While these deplorable actions have generated outrage and protest, defunding Columbia is part of a coordinated plan to stifle the independence of colleges and universities across the nation. Less discussed nationally is how the cuts at NIH and HHS will undermine important regional institutions like the University of Alabama at Birmingham. While the students there did not engage in widespread protests against the Israeli state’s conduct that some misconstrued as antisemitic, and while Alabama is a deep-red state that has elected two sycophantic MAGA senators, this did not stop UAB from suffering projected cuts that threaten to upend employment in the region.
If the cuts stand, UAB will be collateral damage in the larger MAGA project to reshape the United States in the image of Victor Orbán’s Hungary, where there are no independent institutions capable of fomenting dissent through criticism or demonstration. To this end, Linda McMahon, newly confirmed to lead the Education Department, announced a list of 60 schools that, like Columbia, were under investigation for antisemitism and might lose federal funding as a result. But the colleges and universities included on the list—and the ones that are rather conspicuously missing—give the game away: The list of colleges and universities currently under investigation for antisemitism reveals that the Trump administration’s true motivation is to identify institutions receptive to bullying.
UCLA, San Francisco State, George Washington University (or GWU), and Wesleyan are all conspicuously missing from the list of colleges and universities under investigation by the Department of Education. This despite the well-reported clashes at UCLA between student protesters and supporters of Israel in May; despite San Francisco State being the epicenter for citywide demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza and recently divesting from three firms associated with human rights violations; despite GWU hosting protests on its downtown campus that included students and faculty from nearly all the colleges in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area at a park just steps from the White House; despite Wesleyan president Michael Roth’s refusal to disband student encampments during the spring of 2024 and his vociferous defense of academic freedom in recent weeks.
Contrasting the craven behavior of some of the institutions on this list of 60—with the UNC system and Ohio State University two notably spineless examples—with those omitted from the DOE’s list makes it clear that Trump, McMahon, and Homan are looking for cowards that they can bully; for institutions whose first instinct is to apologize and comply rather than defending themselves and their students in the public square.
Like the federal bureaucracy—which is also currently under attack—colleges and universities have traditionally been insulated from the tyranny of the market. This means that, despite the fervent desires of ideologues, colleges and universities have largely been left to pursue their research and educational missions as they see fit, even as the GOP has sought ways to cut their funding. The combination of relative freedom and declining federal and state support led to the corporatization of colleges and universities (and ballooning student debt). But the corporate university has come to replace or augment the functions of the federal and state government across the nation, leading to stability and even wealth in unlikely places like Boise, Idaho, and Ashville, North Carolina, which are dominated by first-rate state universities.
The flourishing of these regional institutions has created a higher-education infrastructure that remains highly resistant to political change, for better or for worse. While many academics—including yours truly—push for greater state and federal investment in U.S. education rather than military and policing budgets, one only has to look at the slow-motion collapse currently underway in the United Kingdom and the international demand for seats here to understand the underlying strength of the—underfunded and overly cautious—colleges and universities in the U.S.
It’s precisely this economic independence—not the lofty and abstract ideas of academic freedom but the indispensable fact that colleges such as UAB and UNC Ashville and Boise State have become the sole economic engines in their regions—that Trump and his acolytes want to curtail. The MAGA movement demands the supplication of the corporate university, and the spineless capitulation of not only Columbia but most of the 60 schools on the Department of Education list show that they are well on their way to achieving this goal. But there’s a clear lesson for those who want to emerge from this era intact: Supplication to Trump will not save you.