The Genius of Trump’s Attacks on the Ivy League

All eyes are on the Ivy League as the Trump administration takes on the universities that have most conspicuously accepted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while flagrantly violating civil rights law. Though Columbia has capitulated in part to the administration’s demands, it remains to be seen what effect Trump’s demands will have on other Ivies’ policies. In fact, we may not know for years, since the handful that can afford to resist (Harvard, Princeton) will not go down without long, drawn-out legal fights.

But the genius of Trump’s attacks on the Ivies is this: even if the targeted universities dig in their heels and make no changes to their policies anytime soon, others will begin changing voluntarily. In some cases—Michigan, Ohio State, the University of California—they already have done so.

Is this because the Trump administration has created a climate of fear? Maybe. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth speculated to the New York Times on Sunday that fear had stopped many university presidents from signing onto the statement “against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” issued last week by the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

University presidents tend to be a spineless lot, but let’s not forget: fear works in both directions. In many instances, it was fear—of students, of faculty, of anonymous leftwing Twitter/X mobs—that drove academic administrators to build and maintain their racialist DEI bureaucracies in the first place. Thus acknowledged Jeffrey Flier, who has become a public advocate for academic freedom since finishing his tenure as dean of Harvard Medical School in 2016. In a recently resurfaced tweet from 2018 criticizing UCLA’s (now eliminated) requirement of DEI statements from tenure-track job applicants, he wrote candidly: “As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said this. But I will now.”

So for those who regret the fear-based decisions they made in the fraught summer of 2020—like hiring seemingly un-firable employees whose only job is to get everyone on campus accusing one another of white supremacy, or linking queer liberation with the fate of the famously tolerant Palestinians—what Trump has provided is cover to make the changes they’ve long sought but been too intimidated to make.

Want to lay off your bureaucrats? Blame Trump. Want to eliminate diversity statements from the faculty hiring process? Blame Trump. Want to overhaul your terrorist-sympathizing Middle Eastern Studies department? You guessed it: blame Trump.

No, you won’t please everyone. Some radical faculty and students will grouse about your cowardice in the face of a fascist dictator. But so what? You lost their respect a long time ago.

Since Trump has no problem playing the bad guy, let him, and trust that the courts will sort it out. You can sign public letters against his violations of academic freedom and rage to your faculty about him—all while taking full advantage of the opportunity he has given you. The bigger and scarier his attacks on Harvard, the more you can reclaim your own campus! Now is the moment. Seize it.

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