Making America Stupid Again

There can no longer be any doubt. The Trump Administration is hellbent on destroying American higher education.

Trump is attacking higher education, as Mussolini did in 1931, Mao in 1968, and Viktor Orban in 2019. All dictators want to neuter and control the intellectual gold mines of their societies. This impulse is fueled by the desires of left-wing and right-wing extremists to control higher education for the benefit of their corporate, religious, ideological, and anti-democratic interests. These extremists first seek to terrorize universities and then follow up with direct attacks on the faculty, students, and financial foundations of higher education. Their game plan is similar to Putin’s attack on Ukraine. First, warn them that they must comply with his demands, next terrorize with artillery and missiles, and then use ground forces to control those regions destroyed.

However, Trump’s war on the independence of higher education started decades ago, when he was still a struggling casino genius. Corporate oligarchs and ideologues have long preferred to control rather than allow unfettered independence. They demand a favorable narrative for their monopolies, business ventures, and ideological jihads. They pay for a broad spectrum of compliant media coverage. When confronted by an independent news source that notices rat feces in their products, they immediately attack or otherwise try to silence their independence. These guys preach the First Amendment on Sunday but subvert it on the other six days. They are particularly threatened by higher education.

What is the evidence of this war on higher education? Since Inauguration Day, the Washington swamp has overflowed its banks with a flood of mostly unconstitutional Trump executive orders. Just as Trump has systematically destroyed the independence of EVERY SINGLE Republican, starting in 2015, Trump seeks to destroy the independence of American universities. Trump operates like that eighth-grade bully everyone hated in middle school.  Until someone punches him out, he will continue to steal our lunch money. However, he will stop harassing those who suck up to him.

Trump’s executive orders and bureaucratic machinations have aggressively assaulted academia in the following ways:

• They must become subservient to Trump or they lose their independence.
• He uses the threat of freezing or losing federal grants and contracts as leverage to force universities to comply with Trump’s political agenda.
• He couches threats to higher education in vague language to confuse and frustrate efforts to comply or resist the threats.
• He issues direct threats to academic freedom of expression.
• He cancels visas for international students.
• He attacks the rights of private universities to set their admission requirements.
• Despite Trump’s duality and hypocrisy over antisemitism, his administration has used pro-Palestinian free speech activism as a pretext to shut down First Amendment rights.
• The Trump Administration has proposed taxing the wealthiest private universities’ endowment income at the same rate (21%) as large corporations. The leader of the House bill says it plans to hold “woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations and other tax-exempt entities accountable, ensuring they can no longer abuse generous benefits provided through the tax code.” Tellingly, this plan exempts qualified religious institutions (for example, institutions founded after July 4, 1776) from the new tax. This is another nail in the coffin for the founders’ separation of church and state principle.
• The collateral damage from the random, spasmodic actions of Trump minions such as Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has closed academic institutes, medical facilities, and research projects throughout public and private higher education. Thousands have or will lose their jobs, grants, and stipends.

The Trump war on higher education is fundamentally the same autocratic war he has waged on the Republican Party and the larger American society. There is no room for academic freedom or most assumed freedoms; the only option is to serve the interests of Trump’s devil-may-care ego.

Thanks to Trump, foreign universities, research institutes, and tech companies will avidly recruit America’s brightest intellectuals, and international students will no longer come to America for their advanced training. Our educational system is positioned to be converted from the shining city upon a hill to a stinking MAGA swamp. From the ashes of bankruptcy, Trump University could potentially rise from the dead…probably without paying taxes. Maybe it will become our new National University?

MAGA is supporting the rise of MASA by making America stupid again.

When and how will American higher education fight back? Having Chuck Schumer send Trump a “very strong letter” will probably not do the trick.