The effects of a rightwing campaign to remake American higher education are fueling fear and anxiety, but advocates say they have plans to fight back
Students and faculty heading back to US colleges and universities from summer break are returning to bruised institutions reeling from the Trump administration’s unprecedented campaign to bend higher education to its ideological will, and are bracing for more uncertainty ahead.
At the University of Utah, the Black student union has lost its funding and campus space – one of many student groups to face the brunt of Donald Trump’s anti-diversity measures. Indiana’s public universities have cut or merged more than 400 degree programs, about one-fifth of their academic offerings, while scores of other universities have made similar cuts as their budgets are on the line. At Harvard and Columbia, certain forms of criticism of Israel will now be punishable as antisemitism. And across the country, schools will see their international student population plummet after the administration erected a host of new barriers to students seeking to travel to the US.
The threat to higher education feels “existential”, said Benjamin Kersten, an art history doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the universities targeted by the president with millions of dollars in cuts. “It makes me wonder how I’m supposed to compartmentalize and conduct the research I was brought here to do.”
