In October 2023, three days before the Hamas fighters attacked Israel, the new President of Columbia University stood outside the low library and asked the basic question.
“What,” she asked, “she needs a world from a large university in the 21st century?”
President Nemat Shafik claimed that the world requires a lot. Strict thinkers who have been anchored in great debates about age. Scientists whose breakthrough could transform companies. Universities that have expanded their missions far beyond their gates.
Seventeen months later, Dr. Shafik is gone And Trump’s administration offers a completely different answer. Ideal Dr. Shafik has described a lot of it historically bankrupt by US taxpayers, is besieged because President Trump combines public money for the vision of his government for university education.
This vision is narrower. Learn what you have to prevent “American tradition and Western civilization”, prepare people for workforce and limit protests and research.
“During 46 years of higher education, I have not experienced a period when there has been so much distance” among the agendas of university leaders and Washington, said Robert J. Jones, Chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The result of this conflict over the purpose of higher education means forming American culture for generation or more. If the President realizes his ambitions, many American universities – public and private, in conservative countries and liberal – could be hiking, culminating in the spine of national research.
For two months, Mr. Trump is released by workers, depositing freezing, closing laboratories and facing federal investigations. After the administration has sent Columbia A list of requirements and Canceled $ 400 million In grants and contracts, the leaders of the universities across the country are worried about how the government might have its financial curriculum could affect the curriculum, staffing and acceptance.
“High schools have received hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers,” Trump said video campaign. “And now we will have this anti -American madness from our institutions once and for all. We will have a real education in America.” The goal, Mr. Trump said, is to get back “Our once large educational institutions from the radical left.”
Other Republicans spoke, often in a more measured language, about their own frustrations with higher education. Senator Bill Cassida, Louisiana Republican, chairing the Senate Committee for Health, Education, Work and Pensions, complained during the hearing last month that universities “do not prepare students for success in modern workforce”.
With the presidential power enlarged mostly reviving congressMr. Trump’s calls against academic freedom and the protection of the first addition did not cause wide and visible public outrage. The emissive reality for the university leaders is that Mr. Trump has an administrative on top and the academy has surprisingly few loud allies.
Fusillade against university education led by Mr. Trump and vice president JD Vance – men with titles Ivy League – is fierce than the previous conservative crusade against elite academic institutions in the country. However, administration earns the imperfections that have been tearing on the character of the system for years.
“His genius was in understanding and then used resentment, anxiety and vulnerability of” voters who already had “critical feelings” of university education, wrote Ronald J. Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University, in his book 2021: “What universities owe democracy”.
A private vote for universities shows that many people believe that these non -profit institutions are nothing but one consequence of high teaching costs. Although university education almost always provides graduates higher lifelong incomes, the growing debt has made the value of the degree for the matter of the debate. Politicians eagerly cartoons of universities such as shrines of intolerance and “awakening”, where the admission processes sometimes considered race or preferred well connected.
For all their great lectures-“for humanity”, the name of a campaign to raise funds of $ 7 billion is often acknowledged, and professors often recognize that they have not threatened easily revealable reactions against routine critics.
The universities are tense to make them more accessible, build more diverse classes and distribute more financial assistance. But Chancellor Jones, who will become president of the University of Washington this summer, described the Public Relations Strategy as a “unfinished work”.
Many leaders admit that while the role of the University of American life is clear to them, it has confused for many.
“Higher education has always been able to stand up and evoke its moral authority,” said Roger L. Geiger, a prominent professor Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and the leading authority in the history of American universities. “What happened is that they just lost the moral authority.”
In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that 26 percent of Americans believed that universities and universities were negatively affected by the United States. Last year, before the demonstrations of the campus, which led to thousands of arrests, Pew announced that this figure had increased to 45 percent.
Much of the agenda of higher education Mr. Trump during his first term of office seized profitable colleges. But now Mr. Trump focuses more clearly on the cultures and missions of the main non -profit universities. His tactics, university officials and scientists believe in American university education for an earlier time – closer to when, as Dr. Shafik, universities “were held separately from the world around them”.
American university education precedes the Republic itself. For example, Harvard was founded in a colonial period to educate clergy. The idea of George Washington for National university He has never been realized, but Abraham Lincoln found that he was more successful to follow the idea that university education was intertwined by American ambitions when he signed the measures that led to the publicly funded grant institutions.
Research has become a focus of universities at the end of the 19th century. The nation at universities at the University of World War II accelerated significantly during World War II, as the United States began to be more than most other countries more than most other countries.
For the system, it was necessary to sign Washington’s willing cost of expensive research projects. In 1995, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that universities were the “basic force” of American research and development apparatus. The universities also took over the part of the Strategy of the Soft Force of the United States and worked on the projects of foreign aid that covered Globe.
This symbiotic arrangement is now endangered. For example, the administration framed its proposed cuts on overhead costs, for example as “to ensure that as much funds are as possible towards the direct costs of scientific research”. However, officials of the administration also portrayed a long -term framework in the harsh term, including the claim that he created a “Fund of Slaš” for the administrators of the liberal university.
As Dr. Geiger, Trump Administration’s approach was a “new era”. In addition to the elevation of individual studies, cuts for federal money could release the dramatic consequences for university structures and objectives.
“For example, no one can assume that biochemistry will have a permanent future of generous funding,” said John Thelin, emeritus professor at the University of Kentucky and former president of the Association for Higher Education.
He could not think of any president, an interim or medical school who had had particularly nervous of evaporation of funding in recent years. These days it is difficult to find the President, the Provisional or Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, who will not get a little.
In Illinois, a federally funded soy innovation will be closed next month. Dr. Jones fears that researching everything from insulin production to artificial intelligence could eventually dry, undermining the ability of the university to develop what he called “public good”.
“Previously, we were just trying to tell our story to improve the design of value in the eyes of the public, but now it is becoming a bigger, much larger problem,” Dr. Jones, one of them Several top university chiefs who were willing to be asked in the record from Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
The threat is also acute in private institutions, even those with the largest war chests. Johns Hopkins said last week that it would remove more than 2,000 jobs in the United States and abroad, which is the largest round of dismissal in its history. Pennsylvania University, Mr. Trump’s Alma Mater, is one of the universities with a new freezing. (Announced this step before Trump’s administration said on Wednesday that yes A pause of about $ 175 million In financing for Penn, because it allowed a transgender woman to compete in her women’s swimming team.)
In recent weeks, presidents at public and private universities have considered how long any institutional life lines can take. However, professors doubt that the main university can meet its modern ambitions without a relatively open federal support pin.
“In the end, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, chairman of biological sciences in Columbia. “It would be really, really more similar to a high school or a local community university where you are teaching some classes without bringing world -class scientists to the classroom.”
So far, Mr. Trump has not said any interest in retreat. This had an academic leader urgently seeking how to save the ideal on which they insist.
Asked if he was afraid of wholesale transformation of the American University, Dr. Jones that he does not like to use the word “fear”. However, he added, “It’s a fear – I can’t say it’s not one of those things that many of us are worried about.”
Sharon Otterman The report contributed.
