• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Trump Campaign Against Universities

The Trump administration undertook an unprecedented campaign to reshape American higher education through multiple mechanisms ranging from funding freezes to ideological compacts with universities. At the center of this effort is the "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," a proposal sent to elite universities in October 2025 that offers preferential federal funding in exchange for compliance with conservative policy demands. This initiative represents the culmination of decades of right-wing hostility toward academia, with allegations of antisemitism serving as a principal justification for what critics characterize as an authoritarian power grab.

On October 1, 2025, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, along with White House officials May Mailman and Vincent Haley, sent letters to nine universities—Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University—proposing the "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." The document promised "multiple positive benefits" and "substantial and meaningful federal grants" to institutions that agreed to its terms, while implying that universities choosing to "develop models and values other than those" outlined in the compact would need to "forego federal benefits."¹

The compact's ten-point framework imposes sweeping requirements on participating institutions. Universities would be required to eliminate consideration of race and sex in admissions, hiring, and financial aid decisions, effectively extending the Supreme Court's 2023 ban on affirmative action in admissions to all university operations. All applicants would be mandated to take standardized tests such as the SAT before admission. International student enrollment would be capped at fifteen percent of undergraduate populations, with no more than five percent from any single country. The compact further demands that universities impose a five-year tuition freeze, reduce administrative costs, and publicly disclose graduate earnings data by program.²

Perhaps most controversially, the compact requires universities to transform or abolish "institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas." This provision grants the administration extraordinary latitude to determine which departments, programs, or offices constitute threats to conservative viewpoints. Universities would also be compelled to adopt government-approved definitions of sex and gender, and to maintain what the compact terms "institutional neutrality" across all levels of administration. The Department of Justice would monitor compliance, with universities found in violation required to return federal monies received and lose access to benefits for at least one year.³

The response from targeted universities was swift and largely negative. By the October 20 deadline for initial feedback, seven of the nine universities had publicly rejected the proposal. MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated that the compact "would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution," adding that "America's leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence." Dartmouth's President Sian Leah Beilock declared that "we will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves." Brown, Penn, USC, UVA, and Arizona similarly declined participation, with administrators expressing concerns about constitutional violations and threats to institutional autonomy.⁴

The University of Texas at Austin's response proved more ambiguous, with Board of Regents Chairman Kevin Eltife stating that the university "enthusiastically look[s] forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact," though subsequent reports indicated the university was negotiating details in closed-door discussions with the administration. Only New College of Florida, the small public institution already transformed by Governor Ron DeSantis appointees including conservative activist Christopher Rufo, expressed enthusiasm for becoming the first signatory. After the initial rejections, the Trump administration expanded the offer to any college or university nationwide, though uptake appears to have remained minimal.⁵

The Broader Campaign Against Higher Education

The compact represents merely one component of a comprehensive assault on American universities that began with Trump's return to office in January 2025. The administration has frozen or cut billions of dollars in federal research funding to more than sixty institutions, including over two billion dollars to Harvard University alone. These funding freezes have occurred without the notice, hearings, or opportunities for voluntary compliance that federal law typically requires before terminating government support. Legal experts across the political spectrum have characterized these actions as violations of the Administrative Procedures Act and constitutional protections against compelled speech and unconstitutional conditions.⁶

Beyond funding cuts, the administration has wielded multiple tools to pressure universities. Executive orders have mandated the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, with the Department of Education declaring such initiatives discriminatory and threatening to withhold federal funds from institutions that continue them. The administration has suspended or revoked visas for international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism, detained students for protected protest activities, and issued proclamations barring foreign nationals from studying at institutions like Harvard. Science funding for research on climate change, vaccines, LGBTQ topics, and COVID-19 has been systematically cut or frozen as part of what the administration frames as opposition to "woke ideology."⁷

The administration has demanded unprecedented control over university operations. In negotiations with Harvard, government lawyers demanded changes to curriculum, hiring, and admissions policies, including requiring the university to hire third-party auditors acceptable to the Trump administration to assess "viewpoint diversity" across all departments and programs. When Harvard refused these demands and filed suit challenging the funding freeze as unconstitutional, federal Judge Allison D. Burroughs ruled in September 2025 that the government had illegally infringed upon Harvard's free speech rights. The judge wrote that it was "difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities."⁸

Accreditation as the "Secret Weapon"

Trump has repeatedly described college accreditation as his "secret weapon" for controlling higher education. During the 2024 campaign, he promised to "fire the radical left accreditors" and replace them with agencies aligned with his ideological vision. Accrediting agencies serve as gatekeepers to federal student aid—universities must be accredited by federally recognized agencies to access grants and loans that constitute the financial lifeblood of most institutions. The Department of Education has authority to recognize or derecognize these nominally independent agencies, giving the administration leverage to pressure accreditors to impose conservative policy requirements on universities.⁹

In April 2025, Trump signed executive orders targeting the accreditation system, ordering investigations of specific accrediting agencies and suggesting others could lose federal recognition entirely. The orders direct accreditors to pressure universities to "prioritize intellectual diversity amongst faculty"—what critics characterize as code for requiring the hiring of conservative professors regardless of academic qualifications or scholarly consensus. The administration has encouraged the creation of new accrediting agencies with explicit ideological missions. Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have announced formation of the Commission for Public Higher Education, a new accreditor that would be accountable to state governments rather than maintaining the independence that federal law contemplates.¹⁰

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent, who oversees university policy, has made accreditation reform a central focus, working to streamline the process for institutions to change accreditors and for new agencies to gain federal recognition. Changes implemented during the first Trump administration by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos already eliminated the regional structure of accreditation, allowing institutions to shop for accreditors. The current administration's approach threatens to transform accreditation from a quality assurance mechanism into a tool for ideological enforcement, with profound implications for academic freedom and institutional autonomy across American higher education.¹¹

The Ideological Roots of MAGA Hostility to Universities

Conservative animosity toward American universities predates Trump but has intensified dramatically under his leadership and that of the MAGA movement. Vice President JD Vance exemplifies this hostility. In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference titled "The Universities Are the Enemy," Vance characterized higher education institutions as "very hostile institutions" conducting "research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas." He called for conservatives to "honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country" and suggested "maybe it's time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues." Vance has praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's seizure of state universities as a model for American conservatives, stating that Orbán's approach of giving "funding to the ones he likes, and taking funding away from the ones he doesn't" represents "the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities."¹²

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo has emerged as perhaps the most influential architect of the right's higher education strategy. Rufo, who serves on the board of trustees at New College of Florida where he oversaw elimination of gender studies programs and diversity offices, helped draft Trump's executive orders on campus policy and has met regularly with administration officials. He has stated explicitly that the goal is to "set [universities] back a generation or two" and has celebrated efforts to "recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere." Rufo's strategy involves weaponizing federal funding as leverage to force universities to eliminate DEI initiatives, alter curriculum, and restructure governance to favor conservative viewpoints. His work at New College, where diversity center books were destroyed and faculty purged, serves as a pilot program for nationwide transformation of higher education.¹³

This hostility reflects multiple strands of conservative grievance. Right-wing politicians and activists point to the overwhelming liberal orientation of faculty at elite institutions and argue that conservative ideas and students face discrimination. They frame universities as training grounds for progressive activism rather than neutral sites of knowledge production. The educational divide has become central to partisan identity, with college graduates voting predominantly Democratic and non-college voters supporting Republicans at similar rates. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis built his political brand partly on attacking universities, using state funding leverage to eliminate DEI programs and impose ideological reforms that became a template for Trump's federal approach.¹⁴

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy blueprint closely aligned with Trump administration priorities, explicitly calls for "attacking the accreditation cartel" and eliminating federal support for what it characterizes as the "higher education establishment captured by woke 'diversicrats.'" The document advocates prohibiting teaching of critical race theory (which it falsely defines as endorsing racial discrimination), eliminating programs that help low-income students afford college, and restructuring accreditation to expose institutions to "greater market forces." These proposals reflect a view that universities have abandoned their educational mission to advance what conservatives characterize as anti-American ideology.¹⁵

Antisemitism as Pretext

The Trump administration has consistently framed its assault on universities as necessary to combat antisemitism on campuses, particularly in response to pro-Palestinian protests following Hamas's October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. However, multiple analyses—including from Jewish scholars, Democratic lawmakers, federal judges, and Jewish advocacy organizations—have concluded that antisemitism serves primarily as a pretext for pursuing a much broader ideological agenda against higher education.

Federal Judge Allison D. Burroughs's September 2025 ruling in Harvard's lawsuit against the funding freeze stated explicitly that the government "used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities." The judge found that the administration's actions violated Harvard's First Amendment rights and lacked legitimate basis in antisemitism concerns. Similarly, five Democratic Jewish senators—Chuck Schumer, Richard Blumenthal, Brian Schatz, Jacky Rosen, and Adam Schiff—wrote to Trump in April 2025 stating they were "extremely troubled and disturbed by your broad and extra-legal attacks against universities and higher education institutions as well as members of their communities, which seem to go far beyond combating antisemitism, using what is a real crisis as a pretext to attack people and institutions who do not agree with you."¹⁶

Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard College Center for the Study of Hate and lead drafter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism that the administration has adopted, told NPR that Trump is distorting and weaponizing the definition. Stern warned that the administration's approach "is reinforcing antisemitic tropes all across the political spectrum" by promoting the perception that "Jews control the institutions." He expressed fear that "this will go down in history books—the history of this era will say that Jewish people were the sledgehammer for fascism" and stated it was "the first time in my life as an American that I have been fearful of our status as equal Americans."¹⁷

Representative Dan Goldman stated at a June 2025 congressional hearing that "we see antisemitism being used as a pretext to go after immigration policy or to go after universities" while actual security needs of Jewish institutions remain underfunded. A coalition of mainstream Jewish leaders issued a May 2025 letter titled "Stand Up for Jewish Safety and Democracy" warning that "a range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press." The statement emphasized that these actions, undertaken in the name of fighting antisemitism, actually make Jewish communities less safe by "pitting Jewish safety against other communities and undermining the freedoms and democratic norms that have allowed Jewish communities, and so many others, to thrive in the United States."¹⁸

Conservative ideologues have been explicit that antisemitism is not their primary concern. Christopher Rufo wrote in a July 2023 article—two months before the October 7 attacks—about targeting DEI programs, making clear the campaign preceded the war in Gaza. Vance's 2021 "Universities Are the Enemy" speech predated October 7 by more than two years and focused on critical race theory, gender ideology, and perceived liberal dominance rather than antisemitism. The Heritage Foundation's "Project Esther," ostensibly focused on combating Hamas support organizations, actually targets "progressive elites" seeking to "dismantle Western democracies" and has been criticized for its own antisemitic conspiracy-mongering while being authored almost entirely by non-Jewish conservatives.¹⁹

The administration's actions frequently have nothing to do with antisemitism. Funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health totaling twenty billion dollars annually, most of which supports university research, cannot be justified by antisemitism concerns. Requirements in the compact for tuition freezes, caps on international students, elimination of gender studies programs, and adoption of government definitions of sex have no connection to protecting Jewish students. The demand for "viewpoint diversity" audits and abolition of departments deemed hostile to conservative ideas explicitly advances an ideological agenda unrelated to combating religious discrimination. As Harvard Kennedy School professor Mathias Risse observed, the administration is "using accusations of antisemitism to attack our universities as places where people work and learn who do not easily fall in line with their illiberal understanding of democracy."²⁰

Institutional and Political Responses

The higher education establishment has mounted organized resistance to the Trump administration's initiatives. More than thirty major higher education associations, including the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Council on Education, issued statements condemning the compact and rejecting its premise that federal funding should be conditioned on ideological compliance. The American Association of University Professors has filed lawsuits challenging the funding freezes as violations of constitutional protections for academic freedom and due process. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy organization, characterized the administration's approach as "flatly unconstitutional" and a "hostile federal takeover" that violates institutional autonomy.²¹

Faculty and students at targeted universities have organized petitions, protests, and public statements opposing both the compact and the broader assault on academic freedom. More than five hundred professors and staff at Dartmouth signed a petition declaring that "when the state demands that a university shutter departments and programs that do not conform with its political ideology, dictates what kind of research faculty must perform, and insists that standards of knowledge arrived at through decades of scientific and humanistic research be replaced with false and politically-motivated definitions…we will no longer have a university." Hundreds of students at Vanderbilt rallied in November 2025 demanding the university reject the compact. Multiple universities reported that their faculty—particularly non-citizens teaching history, political science, and regional studies—expressed terror at the prospect of government oversight of their scholarship and teaching.²²

Business leaders have raised concerns about economic consequences. In June 2025, hundreds of American CEOs, including Reid Hoffman, Paul Polman, and Robert Crandall, organized by the Leadership Now Project, published an open letter criticizing Trump's attacks on universities. They warned that funding cuts and visa restrictions for international students and scholars damage American economic competitiveness, noting that international students alone contribute approximately forty-three billion dollars annually to the U.S. economy. Prominent academics who study authoritarianism, including Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, announced they were leaving the United States in May 2025 in response to Trump's higher education crackdown, with Shore invoking Nazi Germany and stating "the lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later."²³

Some Democratic state officials have taken countermeasures. California Governor Gavin Newsom threatened in October 2025 to cut state funding to any university that signs the compact, characterizing it as a "radical agreement" incompatible with academic freedom. However, the political landscape remains challenging for universities. Congressional Republicans largely support the administration's approach, and the Supreme Court's conservative majority appears unlikely to provide robust protection for institutional autonomy. The funding mechanisms that give the administration leverage—particularly research grants administered through agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—provide substantial discretionary authority that may prove difficult to constrain through litigation.²⁴

Long-Term Implications

The Trump administration's campaign against higher education represents an inflection point in the relationship between the federal government and American universities. Historically, even public institutions have operated with substantial autonomy, with the government respecting the principle that universities function best when scholars and educators—rather than politicians—make academic decisions. The partnership between federal research funding and university independence, forged during World War II and sustained through the Cold War and beyond, has been credited with establishing American scientific and technological leadership.

The current assault threatens to unravel this arrangement. If universities become subject to shifting ideological demands tied to federal funding—with definitions of acceptable research, hiring practices, curriculum content, and campus policies determined by whatever administration holds power—the independence that enables genuine inquiry and innovation will be severely compromised. International students and scholars may increasingly choose universities in other countries, draining talent from American institutions. Research in areas deemed ideologically problematic by current political leadership may effectively cease, with profound consequences for fields ranging from climate science to public health to the social sciences.²⁵

Perhaps most fundamentally, the campaign signals an authoritarian turn in American governance. Universities, along with independent media, judiciary, and civil society organizations, constitute what political scientists term "horizontal accountability"—institutions that can check government power and preserve democratic pluralism. Authoritarian movements consistently target these institutions early in their consolidation of control. Viktor Orbán's takeover of Hungarian universities, which Vance openly praises as a model, occurred as part of a broader democratic backsliding that has seen Hungary characterized by democracy monitors as a "hybrid regime" rather than a full democracy. The willingness to use federal power to force ideological compliance, to punish dissent, and to replace institutional autonomy with political control represents a break with American constitutional traditions and democratic norms.²⁶

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, despite its rejection by most elite universities, establishes a template that may be imposed through other mechanisms. The administration's manipulation of accreditation, its control over research funding, its willingness to weaponize visa policy and tax status, and its coordination with conservative state governments create a multi-front assault that institutions may struggle to resist indefinitely, particularly as legal challenges wind through courts that may prove unreceptive to academic freedom claims. The stakes extend far beyond universities themselves to encompass fundamental questions about intellectual freedom, democratic governance, and America's capacity to generate the knowledge and educated citizenry necessary for meeting complex challenges. Whether American higher education emerges from this period with its independence and mission intact remains deeply uncertain.