When the Trump administration cut off millions of dollars in funding to universities this May, the news media and academia reacted indignantly. The average American, though, may have had a different reaction: Why do these institutions get millions in federal dollars?
The question is made all the more valid by the behavior of our elite universities and major state schools over the past decade.
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Harvard, Yale, and the University of California system have long been hard-left institutions that push left-wing economics and peddle a worldview that undermines religion, family, and tradition. For generations, they have overwhelmingly hired liberals. Conservatives have learned to live with all of this: Progressive Democrats control most cultural institutions, and we just try to navigate that unfortunate truth.
But in the past 10 or 12 years, academia has taken a more radical tack. It has evolved from being merely hard left to being completely intolerant of the Right. It is, in fact, dedicated to weakening and silencing everyone not on the Left.
Left-wing activists were given free rein and faculty support in shutting down conservative speakers, and then academics took to the pages of the New York Times to offer “scientific” arguments that “bad” speech, in fact, is violence.
Then, university bureaucrats set up explicit tests to weed out any non-left-leaning job applicants. Along the way, they used the pandemic and Donald Trump’s elections as excuses to abolish the old rules of fair play.
Nevertheless, academia’s defenders continued to trumpet the old idea of the university as a quasi-public entity, as a fundamental part of the American fabric.
Harvard, Cal, and Yale are building blocks of American society, they argued, and so it’s fine that they get massive federal subsidies, even if they have a political bias.
But once they became institutions that clearly worked against half the country, it became hard to defend their privileged status, and it became easy for Trump to pull the plug on federal funding.
What is the money for?
Colleges and universities receive all sorts of federal government support, but most of it is through two channels: student aid, which, after all, ends up in the school’s coffers, and research funding.
Uncle Sam’s student aid comes with all sorts of conditions, which is why some conservative colleges, most notably Hillsdale, refuse it. Washington has long said that you have to play by its rules to get even this indirect funding.
Federal research funding for universities comes from many parts of the government, such as the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health. This spigot of money, about $60 billion a year, is what the Trump administration is cutting off.
Cutting off the money could cause the schools to abandon their research, but it could also more broadly hurt the universities because they were often profiting, in effect, from the money, spending about a third of the federal grant money on overhead. That overhead need not have any verified connection to research: It could hire administrative staff, pay for new walkways and faculty lounges, or increase salaries.
So, universities, without most people realizing it, had become dependent on federal research funding, all while proudly burrowing into an intolerant, ideological trench.
A record of intolerance
Academia is not merely far left. It is explicitly, as a matter of fact and policy, intolerant of any views more than a step to its right.
Ivy League schools and many large state universities set up ideological litmus tests in their hiring practices.
In 2017, the University of California at Berkeley began requiring all job applicants to provide a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement. This wasn’t simply about trying to get black and Hispanic professors — it was about only hiring people who agreed with the DEI ideology. Berkeley announced it would hire only “committed advocates for advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) through their research, teaching, and/or service.”
DEI is an ideology that pretends to be not an ideology but a neutral set of ground rules. It doesn’t try very hard to pretend, as the practitioners of DEI never care about intellectual diversity: They don’t make sure they hire or admit conservatives, religiously orthodox people, homeschoolers, or Republicans. Universities’ talk of inclusion is likewise undermined by their unwelcoming stance toward conservative speakers (see federal Judge Kyle Duncan’s treatment by Stanford University) and their reluctance to protect Jewish students during anti-Israel disturbances.
Also, those who defended racial discrimination in admissions often said the word “diversity” but quite obviously wanted discrimination as reparations for past racism and current “systemic racism.”
So, DEI is a very particular worldview, and DEI statements should be read as credal professions of faith in left-wing dogmas.
Berkeley’s hiring committee read applicants’ DEI oaths before it considered academic or teaching merit. The university tossed in the trash all applicants whose DEI pledge didn’t meet standards — in the first year, that was 75% of applicants.
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences likewise required all job applicants to provide a “diversity, inclusion, and belonging” statement. Harvard professor Steven Pinker, no conservative, noted that these statements would “purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar.”
This was the norm across academia.
The problem isn’t that they are too liberal. They have long been to the left of America. The problem is their institutional position of excluding conservatives. Harvard and Yale aren’t merely institutions that are to the left of center: They are institutions that reject the legitimacy of conservatives and try to stamp out institutions that rival their power.
Harvard Magazine proudly displayed this passion for conquest in a 2023 issue that featured an article against homeschooling. The message wasn’t merely that “you shouldn’t homeschool,” or “we believe homeschooling is inferior to more institutionalized schooling.” The message was that homeschooling should be illegal.
The article was illustrated with a drawing of some kids, presumably from public schools or Deerfield and Andover, playing freely outdoors while the homeschooled kid was locked in a prison made up of books, specifically the Bible. The article highlighted the work of a Harvard Law School professor who runs an organization dedicated to undermining parental rights. Her central crusade is banning homeschooling. As the professor puts it, “Many homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy, determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives.”
This reflects the view that the role of academia is to tear children away from their parents’ beliefs and traditions.
You see the intolerance in other corners of Harvard. Harvard’s Institute of Politics claimed a mission of engaging and training students “on a non-partisan basis.” After Trump won the 2024 election, Pratyush Mallick, the president of the IOP, declared, “With Trump’s Election, We Can No Longer Be Nonpartisan.”
“As this incoming administration charts its course, we must resist platforming anti-democratic voices in the guise of nonpartisanship. … When democracy itself is under attack, nonpartisanship is not the hill to die on,” Mallick wrote.
The parallel to DEI is obvious: If you define one party as an enemy of democracy, then you have permission to exclude that party while claiming some sort of neutrality — we include people who disagree with us, as long as they play by our rules.
For academia, it has become very clear that conservatives aren’t merely wrong, they are out of bounds. And this is why it has become impossible to continue justifying massive federal funding for these universities.
No longer American building blocks
It’s pretty hard to cry “academic freedom” when demanding federal money while you reject half of the country as illegitimate.
It’s also pretty hard to pose as a national institution deserving of federal funding when you lack patriotism and deride nationalism. The Ivies preach an ideology of “anti-colonialism” that casts the United States as a leading force of oppression in the world. At the same time, the schools often consider themselves and portray themselves as supranational citizens of the world.
Kirsten Weld, president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, in opposing some of Trump’s actions, diminished Harvard’s American-ness: “Harvard is situated in the United States physically, but its students and faculty hail from all over the world.” Many institutions are situated in the U.S. physically. Because we are a free country, they have the right to have their own ideological bent. But if their physical location is the beginning and end of how American they are, they hardly have a claim on being part of the American fabric. And it’s hard to justify that they have some sort of right to federal funding.