Education

Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation

Published

9 months ago

March 21, 2025

Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation

In October 2023, three days before Hamas fighters attacked Israel, Columbia University’s new president stood outside Low Library and posed a foundational question.

“What,” she asked, “does the world need from a great university in the 21st century?”

The president, Nemat Shafik, argued that the world required much. Rigorous thinkers who were grounded in the age’s great debates. Researchers whose breakthroughs could transform societies. Universities that extended their missions far beyond their gates.

Seventeen months later, Dr. Shafik is gone and the Trump administration is offering a far different answer. The ideal Dr. Shafik described, much of it historically bankrolled by American taxpayers, is under siege, as President Trump ties public money to his government’s vision for higher education.

That vision is a narrower one. Teach what you must, defend “the American tradition and Western civilization,” prepare people for the work force, and limit protests and research.

“I have not experienced, across 46 years of higher education, a period where there’s been this much distance” between the agendas of university leaders and Washington, said Robert J. Jones, the chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The outcome of this clash over the purpose of higher education stands to shape American culture for a generation or more. If the president realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors.

Two months into Mr. Trump’s term, universities are laying off workers, imposing hiring freezes, shutting down laboratories and facing federal investigations. After the administration sent Columbia a list of demands and canceled $400 million in grants and contracts, university leaders across the country fear how the government might wield its financial might to influence curriculums, staffing and admissions.

“Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-working taxpayers,” Mr. Trump said in a campaign video. “And now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America.” The goal, Mr. Trump declared, is to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”

Other Republicans have spoken, often in more measured language, about their own frustrations with higher education. Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, bluntly complained during a hearing last month that colleges were “not preparing students to succeed in the modern work force.”

With presidential power magnified by a largely genuflecting Congress, Mr. Trump’s challenges to academic freedom and First Amendment protections have not provoked broad and visible public outrage. The sobering reality for university leaders is that Mr. Trump has the administrative upper hand, and academia has startlingly few vocal allies.

The fusillade against higher education led by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance — men with Ivy League degrees — is more furious than past conservative crusades against the country’s elite academic institutions. The administration, though, is capitalizing on imperfections that have been tearing at the system’s stature for years.

“His genius was in understanding and then exploiting the resentments, the anxieties, and the vulnerabilities of” voters who already had “critical sentiments” toward higher education, Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, wrote of Mr. Trump in his 2021 book, “What Universities Owe Democracy.”

Private polling conducted for universities shows that many people believe that these nonprofit institutions are anything but — one consequence of high tuition costs. Even though a college education almost always provides graduates with higher lifetime incomes, rising debt has made the value of a degree a matter of debate. Politicians have eagerly caricatured colleges as sanctuaries of intolerance and “wokeism” where admissions processes have sometimes considered race or favored the well-connected.

For all of their grand talk — “For Humanity” is the name of Yale University’s $7 billion fund-raising campaign — administrators and professors often acknowledge that they have not mustered easy-to-digest responses against even routine criticisms.

Universities strained to be more accessible, building up more diverse classes and handing out more financial aid. But Chancellor Jones, who will become the University of Washington’s president this summer, nevertheless described higher education’s public relations strategy as “a work in progress.”

Many leaders concede that while the role of the university in American life is clear to them, it has grown muddled to many.

“Higher education has always been able to stand up and invoke its moral authority,” said Roger L. Geiger, a distinguished professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and a leading authority on the history of American colleges. “What’s happened is they’ve simply lost that moral authority.”

The Pew Research Center found in 2012 that 26 percent of Americans believed that colleges and universities were negatively affecting the United States. Last year, even before the campus demonstrations that led to thousands of arrests, Pew reported that figure had increased to 45 percent.

Much of Mr. Trump’s higher education agenda during his first term empowered for-profit colleges. Now, though, Mr. Trump is taking clearer aim at the cultures and missions of major nonprofit universities. His tactics, university officials and researchers believe, could throw American higher education toward an earlier time — closer to when, as Dr. Shafik put it, universities “were kept separate from the world around them.”

American higher education predates the republic itself. Harvard, for example, was established in the colonial period to educate clergymen. George Washington’s idea for a national university was never realized, but Abraham Lincoln found more success pursuing the idea that higher education was entwined with American ambition when he signed the measure that led to publicly funded land-grant institutions.

Research became a focus of universities late in the 19th century. The nation’s reliance on universities greatly accelerated during and after World War II, as the United States began to lean on academia more than most other countries.

Essential to the system was Washington’s new willingness to underwrite overhead costs of expensive research projects. By 1995, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that universities were “the core strength” of the American research-and-development apparatus. Universities also assumed part of the United States’ soft-power strategy, working on foreign aid projects that spanned the globe.

That symbiotic arrangement is now in jeopardy. The administration has framed its proposed cuts to overhead expenses, for instance, as a way “to ensure that as many funds as possible go toward direct scientific research costs.” But administration officials have also depicted the longstanding framework in harsh terms, including the assertion that it created a “slush fund” for liberal university administrators.

As Dr. Geiger put it, the Trump administration’s approach represented “a new era.” Besides upending individual studies, cuts to federal money could unleash dramatic consequences for the structures and objectives of universities.

“No one can assume, for example, that biochemistry is going to have a sustained future of generous funding,” said John Thelin, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and a former president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

He could think of no president, provost or medical school dean who had, in recent years, appeared particularly nervous about an evaporation of funding. These days, it is hard to find a president, provost or medical school dean who is not anxious about something.

At Illinois, the federally funded Soybean Innovation Lab will close next month. Dr. Jones fears that research on everything from insulin production to artificial intelligence could ultimately wither, undermining the university’s ability to advance what he called “the public good.”

“Before, we were just trying to tell our story to improve the value proposition in the eyes of the public, but now it becomes a bigger, much larger issue than that,” said Dr. Jones, one of the few top university chiefs who have been willing to be interviewed on the record since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The threat is also acute at private institutions, even those with the biggest war chests. Johns Hopkins said last week that it would eliminate more than 2,000 jobs in the United States and overseas, the largest round of layoffs in its history. The University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump’s alma mater, is among the universities with new hiring freezes. (It announced that step before the Trump administration said on Wednesday that it would pause about $175 million in funding for Penn because it had allowed a transgender woman to compete on its women’s swim team.)

In recent weeks, presidents at public and private universities alike have weighed how long any institutional lifelines could last. But professors doubt that a major university can meet its modern ambitions without a relatively open spigot of federal support.

“Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.”

So far, Mr. Trump has not signaled any interest in retreat. That has left academic leaders searching urgently for how to save an ideal they insist is imperative.

Asked whether he feared a wholesale remaking of the American university, Dr. Jones replied that he did not like to use the word “fear.” But, he added, “it is a concern — I can’t say that it is not one of those things that a lot of us are concerned about.”

Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.

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Education

Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift

Published

11 hours ago

December 12, 2025

Press Room

Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift

The U.S. military
is broken. Young
Americans want
to fix it.

Bailey Baumbick traded a
career as a national security
consultant to build tech
solutions
for the challenges
she saw at the Pentagon.

Elias Rosenfeld left a job
in social
impact consulting
to start a career aimed

at revitalizing America’s
industrial base.

Lee Kantowski spent
eight years in the
Army before
switching to defense tech,
where
he hopes to fix the
military’s outdated tools.

Opinion

The Editorial Board

a New

Definition of

Service

By The Editorial BoardThe editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Bailey Baumbick knew she wanted to serve her country when she graduated from Notre Dame in 2021. Ms. Baumbick, a 26-year-old from Novi, Mich., didn’t enlist in the military, however. She enrolled in business school at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ms. Baumbick is part of a growing community in the Bay Area that aims to bring high-tech dynamism to the lumbering world of the military. After social media companies and countless lifestyle start-ups lost their luster in recent years, entrepreneurs are being drawn to defense tech by a mix of motivations: an influx of venture capital, a coolness factor and the start-up ethos, which Ms. Baumbick describes as “the relentless pursuit of building things.”

There’s also something deeper: old-fashioned patriotism, matched with a career that serves a greater purpose.

In college Ms. Baumbick watched her father, a Ford Motor Company executive, lead the company’s sprint to produce Covid-19 ventilators and personal protective equipment for front-line health care workers. “I’ve never been more inspired by how private sector industry can have so much impact for public sector good,” she said.

Ford’s interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic hark back to a time when public-private partnerships were commonplace. During World War II, leaders of America’s biggest companies, including Ford, halted business as usual to manufacture weapons for the war effort.

The Covid-19 pandemic drove public-private partnerships, such as Ford’s decision to produce ventilators needed by patients and hospitals.

For much of the 20th century, the private and public sectors were tightly woven together. In 1980, nearly one in five Americans were veterans. By 2022, that figure had shrunk to one in 16. Through the 1980s, about 70 percent of the companies doing business with the Pentagon were also leaders in the broader U.S. economy. That’s down to less than 10 percent today. The shift away from widespread American participation in national security has left the Department of Defense isolated from two of the country’s great assets: its entrepreneurial spirit and technological expertise.

Recent changes in Silicon Valley are bringing down those walls. Venture capital is pouring money into defense tech; annual investment is up from $7 billion in 2015 to some $80 billion in 2025. The Pentagon needs to seize this opportunity, and find ways to accelerate its work with start-ups and skilled workers from the private sector. It should expand the definition of what it means to serve and provide more flexible options to those willing to step in.

The military will always need physically fit service members. But we are headed toward a future where software will play a bigger role in armed conflict than hardware, from unmanned drones and A.I.-driven targeting to highly engineered cyber weapons and space-based systems. These missions will be carried out by service members in temperature-controlled rooms rather than well armed troops braving the physical challenges of the front line.

For all the latent opportunity in Silicon Valley and beyond, the Trump administration has been uneven in embracing the moment. Stephen Feinberg, the deputy secretary of defense, is a Wall Street billionaire who is expanding the Pentagon’s ties with businesses. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, his “warrior ethos” and exclusionary recruitment have set back the effort to build a military for the future of war.

America has the chance to reshape our armed forces for the conflicts ahead, and we have the rare good fortune of being able to do that in peacetime.

Elias Rosenfeld had been at Stanford for only a month and a half, but he already looked right at home at a recent job fair for students interested in pursuing defense tech, standing in a relaxed posture, wearing beaded bracelets and a sweater adorned with a single sunflower. Rather than use his time in Stanford’s prestigious business school to build a fintech app or wellness brand, Mr. Rosenfeld has set his sights on helping to rebuild the industrial base on which America’s military relies.

It’s a crucial mission for a country that is getting outbuilt by China, and Mr. Rosenfeld brings a unique commitment to it. Born in Venezuela, he came to the United States at age 6 and draws his patriotism from that country’s experience with tyranny and his Jewish heritage. “Without a strong, resilient America, I might not be here today,” Mr. Rosenfeld says. Working on industrial renewal, he says, is a way to “start delivering as a country so folks feel more inclined and passionate to be more patriotic.”

Not on Mr. Rosenfeld’s agenda: enlisting in the military. In an earlier era, he might have been tempted by a wider suite of options for service. In 1955 the U.S. government nearly doubled the maximum size of the military’s ready reserve forces, from 1.5 million to 2.9 million, in part by giving young men the chance to spend six months in active duty training. Today the U.S. ready reserve numbers just over a million.

The Pentagon should broaden its sense of service as fewer younger Americans meet the military’s eligibility requirements.

Other countries provide a model for strengthening the reserves. In Sweden, the military selects the top 5 percent or so of 18-year-olds eligible to serve in the active military for up to 15 months, followed by membership in the reserve for 10 years. The model is so effective that recruits compete for spots, and according to The Wall Street Journal, “former conscripts are headhunted by the civil service and prized by tech companies.”

America’s leaders have argued for a generation that the military’s volunteer model is superior to conscription in delivering a well-prepared force. The challenge is maintaining recruiting and getting the right service members for every mission. There are some examples of the Pentagon successfully luring new, tech-savvy recruits. Since last year, top college students have been training to meet the government’s growing need for skilled cybersecurity professionals. The Cyber Service Academy, a scholarship-for-service program, covers the full cost of tuition and educational expenses in exchange for a period of civilian employment within the Defense Department upon graduation. Scholars work in full-time, cyber-related positions.

The best incentive for enlisting may have nothing to do with service, but the career opportunities that are promised after.

It was a foregone conclusion that Lee Kantowski would become an Army officer. One of his favorite high school teachers had served, and his hometown, Lawton, Okla., was a military town, a place where enlisting was commonplace. Mr. Kantowski attended West Point and, in the eight years after graduating, went on tours across the world. Now he’s getting an M.B.A. at U.C. Berkeley, co-founded a defense tech club with Ms. Baumbick there and works part-time at a start-up building guidance devices that turn dumb bombs into smart ones.

The military needs recruits like Mr. Kantowski who want to support defense in and out of uniform. Already, nearly one million people who work for the Department of Defense are civilians, supplemented by a similar number of contractors who straddle public and private sectors. Both paths could be expanded.

A rotating-door approach carries some risk to military cohesion and readiness. The armed services are not just another job: Soldiers are asked to put themselves in danger’s way, even outside combat zones. America still needs men and women who are willing to sign up for traditional tours of duty.

The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps serves as the largest source of commissioned officers for the U.S. military. For more than five decades, R.O.T.C. has paid for students to pursue degree programs — accompanied by military drills and exercises — and then complete three to 10 years of required service after graduation. In 1960 alone, Stanford and M.I.T. each graduated about 100 R.O.T.C. members. Today, that figure is less than 20 combined. The Army has recently closed or reorganized programs at 84 campuses and may cut funding over the next decade.

This is exactly the wrong call. R.O.T.C. programs should be strengthened and expanded, not closed or merged.

The U.S. Army is closing or reorganizing Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs across the country.

It remains true that the volunteer force has become a jobs program for many Americans looking for a ladder to prosperity. It’s an aspect of service often more compelling to enlistees than the desire to fight for their country. In the era of artificial intelligence and expected job displacement, enlistment could easily grow.

Most military benefits have never been more appealing, with signing and retention bonuses, tax-free housing and food allowances, subsidized mortgages, low-cost health care, universal pre-K, tuition assistance and pensions. The Department of Defense and Congress need to find ways to bolster these benefits and their delivery, where service members often find gaps.

Standardizing post-service counseling and mentorship could help. Expanding job training programs like Skillbridge, which pairs transitioning service members with private sector internships, could also improve job prospects. JPMorgan has hired some 20,000 veterans across the country since creating an Office of Military & Veterans Affairs in 2011; it has also helped create a coalition of 300 companies dedicated to hiring vets.

When veterans land in promising companies — or start their own — it’s not just good for them. It’s also good for America. Rylan Hamilton and Austin Gray, two Navy veterans, started Blue Water Autonomy last year with the goal of building long-range drone ships that could help the military expand its maritime presence without the costs, risks and labor demands of deploying American sailors.

Blue Water Autonomy, founded and staffed by Navy veterans, is building fully autonomous naval vessels capable of operating at sea for months at a time.

Mr. Gray, a former naval intelligence officer who worked in a drone factory in Ukraine, said Blue Water’s vessels will one day do everything from ferrying cargo to carrying out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. This summer, the company raised $50 million to construct a fully autonomous ship stretching 150 feet long.

Before dawn on a Wednesday morning in October, military packs filled with supplies and American flags sat piled on a dewy field near the edge of Stanford University’s campus. Some of the over 900 attendees at a conference on defense tech gathered around an active-duty soldier studying at the school. The glare of his head lamp broke through the darkness as he rallied the group of students, founders, veterans and investors for a “sweat equity” workout.

“Somewhere, a platoon worked out at 0630 to start their day,” he said. “This conference is all about supporting folks like them, so we are going to start our day the same way.” The group set off for Memorial Church at the center of campus, sharing the load of heavy packs, flags and equipment along the way.

A group of students, founders, veterans and investors participate in a run during a defense tech conference at Stanford University.

That attitude is a big change for the Bay Area, not just from the days of 1960s hippie sit-ins but also from the early days of the tech revolution, when Silicon Valley was seen as a bastion of government-wary coders and peaceniks. Now it’s open for business with the Defense Department. “The excitement is there, the concern is there, the passion is there and the knowledge is there,” says Ms. Baumbick.

There are some risks to tying America’s military more closely to the tech-heavy private sector. Companies don’t always act in the country’s national interest. Elon Musk infamously limited the Ukrainian military’s access to its Starlink satellites, preventing them being used to help in a battle with Russian forces in 2022. Private companies are also easier for adversaries to penetrate and influence than the government.

Yet in order to prevent wars, or win them, we must learn to manage the risks of overlap between civilian and military spheres. The private sector’s newly rekindled interest in the world of defense is a generational chance to build the military that Americans need.

Portraits by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times; Carlos Osorio/Associated Press; Mike Segar/Reuters; Maddy Pryor/Princeton University; Kevin Wicherski/Blue Water Autonomy; Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times (2).

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Published Dec. 12, 2025

Education

Video: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

Published

4 days ago

December 8, 2025

Press Room

Video: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

new video loaded: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

transcript

One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

One hundred children who had been kidnapped from a Catholic school in northwestern Nigeria last month were released on Sunday. This is part of a larger trend of kidnappings in Nigeria, where victims are released in exchange for ransom.

: “Medical checkup will be very, very critical for them. And then if anything is discovered, any laboratory investigation is conducted and something is discovered, definitely they will need health care.” My excitement is that we have these children, 100 of them, and by the grace of God, we are expecting the remaining half to be released very soon.”
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One hundred children who had been kidnapped from a Catholic school in northwestern Nigeria last month were released on Sunday. This is part of a larger trend of kidnappings in Nigeria, where victims are released in exchange for ransom.

By Jamie Leventhal

December 8, 2025