Trump's War on Education

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” — Nelson Mandela

Throughout history, students and educators have occupied the centre stage of many major revolutions. Time and again, student movements have sensed injustices before anyone else, and have rebelled without fear. Whether it be protests during the Civil Rights Movement, against the Vietnam War, or apartheid in South Africa, students have always been important catalysts to historic social reforms. Consequently, education and the student movement have been the primary targets of any leader seeking to achieve unquestioned authority. The current leader of the free world is no different.

The name Donald Trump has pretty much defined American and world politics for the last ten years. Since announcing his campaign in 2015, there has rarely been a news cycle without his name in it. Trump successfully redefined what it meant to be a right-wing populist. After eight years of tolerating Obama's left-wing populism, Republicans were in disarray. They were planning to pivot to the centre when along came an unconventional guy, someone who looked and sounded nothing like a Washington insider, someone who was willing to use his charm and popularity to bring right-wing talking points into the mainstream media. For the first time since Ronald Reagan, rural and Midwestern conservatives felt truly seen by a presidential candidate; they felt they finally had a guy who was unafraid of speaking his mind, who didn't care what the media said about him. And after years of cautious conservatism under Bush, McCain and Romney, Trump gave them the freedom to be unabashedly, truly conservative. He proved that Republicans could win back the country not by pretending to be centrists, but by energising their base by swinging further to the right, just like Obama did by swinging to the left.

Trump did not really talk much about education in his 2016 campaign. He chose to focus on "draining the swamp". Ever since Democrats lost their Congressional majority in Obama's first midterm elections, nothing much of value got done in the next six years. It was a gruelling partisan deadlock that frustrated the average Americans, who felt like their tax dollars were being wasted funding a battle of egos between Congress and the White House. Trump successfully painted Hillary Clinton as a part of the "swamp", and won the election by convincing Obama voters in the Midwest that if they wanted to fix the mess in Washington, they should vote for him. Throughout his first term, again, he chose not to focus much on education, delegating the issue to his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Other than a few casual comments about "looking into" gutting the Department of Education, and some snide remarks about higher education institutions like Harvard and Columbia, Trump chose to spend the majority of his first term trying to dismantle Obama's healthcare plan.

It wasn't until his 2024 campaign was up and running that he decided to wage a full-blown war on education, particularly higher education, in America.

"The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over." - Trump, at a campaign event, 2023

By the time of the 2024 elections, it had become clear that the Republican Party's hopes of making inroads with college-educated voters were not going to be fulfilled. It is a statistical fact that an American who has a college degree is much more likely to be a liberal Democrat than an American who doesn't. Due to this, there was a growing hatred of higher educational institutions amongst the conservative Republican base, a hatred that was only fueled by the campus protests against the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and the role of the United States in funding it. These protests were reminiscent of similar campus protests against the Iraq War and the Vietnam War. All of these protests and movements were led by far-left, hardcore progressives and caused conservatives to feel even more alienated from academia. Trump seized the opportunity and made it one of the central issues of his campaign.

He promised to punish schools which "pushed woke ideologies" onto children, including those that imposed mask mandates during the pandemic. He explicitly made the promise to dismantle the US Department of Education, saying it had been infiltrated by "radicals, zealots and Marxists". He said that he would cut federal funding to any school or university that taught the critical race theory, mentioned the LGBTQ+ community in any way in their curriculum, or taught any political content that he deemed "un-American". He said he would allow states to decide what to teach in schools, and said he wished to establish a "patriotic education" that would teach only American traditions and would explicitly define a family as father-mother-child. When asked about children of same-sex parents, his campaign refused to answer.

Project 2025, the controversial political manifesto that aims to execute a strong right-wing agenda and replace federal service employees with Trump loyalists, pushed him to go even further to the right on the issue of education. Their proposals include ending the federal enforcement of civil rights and social equality in schools, no longer investigating schools for using harsher disciplinary measures on non-white kids, removing 18 billion dollars in federal funding for schools in low-income areas, cutting the funding for free meal programs, and ending any program that aims to give a head start to children of low-income families. They also ask Trump to fund only those researches which "serve the national interest in line with conservative values". For instance, they wish to stop funding research in the treatment of HPV (human papillomavirus), a sexually transmitted virus which causes cervical cancer and has led to deaths of Puerto Rican sex workers and women living in low-income countries. They also wish to slash the funding of research in climatology or any research into global warming. While Project 2025 is not an official manifesto of the Trump campaign, most of its writers and architects have worked either in the first Trump administration or on his campaigns. Many of its writers got cabinet positions once Trump took office for the second time. He has made it clear that, despite distancing himself from Project 2025 during the campaign to prevent controversy, he fully intends to implement it once in power.

Trump began executing his agenda by attempting to dismantle the Department of Education. He began mass layoffs in the department, particularly in the Federal Student Aid office, and announced a plan to reduce the workforce by half in a month. These attempts were blocked by a court, as the DoEd was created by Congress and its closure would require a Congressional act. Trump knew he could not pass a closure through his 2-seat majority in the House of Representatives, as some moderate Republicans are against his plan. So, he decided to shift his focus to higher education.

Trump used the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses to finally crack down on the institutions he deemed to be "too woke". He had tried to demonise these protests in an attempt to win Jewish voters in the election, an attempt which considerably failed; Kamala Harris won nearly 80% of the Jewish vote, the biggest margin on record for a Democrat. Trump nonetheless used the protests to execute his agenda against colleges. He began by cancelling half a billion dollars in funding for Columbia University, due to "antisemitic harassment and discrimination". He sent a list of demands to Columbia, saying it should place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under review, suspend or expel students who had participated in pro-Palestinian protests, change its admissions policies to prefer Americans over foreign students, and ban face coverings at protests. Despite widespread condemnation of the demands as an attack on academic freedom, Columbia agreed to the demands and made several changes in its campus policies. Despite this, the funding was not restored. The university president was booed and heckled by students during the 2025 commencement for backing down to Trump. Subsequently, the Trump administration paused funding for Cornell, UPenn, and Northwestern University before finally picking up its biggest fight so far: Harvard.

The administration sent a letter to Harvard demanding changes in its curriculum, hiring, and admissions policies, including hiring a third party acceptable to Trump to audit "viewpoint diversity". Harvard publicly rejected the Trump administration's demands and called them an illegal overreach of government authority. This began a month-long hostile face-off between the White House and Harvard. Trump announced that he had frozen $2.3 billion in federal research funding for the university and revoked Harvard's tax-exempt status. He also told the university that it needed to share with the government detailed records about its foreign students—including "relevant information" about students holding student visas that had been involved in "known illegal" or "dangerous" activity, and information about the coursework of all student visa holders—or else it would lose its ability to enroll international students. Harvard responded by filing a lawsuit against the administration, arguing that the freezing of funds was unconstitutional. In May, the administration informed Harvard that their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, and they were now prohibited from hosting international students. Harvard immediately sued the administration. The same day, a US district court judge issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the revocation of Harvard's certification. In response, the State Department ordered all US embassies to pause interviewing applicants for student visas and asked them to conduct "comprehensive and thorough vetting" of the social media presence of anyone seeking to visit Harvard from abroad. The president of Harvard received a minute-long standing ovation from students at the 2025 commencement ceremony for refusing to give in to any of Trump's demands.

"Welcome, members of the Class of 2025, from down the street, across the country, and around the world. Around the world, just as it should be." - Alan Garber, President of Harvard, at the 2025 commencement

Trump has continued his war on academia by revoking the visas of any foreign student whose online activity is considered by the administration to be "pro-Hamas". He has even targeted professors, such as Rasha Alawieh, who was deported despite a court order. Students targeted for deportation include Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia and a U.S. lawful permanent resident. To overcome his lawful permanent residency, the administration cited an act from 1952, which allows the deportation of even lawful residents if "their presence could negatively impact U.S. foreign policy". Trump has started suspending any programs that funded research on climate change, vaccines, COVID-19, LGBTQ issues, and race and ethnicity. These are the same programs that led to the discovery of treatments for polio, HIV, breast cancer and many other diseases that were thought to be untreatable not long ago. Most of these discoveries happened thanks to the research facilities in the very educational institutions that Trump is assaulting. Undirected research has often led to very important discoveries that have shaped human life as we know it. And Trump's fresh assault on science and research in universities will, according to scientists, severely threaten the standard of research in the United States.

"When science is attacked on ideological grounds, its integrity and usefulness are threatened. Independent research is the cornerstone of science in America." - Dr Eleanor Bartlet, The West Wing (Season 5, Episode 16)

Despite courts blocking most of Trump's actions, the impact is being felt across the landscape of American higher education. The repercussions of this Harvard-Trump fight run far deeper than the management of a single Ivy League university. Trump is laying the groundwork for eroding some of the most traditional pillars of support for the Democratic Party. His attack on any educational institution that refuses to give in to his demands is grimly reminiscent of the persecution of communists in academia during the peak of McCarthyism. It is clear that he is still riding high from his victory; the voters gave him a clear mandate, he swept the seven swing states, and for the first time in his three attempts, actually won the popular vote. He is using that popularity to implement agendas he didn't come close to in his first term. And it's working with his base. While his approval ratings have fallen to a record low for so early in a president's term, they are still consistent in the low 40s. This means that his core base has not faltered in their support for him despite his fresh assault on democratic institutions. He is still the messiah who saved conservatives from Obama-era liberalism. The question is how long can he keep up this war on those who disagree with him before people who agree with him realise they are supporting authoritarianism. McCarthyism was also popular when it was happening, as was segregation, but both are now considered some of the most shameful eras of American politics. Will Trump's agenda against academia also have the same fate? Only time will tell.

For now, Trump has chosen to go to war with an institution that is older than America itself, an institution that has taught both the architects of the American Constitution and the lawyers who've been defending it for decades, an institution that has throughout its history averted humanitarian crises thanks to the brilliant minds that have nurtured there. Whether Trump succeeds in his mission of eroding Harvard's prestige is yet to be seen, but one thing is clear: this war on education by a sitting American president is unprecedented, and its ramifications will be felt for long after this presidency.