Trump's War on Higher Education

This is no time for cowardice. With the stakes this high, we have to bring people together from all corners of society to rise up with one voice and demand an end to this madness.

A million years ago, I was a math professor. That part of my past doesn’t usually relate directly to my public service work, but it’s been on my mind a lot recently as Donald Trump has waged war on higher education.

I don’t hear people talk about this as much as other damage caused by the administration. This makes sense. For one thing, as the Trump administration tries to take health care away from millions of people while lining their pockets and disappearing people to foreign prisons, there are more extreme outrages to focus on.

For another, elite higher education institutions, which are first in the line of fire, are unsympathetic victims. They have eleven-figure endowments (yes, that’s tens of billions of dollars) while charging outrageous tuition and yet still somehow crying poor. Many progressives accuse them (not wrongly) of exacerbating social inequality, while conservatives accuse them of being left-wing indoctrination camps.

All that being said, this situation is illustrative of the dangers and pathologies of Trump and his MAGA movement.

It started with the Trump administration’s disingenuous claim that they were concerned about antisemitism. Allegedly in response to this, they froze billions of dollars in research funding, including $790 million to Northwestern University alone.

As the amount of money withheld from specific universities for vague and likely phony reasons mounted, the war spread to other fronts. Trump is seeking to shred the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, organizations that are critical to America’s research capacity across a broad swath of scientific and medical fields.

These attacks have overlapped with the MAGA obsession with immigration. For months, seemingly randomly-chosen international students at institutions across the country have been denied visas, international students involved in protest activity have been detained, and, most recently, Trump is trying to ban international students from Harvard altogether.

So what’s the upshot of all this going to be? Simply put, universities will do less of what they’ve already been doing, and they’ll do it less well. Among other things, that means less research: fewer cures for diseases, less cutting-edge new technology, slower progress toward understanding how the universe began and how human society functions. Humankind will know less, we’ll be poorer, and we’ll die sooner.

But there’s another component to this. For generations, America has been the destination of choice for many of the world’s cutting-edge innovators (for instance, over 70% of Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans), and we’ve benefited enormously from that. It’s supercharged our economy, enhanced our standing in the world, and made our cultural life more vibrant.

By defunding research and trying to chase immigrants out of our labs, Trump is placing that asset directly in his crosshairs. And just as America has benefitted from being the world’s research capital for many decades, if that designation shifts somewhere else in the world, the new status quo that weakens and impoverishes the United States will probably last a long time as well.

Trump thinks universities are full of people who don’t like him, so he wants to punish them. And the collateral damage felt by all Americans just doesn’t matter to him.

This is a perfect example of Trump’s barbaric worldview. To him, success means one thing and one thing only: pushing someone else down. The idea that there’s a way to improve life for everyone is totally foreign to him. All he cares about is dominating others.

Unfortunately, the best things in life have nothing to do with dominance. It’s grotesque to see our government run by someone who is obsessed with harming people–the literal purpose of government is for us to come together collectively and find solutions that benefit all of us.

There should be a bipartisan coalition against these foolish and damaging attacks on higher education, and a shared understanding that investing in research is investing in our people, our economy, and our future. Furthermore, plenty of research happens in red states and districts–it should be easy for Republicans to get behind not torching Duke and Rice, not to mention the many other extraordinary research institutions they represent. Business leaders also know how important government-funded research is to maintaining American economic leadership. But, as we have seen painfully often, many who should speak out are simply too afraid to do so, lest they draw Trump’s vengeful eye.

This is no time for cowardice. With the stakes this high, we have to bring people together from all corners of society to rise up with one voice and demand an end to this madness.

That’s what I’ve always sought to do throughout my time in public service, and it’s why I’m running for Congress: to build coalitions and enact policies that lift up everyone, not just those who pass some political loyalty test. I know that’s what you believe in too, and I hope I can count on your help.