Three weeks ago, the Duke community received unsettling news: 599 staff members were to leave Duke as part of the University’s “voluntary separation incentive” offer. Days later came another blow: the Trump administration froze $108 million of Duke’s research funding, alleging racial discrimination in hiring, admissions, scholarships, and other areas. For many Duke students, Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education now suddenly feel real. After months of reading about the targeting of other schools, we are now about to experience Trump’s ire firsthand.
In the first seven months of his presidency, Trump has taken an aggressive stance towards American universities, slashing research funding, attacking tax-exempt status, targeting foreign students, and, perhaps most vehemently, dismantling any programs or practices that fall under his ambiguous definition of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Though these targeted attacks on higher education have routinely been framed as a necessary defense of the public interest, their purpose is unmistakably partisan. And it’s a tactic that’s hardly new.
The most obvious historical comparison is the Red Scare of the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a witch-hunt seeking “communist” professors, creating a culture of fear and mistrust within higher education. This is the example many jump to when searching for precedent, our brains scrambling for some sort of pattern, a past crisis to learn from.
But, this time around, there is a key distinction. I spoke with Dr. Eric Mlyn, a Fellow in the Kenan Institute of Ethics and founder of Duke’s Democracy and the Politics of American Higher Education program, who explained that “McCarthyism went after individual faculty and devastated the careers of hundreds of people. But it wasn’t an attack on the institution of higher education at large, and it was not the whole force of the federal government.” Today, we are not witnessing a scattershot attempt to discredit individual professors or even institutions, but rather a systematic attempt to dismantle higher education as it currently exists.
The difference is stark. In fact, Dr. Mlyn suggests that a better analog comes not from American history but from modern Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has organized relentless attacks on academic freedom since his election to the post in 2010. In the first year of Orbán’s rule, the Hungarian government cut funding for universities by 40%, framing the aggressive cuts as cost-saving measures. The result was an evisceration of independent research and the forced relocation of the Central European University, a global leader in scholarship, to Vienna.
The parallels to the US are hard to ignore. Both countries share deep rural-urban divides that politicians draw on to fuel resentment towards “elites.” Orbán himself embraced these similarities, telling the audience at Texas’ 2022 CPAC that “We cannot fight successfully by liberal means because our opponents use liberal institutions, concepts and language to disguise their Marxist and hegemonist plans.” He furthered this claim with a sense of militaristic urgency: “Politics, my friends, are not enough. This war is a culture war.”
Orbán’s words ring eerily familiar. Vice President J.D. Vance has employed similarly bellicose rhetoric over his political career, echoing Richard Nixon’s words in his 2021 declaration that “professors are the enemy,” and, more recently, telling conservative podcaster Jack Murphy that “my strategy is to deinstitutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right. … It will require men and women of incredible courage. But I don’t see another way out.”
Republican media has hammered the point that there is a crisis in higher education. And just like in Hungary, the solution has been framed as an ideological necessity: if not to fix higher education, then to break it.
Why does this resonate with so many Americans? To the average Duke student, this animosity towards universities might seem absurd. But that’s because the average Duke student is statistically, well, not average. Over 90% have college-educated parents, and the median family income is $186,700. For most Duke students, higher education was never a question. Hence why most elite students and graduates are quick defenders of academia: their lives were shaped and validated by it.
But while college education is a massive fault line in American politics, it’d be naïve to cast the groups on either side as monoliths. Genuine disillusionment with higher education exists amongst the college-educated, and even amongst those who attended elite institutions. After all, Trump graduated from Wharton, Vance from Yale Law, and Stephen Miller from our very own Duke. As Dr. Mlyn put it, many conservative politicians “both want to destroy [higher education] but also want the imprimatur, the good housekeeping stamp of approval, of having gone to one of these schools.” What’s more, concerted efforts by interest groups of concerned alumni, and others skeptical of the ideological bent of modern universities, are being co-opted for the pursuit of political gain.
The resentment stoked by Trump’s anti-university rhetoric has proved to be anything but uniform, but it shares a common thread: a populist framing that pits “the people” against perceived elites. As Dr. Mlyn explained, “Populism in general is an attack on elites. But there’s leftwing populism and rightwing populism. Leftwing populism is a populism that opposes elites that are wealthy. It’s based in wealth and money. Rightwing populism under Trumpism is anti-elite, but it’s not anti-money. It’s anti-science, anti-expertise.”
Expertise is often seen as technocratic, a system wherein a select few make decisions for “the people” in their supposed best interest, but typically without their explicit consent. This tension between expert authority and personal liberty creates a friction that can quickly evolve into outright rejection. Take the COVID vaccine debate, for example. Public health officials promoted mass vaccination as a scientific imperative, but for many, it felt like a gross overreach of government power, resulting in an innate distrust and attempt to discredit the experts promoting it. By this logic, the attack on higher education makes complete sense. If you want to dismantle American expertise, then universities—the physical embodiments of research and knowledge—make for an easy target.
However, this newly launched “culture war” on higher education that Orbán described means that individuals are inevitably caught in the crossfire. The fact of the matter is that universities aren’t faceless bureaucracies. They are communities of scholars, staff, and students. Universities are no more or less than the sum of their people.
The 599 Duke staff members leaving this year are a prime example of this human cost, but another, more publicized example can be found 4 hours north of Duke at the University of Virginia. On June 27th, the UVA community was rocked by the news that beloved president Jim Ryan had resigned, facing mounting pressure from the Trump administration. The resignation came after the DOJ accused Ryan of failing to sufficiently dismantle the university’s alleged DEI programming. Dr. Mlyn touched on this, noting that the federal government’s message to Ryan was clear: “…you resign, or we’re taking away your money.” He laughed in seeming disbelief, adding with incredulity—“What country do we live in?”
It’s a fair question. The higher education landscape is rapidly evolving, and not for the better. A recent national survey of over 8,000 university faculty, conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of University Professors, found that over a third report less academic freedom than they had six or seven years ago. In particular, 39% of those faculty members cited increasing administrative pressure from state legislators, along with 37% pointing to tensions with funders and donors. And while it may be unhelpful to focus on what could’ve been done differently to prevent this decline, I couldn’t resist asking Dr. Mlyn why universities didn’t take Trump’s campaign trail promises more seriously. After all, Trump was not shy about his plans to tax and defund private universities, and he railed against DEI in schools at rally after rally. Dr. Mlyn explained that perhaps more could’ve been done, but that he “[doesn’t] think we understood the vehemence, the destructive impulses, of the Trump administration to go as far as they’ve gone.”
University administrations were not the only ones to underestimate Trump’s zeal. Students, too, were, and seemingly continue to be, largely unfazed. Dr. Mlyn echoed this concern, citing a lack of student engagement with the issue during the spring semester, but adding that he hopes to increase awareness—and, well, care—about the issue in the coming year.
For my part, I have great hope that more students will engage with the issue this year, but I fear the cost at which this engagement will come. As a general rule, people tend to engage when they are forced to—when a problem affects them in tangible ways. This year, it almost certainly will. International students have already felt the fear of being barred from returning. Students on financial aid or student loans are beginning to worry about the security of that assistance. And beyond these existential concerns, we are all sure to feel the impacts in smaller ways: confusion and complications amidst staff turnover, reductions in club funding, increased competition for research opportunities.
For faculty, the impact is even more immediate. Dr. Mlyn notes that he sees these impacts daily. Professors are renaming courses to avoid attention; researchers are losing lab funding, and many postdocs are even leaving for Europe. “People… feel like they’re vulnerable,” he explained. While the Duke-specific impacts of the Trump administration’s hostility towards education remain uncertain, it is likely they will linger well after Trump leaves office. They will persist in the reputational damage to American academia and in the loss of key research projects, which, once stopped, face significant (sometimes impossible) barriers to re-starting.
“There is a fundamental condition of human life,” Dr. Mlyn reminded me, “which is that it’s much easier to destroy than to build. You can knock down a building in one minute, but to rebuild that building? It would take years.”
So what can be done? How do universities, and their students, fight for their right to free academic expression?
For universities, I believe the answer is solidarity. In April, hundreds of college administrators (including Vincent Price) co-signed a letter calling for the end of “unprecedented government overreach and political interference.” The signing of the letter was a strong start, but this sense of allegiance amongst universities has not continued at the same scale, or at least not publicly. More recently, in April, an amicus brief was filed in support of Harvard’s defiance, though the list of 24 universities who signed on notably excluded Duke.
Because of the administration’s one-by-one approach in targeting individual universities, sustained collaboration is more difficult, but not impossible. Also in April, the Rutgers University Senate proposed a “Mutual Defense Compact” for the universities that comprise the Big Ten. The compact called for a shared defense fund and commitment to legal and public support should any participating university be targeted by Trump. Ten of the eighteen Big Ten university senates approved this compact, yet no administrative officials formally accepted Rutgers’ proposal. The proposed compact is the exact kind of concerted effort that will be necessary to send the message that an attack on one campus is an attack on all.
For students, I believe the answer is much the same—solidarity. Be vocal about these issues. Pay attention to the news, even (and especially) when the news is bleak. Refuse to let these attacks feel abstract.
Thomas Jefferson said, in a 1787 letter to James Madison, that an educated citizenry is “the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
He was right. At their best, universities cultivate civic virtue, prepare students to understand and contribute effectively to a democracy, and host the research and innovation that drive American progress.
But Jefferson’s ideal has never been perfectly realized. For much of our history, American universities excluded marginalized groups and magnified broader societal inequities. Today, there is a real argument to be made that many elite universities are too ideologically uniform, that a culture of intolerance and conformity has taken root.
These critiques deserve to be heard. But they simply do not justify a dismantling of the entire system. Reasoned, constructive criticism can (and indeed should) be utilized to strengthen higher education, but rejecting universities’ autonomy and objecting to their very mission—to educate—is an approach that fundamentally undermines the foundations of a free society.
by Lauren Blake
