America is witnessing an unprecedented series of attacks on higher education that commenced well before Donald Trump was re-elected, amid the contentious protests that followed Hamas’ attacks on Israel and Israel’s ruthless (and ongoing) retaliation on Gaza and its inhabitants.
But Trump, as president, has taken matters much further. Claiming antisemitism, his administration is revoking student visas and arresting students who have engaged in nonviolent protests or expressed opinions on social media or in innocuous op-eds. The government’s pauses, reviews, and cancellations of grants and contracts at top universities—including new funding freezes totaling $1 billion for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern—are creating havoc. And its attempt to cap federal funding for the indirect costs of medical research, though tied up in court, could prove devastating to research universities, some of which have already fired staff, imposed hiring freezes, and slashed or postponed graduate programs in response. Now Republicans are considering a tenfold tax increase on endowment investment income for certain universities to help pay for up to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
All told, these actions amount to the most profound crisis US colleges and universities have ever faced, with likely ripple effects on regional economies and employment, public health, and medicine. Indeed, they have thrown the future of America’s leadership in science and innovation into question.
Yet, instead of speaking out forcefully and cracking open their endowments to cover any shortfalls, most top schools have hunkered down, and even, in Columbia’s case, cut a deal with the administration. Only a few university presidents, including Princeton’s Chris Eisgruber and Wesleyan’s Michael Roth, have had the courage to stick their necks out.
To better understand why, I reached out to Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at the University of California, Merced, who studies the “financialization” of higher ed, and who argued, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that elite institutions can absolutely afford to fight—and should.
Trying to walk too fine a tightrope between the schools’ needs and the interests of wealthy donors, after all, is a high-risk endeavor. In Eaton’s view, “pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Few college presidents have spoken out publicly about these attacks. It’s baffling to me that our top colleges—and law firms, for that matter—aren’t fighting en masse to protect the interests of their students and faculty. What do you make of the reluctance?
By their nature elite universities are conservative—as in cautious—institutions, and I don’t think that equips them well to deal with a full frontal assault like this. Also, elite universities are tied to other elites, especially from the world of finance, who themselves are somewhere between the lines with Trump, and have some sympathy for the Trumpist attacks on diversity and inclusion as university values. So that’s part of what we’ve seen that’s frozen these institutions in their tracks—why they are reacting like deer in the headlights.
Right. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers just had an op-ed in the New York Times in which he decries colleges’ emphasis on identity politics as opposed to academic excellence, in hiring and so forth.
I think that’s the same Summers op-ed where he says [to Harvard]: Don’t be intimidated, spend the endowment—which is pretty different than what we’ve seen from Columbia and a lot of the other elite schools. Summers has played a different role for a long time than your conventional university president. He was the secretary of the Treasury. He’s highly political and has been engaged in politics, and this is a political struggle. Universities like to pretend to not be political—and there are plenty of ways they shouldn’t be, in order to foster free speech and open debate. But pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error.
Wasn’t it this sort of waffling that got them into trouble in the first place amid the Gaza protests? Everybody wanted administrators to issue statements, and they didn’t really know what to do. They’d already spoken up on other things, in support of Ukraine or whatever. And now it looks like they’re stuck back in this mode of indecision.
Yeah. You know, the primary job of an elite university president is to raise money from donors, and if you’re spending a lot of your day talking to your wealthiest alumni—who may have donated to Trump or may feel sympathetic with Trump’s critiques of diversity at the university—it’s hard for folks who spend their day in those social circles to imagine pushing back.
That gets at my next question. Your research examines the relationships between what you call “financialization” and inequalities in higher education. Can you explain how your work applies to the current situation?
Yeah. So, my book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, shows a radical increase in the proportion of elite university board members coming from finance, particularly private equity and hedge funds. If you go back to the ’80s, private equity and hedge funds didn’t really exist. Investment bankers were prominent on university boards but it’s nothing like today. And these are folks who have some official reach in university policy, and who are the primary fund-raisers—a main job of board members is both to donate a lot and to raise money from other donors.
We saw the activation of these ties around the Gaza war protests, with a subset of wealthy donors saying they wanted to suspend donations to the university until protests were suppressed. It’s not hard to imagine that board elites from Wall Street who were always uncomfortable with elite universities embracing diversity and inclusion see an opportunity to push back, and Trump has opened the space for it to be okay to oppose this.
And of course, their complaints often involved perceived antisemitism at Harvard and so forth, with rich alums like Bill Ackman chiming in. It does seem, in any case, that college presidents are under extraordinary pressure to align themselves with the interests of trustees and top donors.
You often don’t quite see how a system works and the preferences of different actors, their roles in the system, until the system is threatened by disruption. I don’t think anybody was terribly attuned to the dispositions of the financiers on university boards 5 or 10 years ago because, outside of a crisis, donors weren’t engaging to pressure the university to be one thing or another. Since the Gaza war and allegations of antisemitism, and now even more so with the Trump attacks, the preferences and dispositions of these donors may become more visible.
A lot of them must be aghast to see colleges they care about taking such a hit.
Yeah. A proactive, offensive university strategy would be to say no to Trump, to try to weather the storm by tapping the endowment and by turning to alumni of all wealth levels, to say, “Help defend your alma mater. Now is the time that we need you.”
You wrote that top colleges can afford a fight. I think we have 16 schools now with endowments over $10 billion, yet many are cutting deals, and in some cases graduate programs. Why would any private foundation, let alone an educational one, hoard money in the face of such a crisis?
I have to give Larry Summers credit for saying endowments are not to be admired; they are there to be spent in a crisis. And I acknowledge President Obama for saying the same. But universities have become attached to steadily growing their endowment as a status object. And that course of action is at this moment potentially fatal for the university as we know it.
We think of endowments as one giant pot of money, but really they consist of thousands of individual gifts, most earmarked for specific purposes.
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