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By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
When I went back to my office at Duke last week to prepare for the fall semester, I confronted danger signs, police-style tape and other obstacles outside the entrance to the building. I had to weave my way in. And while the impediments reflected humdrum structural maintenance, I couldn’t help but see a metaphor in them, one so on the nose that a novelist writing about higher education under President Trump would probably be ashamed to use it.
Those of us in academia are on newly threatening terrain. Will the Trump administration take away yet more of our funding? How closely is it watching us? Those questions dog me, but no more so than a larger one: What sense, if any, does the administration’s attack on many of the country’s leading colleges and universities make?
