Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education

By the time Trump returned to office, the higher-ed playbook was ready. The person in charge of coördinating it was May Mailman, then a policy deputy to Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. Mailman, a Harvard-trained lawyer, previously led the Independent Women’s Law Center, arguing in court that biologically male athletes who identified as transgender had undermined legal protections for female athletes. (“May Mailman is my Taylor Swift,” Riley Gaines, a swimmer who became a prominent activist after competing against Thomas, wrote on X in February.) Mailman told me that the Administration’s critique of higher ed has roughly three parts. The first is that many of these institutions are too rich to deserve endless public largesse. “We have a thirty-six-plus-trillion-dollar national debt, and American taxpayers are paying billions to élite universities with extremely generous endowments,” she said. The second is that universities are failing in their basic mission. Instead of producing citizens who will “propel our country into the next generation of greatness,” they are, in her view, creating “indebted students with useless majors who hate our country and like to go to riots.” The third is that the so-called woke aspects of campus culture—D.E.I., transgender athletes, unchecked antisemitism—violate federal laws.

Over the past nine months, the Administration has waged an effective, unrelenting assault on higher education. D.E.I. programs have been dismantled nationwide. Columbia will pay more than two hundred million dollars to settle allegations of antisemitism and violations of antidiscrimination laws. The N.C.A.A. ruled that athletes “assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team.” This campaign has been framed by Trump officials as existential. Max Eden, a former Domestic Policy Council staffer who wrote a brief outlining how to “destroy Columbia University,” published a Substack post likening the second Trump Administration to the Battle of Agincourt, in which an outnumbered English Army crushed the French. The Administration has also pledged to abolish the Department of Education altogether—a long-held goal among conservative activists, who believe education should be managed locally. “They can’t repeal the department,” James Kvaal, Biden’s Under-Secretary of Education, told me. “So they’re vandalizing it.”

A decade ago, higher education was “an away game for Republicans,” Rick Hess, a senior fellow at A.E.I., said. That has changed. “The Trump Administration’s very aggressive moves against Columbia and Harvard in 2025 would have been unthinkable in 2017,” Eitel, the former Education Department official, told me. As Trump’s assault on higher ed has unfolded, conservatives have learned to stop worrying and love federal power. “For so long, conservatives were, like, ‘We can get there by hoping,’ ” Mailman said. “ ‘We’ll write some op-eds. We’re going to be nice to people.’ ” That approach has failed, she said. This Trump Administration marks a new era. “You don’t feel like a bunch of losers anymore,” Mailman told me. “You have a seat at the table.”

The Department of Education building is ugly in a distinctly Washington way—a concrete shoebox more suggestive of bureaucratic toil than of any grand vision of government. Directly in front of it stands a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower, which includes a metal tapestry of the Normandy cliffs, where Eisenhower oversaw troops on D Day. When Eisenhower, a Republican, was elected President in 1952, the memory of World War Two and the pressures of the Cold War shaped every aspect of politics, including education. He championed the National Defense Education Act and poured federal money into universities to advance weaponry and space technology. Eisenhower’s investments built on a long history; in the nineteenth century, the U.S. government had created numerous land-grant universities, which became the backbone of America’s public-university system. There was a compact between the federal government and higher ed: taxpayers would fund research and student aid. In return, universities would deliver scientific breakthroughs and educate citizens who could defend the nation.

This compact was broadly popular. Conservatives groused about ideology—in the nineteen-fifties, the public intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr., blasted Yale as dogmatically secular; in the eighties, the political philosopher Allan Bloom decried relativism—but the consensus held. “The general feeling about American higher education was that it was the finest in the world,” Margaret Spellings, who served as George W. Bush’s Education Secretary, told me. “People came from all over the world to study here. It was a major driver of our economy. Scholars and academics were widely respected.” Republican reformers worked within that consensus: Spellings convened a commission to push for greater affordability and accountability, asking colleges to provide better data on things like student outcomes and employment, but “the university community was, like, ‘Hell no—give us our money and leave us alone,’ ” Spellings recalled. “It does make me wonder if we had read the room and rung the bell back then, whether that would have prevented some of this cynicism.”

Around this time, a political scientist named Jonathan Pidluzny was launching his academic career. Universities, he told me, are “where young people are empowered to live good lives—to think, to write, to appreciate beauty.” These schools ought to drive the economy, bolster national defense, and serve as “repositories of our civilizational inheritance.” All this, he said, has been “imperilled by the woke takeover of higher education.”

“That one’s just laundry.”

Cartoon by Lars Kenseth

In January, Pidluzny joined the Department of Education, becoming the deputy chief of staff for strategy and implementation. He came from the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, where he argued that D.E.I. was fuelling antisemitism and the spread of “transgender ideology.” In his writing, he urged concessions from universities accused of enabling antisemitism, including an audit of D.E.I. offices and academic programs that allegedly promote “anti-Israel bias.” He called for the government to revoke visas of students suspected of supporting Hamas and to penalize universities that failed to disclose large foreign gifts, which violates federal law and arguably exposes schools to ideological influence. Under Trump, much of this has become policy. “How did I get to where I am?” Pidluzny said. “It’s watching something really valuable to our way of life slip away.”