In some cases, the Trump administration’s radical tactics might change American politics in ways a Democratic president can’t easily undo. Take higher education. The Trump administration sees elite academia as a center of progressive conformity — the incubator of the “woke” ideas that exploded in the early 2020s and that even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) recently suggested went too far.
On taking office last year, the administration promptly launched a barrage of legal attacks on key universities. It threatened or withheld billions in federal funding and launched civil rights investigations alleging progressive racial preferences and antisemitism on dozens of campuses.
Much of this campaign was legally flimsy, as a judicial decision last week finally tossing the lawsuit against Harvard University shows. But that doesn’t mean the effort won’t achieve some of its desired results. University of California Law San Francisco professor Zachary Price argues in a recent paper that the Trump administration’s “shock and awe” approach could lock in new incentives for universities even after Trump leaves office.
Antidiscrimination laws from the 1960s and 1970s have typically been used to push education policies in a progressive direction. For example, in 2011 the Obama administration directed colleges to pare back due process protections for students and faculty accused of sexual misconduct.
Trump has demonstrated that civil rights laws can be aggressively wielded against left-wing ideas as well. Progressive classifications around race and sex — as well as anti-Israel advocacy that veers into antisemitism — can expose universities to civil rights scrutiny and give the federal government a pretext to defund their research. The Trump administration didn’t remotely follow the proper procedure for threatening funding streams, but as Price notes, “the administration’s very lawlessness gave it the upper hand” in coercing the ivory tower.
Universities comply with what they anticipate being punished for, and until 2025 the anticipation ran in one direction. Title VI and Title IX enforcement had a settled valence, and general counsels priced risk accordingly. Demonstrating that the same statutes can be turned around changes the calculation permanently, because the demonstration cannot be un-demonstrated. That part of Zachary Price’s thesis survives the Harvard ruling.
The rest of the column has trouble.
Start with the evidence. The piece concedes that October 7 and the 2024 election might explain the pivot, then argues as though Trump’s role stands established. But the timing favors the rival account. Institutional neutrality statements began spreading in 2024, after the December 2023 presidents’ hearing and the donor revolt that followed. Harvard adopted its version before Trump took office.
Second, the column notices the problem and walks past it: “or at least saying they’re doing.” That is the question, and everything downstream depends on the answer. Ten million dollars for ideological breadth at an institution with a fifty-billion-dollar endowment is two hundredths of one percent, announced through the student newspaper. A report criticizing groupthink costs a committee’s time. What deters is expensive, and what is cheap is a press release. The measurable indicators sit elsewhere: the composition of junior faculty hires over five years, whether DEI offices closed or changed their letterhead, whether general education requirements moved, whether the disciplinary associations that certify prestige altered anything. Nobody has those numbers yet.
Third, the pressure lands on people who did not produce the thing being punished. Federal research funding flows to medical schools, engineering, the physical sciences. The ideas the administration objects to come from education schools, ethnic studies, parts of sociology and the humanities, which run on tuition and internal transfers. A biochemistry lab loses its grant so that a comparative literature department will moderate. The transmission from one to the other passes through a provost who has limited ability to direct hiring in departments that guard their autonomy fiercely and who has strong incentives to protect them from outside interference. Coercion applied to a hostage rather than the offender produces resentment, symbolic compliance, and a shared story about external attack. It might also produce the intended result. The column assumes the second without arguing against the first.
Fourth, the deterrence claim requires that the threat stay credible across a decade, and the column’s own account undercuts this. Deterrence decays with the probability of repetition and the length of the interval. If courts hold the funding cutoffs unlawful, the next Republican administration must build a slower apparatus with procedure, which is more litigable and more reversible. The value of shock and awe lies in speed, and speed is what the ruling takes away. What remains is the memory of a bad two years, and institutions have absorbed worse and reverted.
Fifth. A government that specifies the ideological composition of a private faculty is not pursuing neutrality by rough means. The demands ran to governance structure, hiring authority, discipline of named students, and admissions data. An equilibrium where universities track the current administration’s preferences is the end of institutional independence, with the direction of tilt set by elections. The column senses this in its last paragraph and then declines to follow it.
One thing the piece leaves out that might matter more than any of this: the endowment tax, indirect cost rate changes, and student visa restrictions operate on budgets rather than ideology, and they bite regardless of who wins in 2028. If elite universities change substantially over the next decade, the cause will likely be that they got poorer and smaller.
