Trump vs higher education: a report from March 17, 2025

Recently I’ve been tracking what the Trump administration has been doing to higher education, along with how academics have responded.  I wanted to organize my understanding of the events and to share evidence about them.

I blogged about this (February 25, February 1, January 30), then decided to turn to a video format in order to broaden the audience.  That’s worked as far as I can tell, with a healthy amount of commentary.

Now there are four vlogs about Trump 2.0 and higher ed. I just posted the most recent one today, and thought I would try another track: sharing the video here, along with my show outline and notes.  You can watch the video here, or read the notes and use the links below.  Either way, please share and comment.

Notes and links:

…If you’re new to this series, these videos are where I summarize what the Trump administration has been doing to higher education, and how colleges and universities have responded. It’s a little different from my usual video work, which focuses on the future of higher ed, and the future in general.   I initially started  doing these weekly, but things have developed at such a fast pace that I have to offer them more frequently.   

So here are the latest developments since the last video, as of today, March 12th.  

What follows is going to be formally very simple: no images or creative audio tracks or fancy editing; just me sharing the news, which I’ve organized into five categories: federal level, campus cuts, DEI, climate change, and academic responses.   

1 At the Federal level

I’ll break these down by departments and offices.

A White House executive order shut down a group of services “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law”, notably the United States Agency for Global Media, which includes the Voice of America. On the academic side, the EO ends the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  IMLS serves museums and libraries across the country with grants, research, and policy support.  In 2023 their budget was $313.58 million. Closing IMLS will cost the museum and library world.   One response from the EveryLibrary group called on Congress to restore that funding. The American Alliance of Museums is organizing to protect IMLS.     

The Department of Justice  requires, according to the University of Kentucky, “ If an award-funded project includes a survey, form, or data collection tool that asks about “gender” or “gender identity,” it must instead ask about “sex,” with only two available responses: “male” and “female.” A “choose not to disclose” response is not permitted. All questions about “gender identity” must be removed.”

The Department of Education  

On March 10, the Office of Civil Rights sent 60 colleges and universities a note “warning them of potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” This builds on previous warnings against this group of institutions.  The OCR then launched investigations into 45 campuses, charging them with failing to “end the use of racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.”  In part OCR criticized them for working with the “PhD Project”, an effort to grow numbers of underrepresented minorities with PhDs. OCR is also targeting seven others “for alleged impermissible race-based scholarships and race-based segregation.” 

The Education Department then joined with the Department of Health and Human Services and General Services Administration to send an extraordinary letter to Columbia University, outlining a set of internal changes for the campus to make. The letter calls for changes to campus police, admissions procedures, masking, organizing and disciplining student groups, and more. Perhaps most striking is to “[b]egin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years.” 

Let’s stick with Columbia for another development, this time from a different branch of the federal government.  We’ve already seen in our last update that The Department of Homeland Security arrest and attempt to deport a recent graduate, Mahmoud Khalil.  Khalil is still being held without charges, as of this recording.  ICE then deported a Columbia student, Leqaa Kordia, who came from the West Bank. Another Columbia student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fearing arrest and deportation, self-deported to India. Meanwhile, Customs deported a Brown University medical professor, a Lebanese organ transplant specialist with an H1-B visa, allegedly for a Hezbollah connection. , feds say

Elsewhere, the New York Times published a document describing new travel bans the Department of State is apparently considering. Promulgating such a new round of bans would likely depress international enrollment, both from the named states as well as from others fearing America has become less welcoming to international students. 

The State Department is also starting to ask other governments to change how they describe Fulbright scholarships.   According to a Swedish newspaper, this has occurred in two Finnish institutions, the University of Helsinki and Aalto University. As translated by Google: “ the American side has asked that the advertisements be cleaned of words such as “climate change”, “equal society”, “inclusive society” and “women in society”.”  Meanwhile, ABC News Australia reports that a group of as yet unidentified US federal agencies has started adding a new request to Australian researchers working with Americans:

Last week US agencies sent some of those Australian researchers what appears to be a global notice, asking them to justify their funding, as well as a questionnaire grilling them on a host of issues — including their links with China and the Trump administration’s edicts recognising only two sexes.

The document also asks them to confirm if they’ve received “ANY funding from the PRC” or Chinese state actors, and asks what steps they’ve taken against “Christian persecution” or to “protect women and to defend against gender ideology.”

2 Cuts

Within higher education, one response to Trump actions is cuts to programs and operations.  For example: “Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday that it will be cutting more than 2,000 jobs after it lost $800 million in funding from the US Agency for International Development.”  That’s “1,975 positions in 44 countries internationally and 247 in the United States,” according to a Hopkins representative. (more and more) 

Some universities have announced hiring freezes, like Duke. Others are pausing recruitment of new graduate students.  One, the University of Massachusetts Amherst actually rescinded acceptance to would-be students in its medical school.

3 DEI

One area of cuts involves DEI, a particular focus of this administration.  We have seen more program and staff changes and cuts.  For example, Kentucky’s legislature just voted to ban DEI programs for any college or university receiving state funding. This actually has many parts, according to Higher Ed Dive:

the bill seeks to limit the classes that colleges could require students to take. It would prohibit courses designed primarily “to indoctrinate participants with a discriminatory concept” and bar the Council on Postsecondary Education, Kentucky’s higher education coordinating board, from approving degree programs that require students to take such classes… The bill would also prohibit colleges from using diversity statements — descriptions of one’s experiences with and commitment to diverse student populations. And it would bar colleges from requiring employees or students to undergo diversity training. The legislation would exempt DEI training and programs required by federal and state law. Additionally, the bill requires state colleges to undergo audits every four years to prove they did not spend funds on DEI.

The state’s governor seems likely to oppose the bill, but Republicans seem to have enough votes to override a veto.   

4 Climate change

Climate change is another Trump target, one he has gone after in multiple ways. Some of those attacks are now impacting higher education.

For one example, we can draw on an excellent Hechinger Report update concerning New York’s state university system, SUNY:

At the start of the year, the State University of New York was awarded $15 million to buy 350 electric vehicle charging stations. “We have yet to see the dollars,” said its chancellor, John B. King Jr. A webinar on the Department of Transportation grant program, which is funded by the bipartisan infrastructure act, was canceled. “It’s been radio silence,” said Carter Strickland, the SUNY chief sustainability officer. 

The SUNY system, which owns a staggering 40 percent of New York State’s public buildings, had also planned to apply for IRA payments for a variety of projects to electrify campuses, reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency. In November, it applied for approximately $1.45 million for an Oneonta campus project that uses geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling. It still expects to get that money since the project is complete and the IRA remains law, but it can no longer count on payments for newer projects, King said.

Across the country lies another example:

[according to] Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature… The University of California system…filed applications for more than 70 projects, including a $1 billion project to replace UC Davis’s leaky and inefficient heating and cooling system and a project at UC Berkeley to phase out an old power plant and replace it with a microgrid.

5  Reactions 

There is a lot of academic silence in response to the Trump’s administration’s actions, but there is also protest, resistance, and actions.

Some faculty are making public statements in response.  One Columbia university professor, Marianne Hirsch, told the Guardian: “My committed Jewish faculty colleagues and I have warned that the false characterisation of [Columbia University] as a hotbed of antisemitism would be used as an alibi for what’s actually at stake for the Republican establishment and now the Trump administration: strict control of speech, of protest, and of higher education at large….”  Another Columbia professor Michael Thaddeus “described the combined cut to federal aid and Khalil’s arrest as a pincer attack by Trump.”

Seven other Columbia faculty, legal scholars, published an open letter analyzing and disagreeing with the Trump administration letter we mentioned earlier.  A Johns Hopkins political scientist, Lester Spence, is conducting a survey of people in two cities to see how Trump’s actions are impacting them: “Understanding these impacts in Detroit and Baltimore not only highlights the local consequences of federal policies, but also underscores the interconnected struggles and strengths of Black urban communities in the face of shifting political landscapes.”

Some northern Virginian colleges and universities now offer free or low cost classes to fired federal workers. One group, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, sued the Department of Education to block the mass firings we mentioned last time. 

There is also some international support.   Returning to our earlier story about Finland and the Fulbright program:

…around 700 Finnish researchers reacted to the American action by signing a call for academic freedom and freedom of expression.

“We want to openly show how many researchers are resisting these attacks and the goal is to reach a common line for all universities and colleges on how to deal with such censorship demands,” one of the initiators, researcher Tapani Hopkins at the University of Turku.”

There is also a petition in response, which “request[s] that the Council of Rectors of Finnish Universities (Unifi) and the Rectors’ Conference of Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences (Arene) publish statements on their websites that clearly reject any political attempt to censor the activities, research and related communications of higher education institutions.”

To summarize: the Trump administration is continuing to go after higher education through multiple government offices and in many ways, from funding cuts to deportations and even an extraordinary interference in one university’s autonomy.  Academics are feeling impacts across the nation and elsewhere in the world. Columbia University seems to have emerged as a flashpoint, perhaps a test case for the new administration to see how far it can go, how much punishment it can mete out.

Please use the comment box to add your thoughts, knowledge, and experience to this account.  You can also let me know what you think of this project, either the vlogs or blogging ’em. And if you’d rather reach me privately, please use this link to do so.