pro-Palestinian students who may have protested.

Let’s talk about the Harvard case. Harvard is in court fighting back. And they are signaling that they don't want to settle, although there are ongoing negotiations. Why is Harvard taking more of an oppositional stance than these other schools?

Yeah, it was really interesting. It seems like the kind of instigating thing was a letter that Harvard received from the government officials they were talking with behind the scenes. That letter laid out terms that did so clearly infringe on academic freedom that Harvard leaders felt like they just had to say no — and that they had to publicly post this letter so everybody could see what the government asked from them.

Funnily, the New York Times later reported that government officials said that letter was mistakenly sent. So would we even be here today if it hadn't been sent? I don't know. But that was the thing that kind of set this off.

Sometimes people ask me: ‘Why is Harvard defiant and Columbia submissive?’ And I don't know if you can think of them as opposite poles. Certainly, they're taking different approaches. But maybe not as different as it might seem at first. Harvard is still in discussions with government officials.

The Harvard fight is happening against the backdrop of the [Harvard President] Claudine Gay resignation. Which does speak to this power struggle, where you have people like Bill Ackman trying to wrest power away from an academic firmament that they feel has become too entrenched with the wrong values.

One interesting thing about this moment is that it started before the start of the second Trump administration. It started with the student protests and the way Congress reacted so strongly to them, hauling university presidents before them to testify before lawmakers. And then you had the intense pressure for Claudine Gay to resign.

That was one of the first signs that conservative politicians were trying to make this big change with universities. Another sign that has gotten less attention is that these kinds of changes have been happening at a state level for a while. The Florida legislature has done a lot to put their imprint on the public universities there. Allowing students to record their classes for the purpose of making a complaint about the professors. Asking the university to send in all their courses that mention certain keywords.

The administration talks about the Columbia deal as a model. Is the idea here that ultimately every school in the country will stop DEI programs or considering race in admissions?

It does kind of feel that way. At the same time, if that's the outcome they want, why not do it in a more systematic way? With executive orders, guidance from the education department? Those are the levers of government that previous administrations have used. Maybe people [in the administration] feel like the government was not able to make big enough changes using those levers.

What does the future of higher education look like? Are we being set on a new course?

We are all wondering the same thing. I have a kid who is probably going to go to college in, like, 17 years. I would like to know what higher ed looks like then — what options he will have, what the college experience will be for him. But I just don't know. This is certainly a bigger attempt to overhaul higher ed than we have seen in a while.

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