Trump’s battle against universities and science

Trump’s battle against universities and science

The US government is currently waging an unprecedented frontal assault on its own country’s universities and research system. But what is its aim?

By Ulrich Grothus

[This article posted in August 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/trumps-kampf-gegen-hochschulen-und-wissenschaft/.]

Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration launched a campaign against the best American universities and the scientific system as a whole. Back in 2019, the current Vice President J.D. Vance had already publicly declared: “If we want to do what we want to do for our country and the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” (quoted from New York Times, June 3, 2025)

In March and April, it blocked federal funding for several top universities, essentially cutting off funding for research projects from nationwide research funding institutions and individual federal ministries[1]. The most well-known cases involve Harvard and Columbia. At Harvard, the amount involved is several billion US dollars; at Columbia, it is 400 million US dollars directly, but even there, the total amount of blackmail amounts to over 1 billion dollars. Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”), Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, and Brown are also affected by the funding cuts. All of these universities are private. Most are ranked among the top 50 in the world. At the beginning of August, the first leading public university (UCLA) was added to the list of cuts, with a total of $1 billion.

Further pressure was also applied: Harvard, for example, is no longer allowed to have foreign students (a judge has initially stopped this). As with most top universities, foreign students make up around a quarter of the student body – and at least a corresponding proportion of fee income comes from foreigners. In any case, the number of international students will decline sharply due to the xenophobic atmosphere and restrictive visa policy under Trump.

The Department of Education asked the regional accreditation agency responsible for Columbia to revoke the university’s accreditation. This accreditation is linked to state education funding in the form of scholarships and loans, without which no major university can exist. At the end of April, Trump announced a comprehensive “reform” of the accreditation system by executive order, both to better harass existing universities and accreditation agencies and to make it easier and faster to bring new for-profit colleges with new agencies and lower standards to market.

Pretexts in the fight against universities
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The government essentially accuses universities of three things: They have specifically promoted women, minorities, and people with disabilities, which is a violation of the “civil rights” of white heterosexual men. They have failed to adequately protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment, especially in connection with the war between Hamas and Israel. And finally, as in the case of Penn, they have allowed trans women to participate in women’s sports competitions.

So much for the accusations, or rather, the pretexts. The alleged preferential treatment of Black applicants at Columbia University, for example, has led to a situation where currently less than 8.6 percent of native students are Black (compared to 13 percent of the population), while 37 percent are white and 22 percent are of Asian descent. Unfortunately, it is true that, according to a campus-wide survey, a majority of Jewish (as well as Muslim) students do not feel accepted at the university because of their religious identities. Most Jewish (87 percent) and Muslim (82 percent) students are afraid to express their opinions on the conflict in Gaza (Student Belonging and Exclusion Survey Report 3, June 2025). But universities can and do take action against anti-Semitic discrimination without government interference. Finally, several years ago, the University of Pennsylvania entered a trans woman in nationwide competitions. And apparently, she is the only trans woman to have won such a competition in recent years.

Focus on the richest and most powerful universities
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Probably to set an example for the entire academic system, the government’s campaign is focused on very prominent universities – and those that are very rich thanks to their endowment funds. With assets of $53 billion, Harvard is the richest university in the world – and therefore has the strongest economic resilience against government blackmail (Barney 2025, 14f).[2] How long it will last financially and morally will be seen in the coming weeks. At the end of July, the media reported that Harvard was negotiating a penalty payment of half a billion dollars.

Columbia has “only” just under $15 billion, Penn $22 billion – and both caved in July. In order to regain federal research funding, Columbia is paying a $221 million fine and allowing its admissions policy to be monitored for prohibited equal opportunity practices. The letters commonly used in the US, in which applicants explain their motivation and biography – and thus also the social conditions under which or despite which they obtained their school-leaving qualifications – may not be used to relativize slightly poorer grades or test results. Regional studies (including those on the Middle East) are placed under the special supervision of a member of the university administration. Columbia hires additional security guards with arrest powers to suppress protests on campus and must now report arrested foreign students to the authorities, regardless of whether they have been convicted of a criminal or disciplinary offense.

The university administration (already the third in a year) justifies this by saying that the “core area” of academic freedom and autonomy in admissions and hiring has been preserved. Civil rights organizations and professors’ unions warn that this sets a dangerous precedent for how a university can be successfully blackmailed into making concessions.

Drastic cuts in science spending
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Parallel to the disciplining of universities, drastic cuts are being made in public research budgets. These could change and damage the science system at least as dramatically. According to the government’s plans, the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest health research organization, is to be cut by 42 percent in the upcoming 2025/26 fiscal year (University World News, July 18, 2025). The NIH maintains its own research institutes with a total of 6,000 scientists and uses 82 percent of its budget to fund projects at other research institutions, primarily universities, involving around 300,000 employees. The planned cut would amount to $18 billion. By way of comparison, this exceeds the total budget of non-university research institutions in Germany (2023: €13.8 billion).

The budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds research projects in other natural and social sciences, is to be cut from $9.3 billion (2024) to $4.1 billion (2026), i.e., by more than half. In absolute and relative terms, the most affected areas include the life sciences, engineering, and STEM education (including teacher training and scholarships for students, doctoral candidates, and postdocs). In absolute terms, the largest cut, at over $1 billion, will be in mathematics and physics (down 67 percent) (FY 2026 Budget Request to Congress).

Overall, federal spending on research is to be cut from $97 billion to $62 billion, i.e., by more than a third. However, it remains to be seen whether these figures will be confirmed by Congress; the relevant Senate subcommittee has spoken out against them.

Never before in recent decades has there been such a frontal attack on the scientific system in a developed capitalist country. Alongside information technology, the cultural industry, and the military, this is one of the few sectors in which the US is internationally competitive and even a leader.[3] The US has so far attracted the most internationally mobile students and scientists—and benefits from this: almost half of doctoral students come from abroad, in the natural sciences and engineering even almost 80 percent, and more than half of foreign doctoral graduates remain in the country.

Fundamental hostility to science
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Why does the Trump regime want to deliberately damage US universities and the scientific system as a whole? Has the White House possibly been hijacked by a foreign power (Russia, China, the EU?)?

There is some evidence to suggest that the government’s actions are based on a fundamental hostility towards science. For years, Trump and his supporters have denied that climate change even exists. The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency has announced the repeal of the official finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health (New York Times, July 29, 2025). This finding, made in 2009, is legally binding on the limitations of emissions from cars, power plants, and other industrial facilities. Further scientific evidence of how climate change is progressing and insights into its underlying causes can only be a nuisance. The current Secretary of Health, Kennedy, has been waging a campaign against vaccination for years, contrary to all medical evidence.

However, the cuts in research funding mainly affect scientific projects, theories, and institutions that have nothing to do with politically “controversial” issues: cancer research, mathematics, physics, and the life sciences. These are fields of research whose innovations are crucial to the lives and health of Americans and the future development of the productive forces and competitiveness of the US.

In part, this could be a displacement activity by a regime whose anti-science ideology (and the resentment of its supporters) seeks to stifle state-sponsored knowledge even when it is indispensable for the development of US capitalism in the medium and long term. This is an example of the state apparatus becoming independent, even from large sections of the economically dominant class (even though never before have so many billionaires personally belonged to a government). This would support the interpretation of the regime as Bonapartist, following Marx’s analysis of the Second French Empire in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (MEW Vol. 8; see also Solty 2018, 74ff).

Privatization
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On the other hand, the Trump administration appears to be pursuing a partial privatization of the science system, i.e., the transfer of state-funded research and development from universities and independent research institutes to companies. On the same day that the “deal” with Columbia University was announced, Trump himself presented an “AI action plan” (NYT, July 23, 2025). The further development of artificial intelligence is to be “freed” from any serious regulation and at the same time promoted with billions in subsidies. A reduction in the university’s share of research in favor of research conducted under the direct control of individual capital would not only lead to development expenses being passed on to the public sector, but also to research directions being oriented toward short-term commercial interests. This would make the path to new, unpredictable, but potentially profitable scientific discoveries more difficult.

Privatization also affects teaching: so far, only just under 6 percent of students study at profit-oriented universities[4], but this proportion has doubled in the last two decades. The change in accreditation procedures is likely to lead to lower standard requirements and higher profits.

The struggle for DEI – interests of classes and class factions
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The crackdown on top universities could destroy one or more of these institutions. But the real goal is not destruction, but subjugation of the universities. The attack is primarily directed against the theory and practice of tapping into additional intellectual potential through greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – DEI).

Theoretically, it is directed against the critical analysis of the discrimination of women, ethnic and sexual minorities (there is hardly any mention of class rule in the poststructuralist mainstream anyway). And in practical terms, it is directed against training future academics for working environments in which creativity and success depend largely on diversity. Such a working environment—and the aptitude for it—is primarily in the interest of the most technologically advanced capital factions, namely in information technology, biotechnology, and the platform economy. The technical and scientific ecosystems that have developed in recent decades in places such as Silicon Valley and Boston depend fundamentally on the diversity of a globally recruited workforce from a wide range of backgrounds and their productive collaboration.

Tech companies are in a tense relationship with Trump and his MAGA regime. Tech bosses, like managers in the cultural and media industries, had overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party in the past. Some joined the MAGA camp before the last election, while others threw their support behind Trump after the election, but probably more out of opportunism than conviction. At the core of the socio-political bloc that the Democratic Party has formed in recent years were large sections of the technologically advanced capital factions, well-educated and well-paid people.[5] Trump, on the other hand, has mainly rallied the fossil fuel industry, traditional industries, other real estate sharks, and, more recently, part of the tech industry that wants to benefit from deregulation and tax cuts—and as voters, a majority of less educated and lower-income white men.[6]

At the same time, universities are to be forced to suppress socially critical scientific approaches and politically rebellious students. Resistance to this is complicated politically by the fact that, of all things, anti-Israel and occasionally openly anti-Semitic positions have become the focus of the debate on academic freedom and freedom of expression.

Either way, it is obvious that the Trump administration understands and is waging the battle for and against science and universities as part of the “culture war” to restore male and white hegemony. In the process, institutions and processes that we have hitherto understood as central to bourgeois society and the development of the productive forces under capital are being weakened. The exciting question—both theoretically and politically—is whether this is a case of populist ideology taking on a life of its own, or whether it is a fundamental reorientation of the bourgeois approach to the production and transmission of knowledge.

[1] An overview can be found in the NYT article of April 5, 2025: Reasons for Singling Out Universities for Defunding Run Deep.

[2] Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard’s non-profit status. As an additional form of harassment against the wealthiest private universities, the tax on income from endowment assets introduced under the first Trump administration has been increased from 1.4% to 8%; originally, 21% was even planned. The tax is only levied on universities that have more than half a million dollars in endowment assets per student. Columbia and even the wealthiest public universities are not included.

[3] In terms of scientific publications, the US has been in second place behind China since 2020 (with an increasingly wide gap, while China has now at least caught up in terms of the most cited, “excellent” publications).

[4] Only universities with full (four-year) bachelor’s degree programs, figures for 2021. Source: Digest of Education Statistics. For comparison: 65% at public universities, 29% at private non-profit universities.

[5] It is therefore not surprising (nor new) that the vast majority of professors lean toward the Democratic Party: they are both well-educated and well-paid.

[6] See Riley/Brenner (2022) and the subsequent discussion in the following issues of the NLR.

### Literature

Barney, Martin, 2025: Yale, Harvard, and Their Capital, in: Le Monde Diplomatique (German), June 2025, p. 14

Riley, Dylan /Brenner, Robert, 2022: Seven Theses on American Politics, in: New Left Review 138 (2022), 5-27

Solty, Ingar, 2018: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump?, in: Martin Beck / Ingo Stützle (eds), The New Bonapartists, Berlin (Dietz)

### Ulrich Grothus

Ulrich Grothus worked for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for 30 years, including as Deputy Secretary General and Head of the New York office.

Protests against Trump at Harvard University’s graduation ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on May 29, 2025