Alan Blinder
Appearances
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Oh, I mean, you have billions and billions of dollars that flow to campuses all over the country. You've got the University of Georgia, which, for example, was getting federal funding for a lab that focused on peanuts. You know, Illinois, they get money for insulin research.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
You've had all this money flowing to public universities, private universities, red states, blue states, you know, large, small universities. Just about every college or university in this country has some kind of financial tie to the federal government. Some of them have much larger financial ties than others.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
But when you start talking about cutting research funding, the trickle down effect is enormous. It's not just cutting off Harvard and Yale and the like. It's cutting off potentially state universities near you.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Absolutely. But one thing to know about endowments is they tend to have a lot of what are called restricted funds, which really limit what the money can be used for. So, for example, you, Rachel Abrams, might have donated money to a university for a specific topic, a specific job, a specific research project, whatever it might be.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
That money cannot just be used for another project because they suddenly need the money.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Yeah, I mean, it's not just like going to the ATM. And not only are university officials really handcuffed on what they can do with their endowments, there's actually a push among some Republicans in Washington to tax the biggest endowments at even higher levels. So if that happens, there will be even less money for them to be able to spend on things like research and the like.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
So when you put all this together, the punitive threats to withhold funding, the broader budget cuts that we're seeing in the name of government efficiency, possible changes to the tax structure for endowments, what we're seeing is potentially a really dramatic realignment of the relationship between the federal government and universities in this country.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, look, there have been frustrations building with higher education for years and actually decades in this country. There's been this idea that they're for the elite. They build the elite. They're too expensive. What is even the point of a college degree?
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And you've had this emerging tension between what universities think they should be and what other people in this country think they should be.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
It's been this wave of complicating factors that may or may not have to do with universities themselves. And in the end, you've got this real mess for higher education at this point that has left a lot of the country's most elite universities, but also schools that are less prominent on defense.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, I don't think it's just the left. I think universities, especially the big research schools, have really assertive visions for their role in a modern society. They want to be places where they're really training the great thinkers of the day, talking about the big debates. They're doing research that changes the world. There is independence.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
They're extending their missions well beyond their campuses. That's their vision. Now, there's another school of thought, some of it is politically motivated, that these schools should not be what they are.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
They should be places where teaching is the focus, where workforce development is the goal, where you should come out of college with a degree that prepares you for the quote-unquote real world.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
This school of thought is very stringent on the idea that they don't want universities and colleges to be, you know, ideology factories. If you think through the list of complaints, it's that there's been affirmative action on campuses over the years. It's that the people up in academia just sneer at the rest of the world. They don't really want as many, I guess, abstract outcomes.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
They want concrete things, you know, where you can take a degree and go do X, Y, or Z. Now, this is not a new argument. But the reality is that universities have done a generally terrible job of making the case for themselves.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
You can probably blame it on a lot of different things. Sometimes when they're talking about their research, they go so deep in the weeds, no one understands what the research is about or what it's going to do. They've done a pretty terrible job of explaining how tuition costs work and how financial aid works.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
I mean, I don't know if the last time you looked at like a financial aid application or a scholarship listing, It's this muck.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
I mean, look, there's a whole body of research out there that says if you're a college graduate, you are likely to have higher lifetime incomes, less likely to be in poverty. The outcomes tend to be pretty good. But what they haven't done a good job of is explaining that for whatever reason, they cannot muster much of a coherent defense. Right.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Yeah, I mean, look, I would be hard-pressed to name a college president who does not think there need to be changes somewhere in the system. But I think they are worried about the proverbial throwing out the baby with the bathwater here.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
They will acknowledge for all the flaws of universities, and they will often admit there are flaws, that the system is too much the envy of the world to just trash it.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, there's a long history in the world of authoritarian regimes trying to pressure universities and transform them. And there are some people in academia who feel these last few months have been at least steps toward that kind of reality. They see these steps as out of a strongman playbook. You know, there was a book a couple years ago
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
by the president of Johns Hopkins called What Universities Owe Democracy. And he talked about in that book how the fate of universities and liberal democracies are entwined with one another.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
So, you know, there are people in academia who are giving voice to these types of things. There was a statement last week from a center at Georgetown University that talked about kind of an encroaching authoritarianism by the administration, you know, throwing out words like McCarthyism. We keep hearing that word thrown around a lot.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
That kind of, you know, speech suppressing, speech chilling atmosphere is what people are trying to compare this moment to. On Saturday, I was talking with Mary Sue Coleman, who is a former president of the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. And I was asking her, you know, what do you make of this decision by Columbia to concede what the administration wanted?
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, look, it's been a very long year and a half or so for a lot of higher education. But you will not find many universities in this country that have had a longer year and a half. than Columbia. It has absolutely morphed into being a poster child for crackdowns and protests and really bitter disputes about what a university can and should be.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And her answer was pretty revealing. And she said, I was alarmed by it because of what the ultimate consequences might be for higher education. But I don't want to say if I were sitting in their shoes that I would have made a different decision.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
I think some universities may very well decide it's an act of survival. And I think one of the biggest questions that's still out there is, what will the surviving university look like? Will it be these places where research has flourished and there's been a lot of debate, or will it be something different? And I think whatever the answer is, it's going to shape this country for a very long time.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And that's really been coming home to roost these last couple weeks.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, Colombia has really been one of the biggest hubs of campus protest since the war in Gaza erupted and since the Hamas attack on Israel in October of 23. Colombia had one of the most prolific encampments last spring. Its university president at the time went to Capitol Hill, had a pretty roundly criticized appearance there.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And what was interesting about Colombia is that a lot of people thought the university was getting it wrong. It wasn't just one side or the other that thought the university was blowing it wrong. And so as time has gone on, Columbia has really been, you know, a synonym for college chaos, essentially, over the last year and a half.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, the left felt that Colombia was essentially becoming a police state and that it was being far too aggressive in tamping down on protest, on looking to restrict academic freedom. They essentially saw a university that was –
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
crumpling under pressure from the right wing the right had plenty of complaints of its own the right was mostly concerned that columbia had descended into you know becoming this hot house of anti-semitism that it had allowed campus protests to just run amok and make one of the country's most prominent universities this kind of lawless environment
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And that has been a drum that Republicans have been beating at this point for many, many months. And it's one President Trump and his allies were happy to jump on during the campaign and then as soon as they returned to power in January.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
It's very clear from the get-go that rooting out anti-Semitism on campuses is now going to go from being a campaign talking point to a real focus of the federal government. So we start seeing executive orders and decisions that really start to shape how this is all going to play out.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
One of the most important things we saw was this idea that the Department of Justice would start investigating and visiting 10 universities worldwide. that they saw as really having a lot of problems with anti-Semitism in their view, Columbia was on the list.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, they got a whole range of investigations. There's this Department of Justice investigation that looks at whether Columbia and other schools were essentially allowing anti-Semitism to take hold and it was unlawful discrimination. You've got an investigation from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights that's looking at the same types of things.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
You've got investigators from the Department of Health and Human Services talking about universities.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Yeah, I mean, they are covering the waterfront on just about everything you can imagine. And Columbia was an easy target. So these investigations tend to take a very long time, but it becomes very clear very quickly that the federal government's going to be moving at really warp speed when it comes to these universities.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And on March 7th, the government tells Columbia that it's going to withhold about $400 million in grants and contracts to the university.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
So a $400 million cut would be a lot at any college or university in this country. But Columbia, to put it in perspective, has like $6.6 billion in annual revenues, and government grants and contracts make up about 20% of its revenue. So when the word came down from Washington about this $400 million cut, Columbia's interim president, she's a doctor named Katrina Armstrong.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
She said a cut of the size would be felt pretty much all over the campus. It wouldn't just be in one lab or one academic department or the hospital. It was the kind of cut that was just going to shake the campus really to its core.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, that's an interesting question, but they got something of an answer a few days later when the federal government sent another letter to Colombia. And this letter essentially was a ransom note, as some people have put it.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
It was a letter that spelled out a list of demands for Colombia to meet if it wanted to start a conversation with the federal government about restoring that $400 million in funding.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, the demands kind of ran the gamut. They were everything from having the university adopt a formal definition of anti-Semitism. There was a push to ban masks on campus because a lot of protesters on campuses have been covering their faces. There was a call to really review the admissions process, to overhaul the disciplinary system, to empower campus security officers with arrest powers.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And then there was this idea that they should put Columbia's Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under what the government described as academic receivership.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Some of them were, as you said, kind of mainstream, if you will. I mean, like the mask ban proposal was pretty well in line with what the University of California system has done. So that wasn't seen as this totally off-the-wall demand. The idea that you would have security officers with arrest powers... A lot of campus police departments around the country have arrest powers.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
It's a somewhat loaded question to a school like Columbia, which has a long history of campus protest and a complicated history with the police. But the one that really got the biggest attention was this idea of academic receivership that really set off alarm bells all over the campus and all over academia.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
The reason is because historically, universities, especially private ones, have near absolute control over what they're teaching and how they're running their academic departments. So the idea that the federal government would directly or indirectly dictate to a university what its curriculum and teaching should look like That was a red flag.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And one thing to remember, though, is that this letter to Columbia did not arrive in a vacuum. This has been months and months of scrutiny on Columbia that's been building. And then these last few weeks, you've even had Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers on campus. You've had a green card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, detained because of his protest activities.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
There's been this threat and this implied threat of deporting students and pulling visas. And it's really created this challenging environment where Columbia has felt besieged really in every way you could imagine.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Oh, there was so much pressure, even among people who were frustrated by Columbia over the last year, year and a half. There was fear that Columbia was going to cave to these demands. The idea that Trump administration could effectively bully a university. into doing something was really alarming to people.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And there was this really swelling fear and frustration as Columbia deliberated over what to do. And on Friday afternoon, we got our answer when Columbia's interim president released a letter, and it basically said the university was bowing to the government's demands.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, Columbia never in its announcement really talked about the $400 million in funding. They never made this explicit connection. But I think the administration at Columbia felt like it had very little choice in the matter. You know, they could have litigated this. There were people who were saying you should go to court, challenge the administration, make them prove their case.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And Columbia made the calculation that it would agree. Now, some of these things were ideas that Columbia had already been kicking around before the administration sent the letter. But the optics were really bad here. I mean, they were essentially saying we're going to do it in response to a letter from the federal government.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
There was a calculation that was made that they either could not win this fight, would not win this fight, or it would get worse if they did try to fight it. And they came down on the side of seeking to settle. But here's the kicker of all this. This is the rub. By agreeing to all these concessions, Columbia did not automatically reopen the spigot of $400 million.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
That $400 million does not just automatically return. These concessions that Columbia made were essentially their effort to get the government to come to the negotiating table to talk about restoring that $400 million.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
That's exactly right. So if Columbia gets the money back, there's likely to be a bigger cost than what's already been announced.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
You should absolutely be prepared to see those hardball tactics. I mean, you've got dozens of universities in the first two months of the Trump administration that have been told they are facing an investigation by at least one agency of the federal government. And they're not even all like Harvard and Columbia. Ohio State University is on the list. The University of Hawaii is on the list.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
It's fair to say that the administration seems to be embarking on a coast-to-coast campaign against higher education.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
Well, remember, it's not just a matter of will the administration come after my particular university that's driving college presidents nuts right now. The administration is looking at all kinds of budget cuts that could broadly affect higher education. So one of the things we've been seeing the last few weeks is more hiring freezes. We've seen layoffs.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
We've seen schools shutting down laboratories because they're starting to lose grant funding or they're fearing what's coming next. Columbia is among the most powerful universities in the United States, one of the oldest, one of the richest.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And one of the biggest fears has been that if Columbia University cannot stand up to the federal government for whatever reason, what are other universities supposed to do?
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
So this country has had higher education since before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But it wasn't until the late 19th century when Johns Hopkins University was founded as the nation's first research university when you started to see a much more explicit focus on research. That took a little while to take root.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
But around World War II is when the universities and the federal government really got to work with each other. The country had a lot of wartime needs. They needed big ideas, innovation. They needed interpreters and translators for these kind of esoteric languages. And those were the kind of people you could find at universities. And it created this relationship.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
The idea was that the universities would get this research funding, it would fuel their labs, it would fuel the scientists, and then that research would flow into corporate America, it would flow into other parts of the government, other parts of academia.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
And the result was the country got new pharmaceutical drugs, new technology, Nobel Prize winners come out of university labs in a lot of cases doing federally funded research. Now it's tens of billions of dollars a year that flow from the federal government down to the universities.
The Daily
Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
I haven't seen anything like it, but more to the point, a lot of the sources I talk to, a lot of presidents and chancellors and provosts, people who have been in and around higher education for decades, haven't seen anything like it either. They're almost shell-shocked about what's happening. It's been this wave of... campaigns against higher education.