Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities/NYT

Time to bring back real academic freedom and free speech to campuses everywhere

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/trump-pressure-universities.html

$9 BILLION with a B? What is the federal government buying with that money? It obviously isn’t Harvard’s loyalty to the present administration.

What does Harvard cost? Families with income below $85K/year get full financial aid. For the others, “The annual cost of attendance, which includes tuition, fees, housing, and other expenses, is estimated to be between $82,950 and $91,166 for the 2024-2025 academic year.”

Harvard University has approximately 2,400 professors, lecturers, and instructors. This includes a total of 2,048 faculty members, with 903 being tenured, 363 on the tenure track, and 782 not on the tenure track. That is an average of $4.5 million dollars in federal grants for every professor and even lowly instructor at Harvard. And Harvard collects 40% of that total as overhead, which goes straight into the university’s coffers. (Trump reduced that to about 10% but a judge got involved, so it is up in the air whether the university “overhead” charges will be cut.) Either way, the White House still has considerable leverage at its disposal

Princeton’s President Eisgruber came out with a tone-deaf response to all this.

Mr. Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic last month that the Trump administration’s moves against Columbia were creating “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”

“There is a pattern here of intrusions in academic freedom of strong universities that should be of concern to every American,” he said in an interview on “The Daily,” a podcast from The Times.

I guess he missed the news about the plummeting skills of college graduates and the propagandizing that takes place on campuses, with most students now afraid to voice their true opinions publicly.

In the scramble for self-defense, some university leaders have reached out to Jewish activists to push back on what they view as the administration’s overly broad definition of antisemitism.

Other schools have focused on outreach to Mr. Trump through his allies. Harvard hired as a lobbyist Brian Ballard, a former Trump campaign finance chairman whose firm once employed Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, and Ms. Bondi, the attorney general. Dartmouth installed a former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee as the college’s top lawyer.

But it is unclear how much these connections will help. The key staff members on the issue inside the West Wing are Mr. Miller; Vince Haley, the head of the domestic policy council; and May Mailman, senior policy strategist — all three of whom are seen as hard-line culture warriors resistant to lobbying.

I have never seen anything like that in print before: political beings who are “resistant to lobbying.” I love the sound of that. I think it is NYT code for “they stick to their principles.”

The article ended like this.

The administration’s zeal has flummoxed even some close Trump allies concerned that the pressure campaign could set a troubling precedent for future administrations that, for example, decide to “eradicate” sexism from college campuses or bigots from the faculty. Who gets to decide which people fall into what category and when?

Inside the White House, such worries are dismissed. That kind of thinking held back the first Trump administration, officials said. They are not concerned about what the political left might do in the future, they said, but instead are focused on setting in motion long-term change.

I think the take-home message is that if you or your colleagues are going to try and destroy someone’s Presidency, business, finances; attempt an assassination and steal an election—don’t try and stick around when he gets his second chance to govern. Columbia’s interim President is already gone. What’s next for the rest of the storied Ivy Presidents?