Battle For US Colleges

medium120459523It’s a dizzying, devastating time to be one of the 4mn-plus who are employed in higher education in US. The Trump regime is attacking colleges and universities on multiple fronts: pulling the plug on federal grants from agencies like National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation, revoking student visas of hundreds of international students, threatening to withhold even more federal dollars if schools refuse to eliminate DEI programming, and cutting, if not eliminating, Department of Education, from which students borrow money for college, and/or get need-based aid, such as Pell grants.Throughout these attacks, the Trump administration has leaned heavily on the rhetoric of ideology, claiming that higher education has been poisoned by “woke” and “far left” idealogues. Trump argues that colleges and universities allowed anti-Semitism to run rampant during the 2023-24 school year, when pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments became fixtures on hundreds of college campuses. Trump also argues DEI programmes — running the gamut from social mixers, welcoming events, scholarship opportunities, clubs and student organisations, anti-bias training etc — put universities in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, national origin and sex.While I disagree with these accusations, I also think that there is another ideology in play that undergirds capitalism. If we look at the cuts to govt funding/staffing being conducted by Elon Musk and DOGE, and line those up with the Trump attacks on higher education, we see the truth of a claim made by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in their 1966 book, Monopoly Capital, that the social struggle under capitalism is defined as the struggle over the surplus — the difference between the overall output of a society’s economy and what a society requires to keep itself going.Govt taxation and spending are basic mechanisms by which the surplus is collected and redistributed. And, while US constitution clearly assigns the “power of the purse” to US Congress, the Trump administration is exploring every conceivable way, some legal — and most of which will likely be found to be unconstitutional — to keep the power of the purse for itself.Federal govt spending on higher education represents a fraction of total govt spending in US — no more than 4%. But colleges and universities are particularly vulnerable to Trump’s attacks, in part because higher education is awash in contradictions.On the one hand, universities can be genuinely Utopian and egalitarian places, where young people explore, change and grow in an atmosphere of genuine curiosity and discovery. A college degree can also catapult students from one social class to another. Also, universities are places of enormous vital research and innovation. At Carnegie Mellon University, we invented the emoticon, the Java programming script, and the wireless internet. Down the road, at University of Pittsburgh, Jonas Salk created the Polio vaccine.At the same time, universities are often perceived as elite and exclusive. The top schools certainly are, with the eight known as members of the “Ivy League”, keeping enrolments low and acceptance rates even lower. The sticker price for tuition, room and board topped $100K at some universities this year. Universities don’t pay taxes on their vast holdings, even as they often hoover up large tracts of housing and commercial real estate into their tax-free orbit. Some universities boast large endowments — larger than GDPs of small countries, while college debt is at an all-time high: $1.8tn for all borrowers.Higher education is fighting back against Trump’s attacks. Harvard, after receiving a letter demanding that it conform to Trump’s ideological agenda in a myriad of ways, including changing hiring, admissions, and student disciplinary policies, is standing up to Trump. In response, Trump has frozen $2.2bn in federal funding to Harvard, and is threatening to have IRS revoke its tax-exempt status.As a result, American Association of University Professors, the Harvard chapter as well as the national chapter, are suing to block the Trump administration from cutting Harvard’s federal funding. On another front, a group of international students is suing to stop the revocation of their student visas, claiming they were refused due process. On yet another front, Association of American Universities has started a multi-university lawsuit to block NIH from capping the amount of overhead universities can collect on grants. The newly instituted 15% cap, if it becomes the new standard, would result in the loss of billions of dollars of federal funding for medical research conducted at US universities.What all of these efforts have in common is that individuals, and individual institutions, are organising collectively. In graduate school, as a member of a group of graduate students trying to form a graduate student union at Yale University in the 1990s, I learned that there is power in numbers. I learned, in fact, that sometimes, there is only power in numbers.If American democracy survives the Trump administration, I would love to see universities extend collective bargaining rights to whomever seeks them within their institutions. I would also love to see them become more radically egalitarian, lowering tuition costs, accepting a greater number of poor and working class students, and doing more to lift up the cities in which they reside.Universities also need to do a better job of educating the public about the life-saving, life-changing research that is conducted within the ivory tower. Universities do contribute to the public good. But if the public doesn’t know that we do, or doesn’t believe that we do, the Trump attacks will simply be the beginning of the end for a system of higher education that has, up until now, been the envy of the world.The writer is Professor, Carnegie Mellon University