Professor James Dennis Hoff pens a piece over at Left Voice entitled Trump’s Attacks on Harvard Are About State Power — Not Antisemitism. His main claim is at least partly right.
Though the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is using Title VI civil rights legislation to justify a crackdown on universities like Harvard, it’s clear that these attacks are not really about antisemitism or bias; they are about punishing the movement for Palestine and the Left and asserting more direct ideological control of academia.
It is true that the crackdown on academe is not primarily about antisemitism, but antisemitism surely plays a role. Thugs who falsely claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are illegally occupying campus grounds and vandalizing buildings while carrying Hamas flags and shouting Hamas slogans--slogans that explicitly call for the extermination of the world's Jews. This is intolerable, especially when the thugs are in significant portion foreign students.
But Professor Hoff is surely correct that the major focus is something else. He describes Trump as "Bonapartist," a term which confused me. In 2017 Left Voice posted a piece entitled Trump: A Weak Bonapartist Government, which I found unhelpful. ChatGPT is more useful. It replied (excerpted)
The bourgeoisie is too weak or divided to rule directly, and the working class is too immature or disorganized to take power—so the state acts as a kind of arbiter.
Bonapartism arises during periods of class stalemate, like after a revolution has been defeated or stalled.
Trotsky described it as "the rule of the sword"—a regime where the military or a strongman rules in place of clear class dominance.
I think authoritarian is a reasonably good synonym, and Professor Hoff uses that word elsewhere in his article. It is a common accusation made against Trump by Progressive Democrats, including Professor Hoff.
So is President Trump acting like an authoritarian? I think not--as a comparison with Ron DeSantis illustrates.
Mr. DeSantis took over the New College of Florida in a very authoritarian manner. He fired the board of trustees and replaced them with his own appointees. The trustees, in turn, fired the school president, again replacing her with someone congenial to Mr. DeSantis. Many faculty were let go, or more commonly, chose to leave. The result was a fairly complete transformation from a left-wing to a right-wing institution. Whether you approve of that or not, there is no question that Mr. DeSantis went about it in a very authoritarian way.
Trump is not doing that. He has made no attempt to fire either the president or the board of trustees from either Columbia or Harvard. Instead, he is treating them as he might any other federal contractor, eg, Lockheed-Martin. All such contractors must obey federal regulations in order to keep their contracts, and these days such regulations strongly forbid such items as DEI. Do DEI, says Trump, and you forfeit your federal money.
So I don't think Trump is trying to take over Columbia or Harvard in any way like DeSantis conquered Florida's New College. That's not the goal.
What is Trump's goal? I can't read Trump's mind any better than Professor Hoff, but I can imagine two possible reasons. They're not mutually exclusive.
The first is to fulfill the promise of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. This claims that higher education (along with education, generally) is not among the Constitution's enumerated powers given to Congress. According to this strand of Conservative and Libertarian thought, both the Higher Education Act (1965) and the formation of the Department of Education (1979) were (and are) not constitutional. The goal, therefore, is to end all federal aid to colleges & universities (along with K-12 education), and return both the responsibility and the authority to the states.
In this sense the goal is not to defund the universities, but only to eliminate federal funding. State funding for higher ed is up to the individual states, and not part of Trump's agenda. It does seem that Trump is dead serious about ending all federal funding. We'll have to see what the courts have to say about this.
I happen to agree with the Heritage Foundation here; I think federal grants to higher ed are, indeed, unconstitutional, especially given the large sums awarded to Harvard and Columbia. But perhaps Trump is not all that inspired by constitutional legalities, then there is another reason why he might go after the Ivies.
Trump is first and foremost a political animal. He is methodically attacking the Democrats at their weakest points, eg, men playing on women's sports teams, DEI, deporting MS-13 gangsters, etc. All of these issues poll very well for the GOP, and skepticism about the huge amounts of money given to places like Harvard is equally popular.
Dissing the elite, Ivy League schools is a political plus. More, they have way too much money, hire too many people, and seem to spend money on completely frivolous things. In Trump's mind all higher education is is a Democratic Party patronage machine--similar to Tammany Hall. If you want to kneecap your political opponents, shutting down their access to patronage jobs is surely a good way to do it.
And hence the diligent efforts to defund the universities. It makes sense.
The first bit of evidence is the relentless growth of the sector--and that despite much lower enrollments since the pandemic. Too many people work in academe. These are mostly patronage jobs given to folks who almost unanimously vote for Democrats.
Second, too many people are going to graduate school. This is most obvious in the humanities--where freshly-minted PhDs are competing for very low-paid adjunct positions. Certainly Professor Hoff is aware of the dearth of tenure-track jobs in English departments all across the country.
Students enroll in English graduate programs because 1) they like literature, and 2) the grad programs are heavily subsidized by the government, and hence they can attend school for free and receive a small stipend for doing so. As the old saw goes, if you subsidize something, you get too much of it--and these are mostly patronage jobs. This problem exists not just in humanities disciplines, but also in the sciences. A baccalaureate degree in biology is worth almost nothing on the job market, and a chemistry degree is not far behind.
Third, Professor Hoff touts the research chops of the major universities. He writes,
Even at the height of the student protest movements in the 1960s, the federal government continued to expand investments in research and higher education mostly without strings attached. And why not? Research universities not only helped to train a caste of highly competent business leaders and worker-managers, (not to mention less prestigious skilled workers) but produced some of the most profitable and deadly technological innovations of the century, helping the U.S. to develop and maintain its economic and military dominance over the globe for much of the second half of the twentieth century.
This may have been true in the 1960s, but it is much less true today. As noted, we have far too many "business leaders and worker-managers." Academic research has also lost its mojo: we're paying for quantity rather than quality, and much of the research done today is published just to let PhD students graduate. We could cut the research budget by half and not impinge on scientific progress at all.
Beyond which, scientific research is also not among the enumerated powers of Congress. So apart from that narrowly tailored to defense needs, it probably shouldn't be paid for by the feds. Note that the federal government didn't fund research at scale until after WWII--the power grid, the electric motor, the automobile, the polio vaccine, the airplane, and much else besides were all invented without the feds spending a single dime.
In short, I think Trump is right. Whatever his reasons, federal funding for schools like Harvard and Columbia needs to be zeroed out.
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