The new Trump administration hits higher education

(Greetings from airportland.  Today I’ve been in New York’s JFK airport for nine hours and counting, with flights delayed due to the awful Potomac River crash.  Apologies if this post is telegraphic or hasty.)

Donald Trump is back in office with an intense flurry of executive actions and statements. In that whirlwind he and his team have found time to take some steps against concerning higher education, which I’ll try to summarize here.

First off: if any of these policies impact you in your academic work, please share your story in comments, if you can. If you’d like to, but don’t want to do so in public, you can reach me privately here.  We need to get these stories out to show the real, human damage Trump is doing to academia.

Second, please note this is a post made in haste.  Political events are moving very quickly. Personally, the past two weeks have been grueling. If this post missed anything, please let me know in comments.  This is also a post focused just on higher education impacts; I don’t have time for a summary or analysis of the overall administrative strategy.  Similarly I can’t offer advice about what to do about all of this.

ITEM – some federal web content has gone down or been replaced by new materials. This has removed some data and documents from researchers’ use.

ITEM – an executive order ending DEI language and practice in the federal government includes this plan to go after a handful of wealthy campuses: “each [federal] agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of… institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”  In other words, the feds will target some universities with lavish endowments to, ah, check on their DEI work.

ITEM – an executive order against antisemitism includes many points about colleges and universities.  They include working with campuses to possibly deport “aliens” who teach (alleged) antisemitism as well as preparing for future Attorney General actions against campuses.

ITEM – the new administration tried to suspend the operation of a lot of federal grants and loans. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo M-25-13 called for a pause in many payments:

To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal. [bold and odd capitalizations in original]

Some of those grants currently go to academic activities.  In response, the National Science Foundation (NSF) told grant recipients to not spend any grand monies while they “are working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.”  The National Institutes for Health (NIH) suspended staff travel for the moment, travel which is key to holding meetings for grant decisions.  NIH also canceled meetings straight up.

The threat poses by this order to academic research and other programs is substantial.  President Mitchell of the American Council on Education (ACE) stated that “this unprecedented order to pause grants, loans, and other direct federal support is causing great harm to millions of Americans, as well as our nation’s overall economy and security. This is bad public policy…”  On a podcast Mitchell referred to the policy as “institutional destruction.”

With a day the pause was itself temporarily paused by a federal judge.  The OMB then fired back with a clarification memo, within which we find assurances that the pause wouldn’t hit student loans.  Instead, the policy was “expressly limited to programs, projects, and activities implicated by the President’s Executive Orders, such as ending DEI, the green new deal, and funding nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest.”   At around the same time the new press secretary offered her view on X/Twitter:

This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.

Many scholarly societies and universities have issued comments, mostly of the “we’re watching closely” variety (for example).  The Department of Education seems to be starting to review some of its programs, according to Inside Higher Ed:

At the Education Department, programs subject to review include TRIO, Pell Grants, student loans and grants for childcare on campus, as well as those that support students with disabilities and minority-serving institutions. Currently, neither the $229 million fund for Hispanic-serving institutions nor the $400 million grant program for historically Black colleges and universities is included in the review.

As part of the review, agencies will have to answer a series of questions for each program, including whether the programs fund DEI, support “illegal aliens” or promote “gender ideology.”

So it seems now that the administration is conducting, or is about to start, some review of some of its grants to academics.  This immediately has a chilling effect on plans, research, teaching, and other academic work. And some of that work just stopped.

ITEM – an executive order ended a suite of Biden administration executive orders, including a group dealing with higher education, such as:

Executive Order 14021 of March 8, 2021 (Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free From Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity).

Executive Order 14045 of September 13, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics).

Executive Order 14049 of October 11, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Native Americans and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities).

Executive Order 14050 of October 19, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans).

Executive Order 14084 of September 30, 2022 (Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services).

These are varied, but the reader can glimpse the impacts: reducing federal support for museums, tribal institutions, black people, Hispanics, women, gender nonconforming folks, and more who are students, faculty, or staff.

ITEM – the order proclaiming the existence of only two genders can impact nonbinary and gender fluid students, faculty, and staff by ending federal programs which supported them and by changing their identity documents.

ITEM – another order announced an impending “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” for K-12 schools.  This entails a review of federal funding (grants), school curriculum, and more.  The target: the teaching of “radical, anti-American ideologies.”  It’s not clear how this might work in higher education, and I’d like to hear from people in education programs.

Beyond these statements and policies directly impacting higher ed are other orders which may have indirect effects:

The orders tightening border controls and launching mass deportations (for example) can impact undocumented students.

That executive order against DEI in the federal workforce – this includes ending federal promotion of diversity and ending DEI language in grant documentation.

This order ending many Biden orders may hit federal climate programs, which side effects for academics relying on them.

That’s where I’m stopping for now.  Looking back on this post, it seems to be a lot.  It might be too much to deal with for some folks.  If you’d like more information, the American Council on Education (ACE) has some good resources on what the Trump administration is doing to academia, including this page.

On a personal note, an observation and a question: over the past year I worked to help academics plan for a potential Trump 2.0 administration.  That seemed like a good use of my futurist skills and platform.  Accordingly I wrote a bunch of blog posts (look under this header) and hosted several Future Trends Forum sessions.  We did an open, extended reading of Project 2025. Now Trump is fulfilling many Project 2025 plans and taking other actions we’ve discussed.

Honestly, I’m not sure if what I did last year did any good.  Most readers and participants reported being depressed and resigned. Now, I’m not sure what I should do as the warned event has begun.  I’ve had people tell me privately that I shouldn’t do anything publicly, either because it might lead to attacks on my family or because I might platform those the speakers found to be dangerous.  Do posts like this one help anyone?

My work on climate change… continues, even though it’s now become a lot harder. I plan to keep doing that, addressing what Trump means for academic climate work.

Over to you. What would you like this higher ed futurist to do? I’m open to suggestions.

Above all, I wish you all the best, my academic family. Please take care and be safe.