In a very short time, Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist who was questionably detained by federal immigration officials, has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s escalating antagonism toward elite universities. Columbia finds itself up against the impression that whatever it has done to combat what it perceived as antisemitism — suppressing campus protests of the war in Gaza with the help of the police; evicting and expelling rallying students; severing ties with a law professor who had been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause — it has not been nearly punitive enough.

However egregious these measures might seem to champions of civil liberty, they strike people like Jeffrey Lichtman as cowardly and insufficient. Last year, Mr. Lichtman, a lawyer, represented a Columbia student and former member of the Israel Defense Forces in a suit against the university after he was suspended for showering protesters with foul-smelling joke spray that sickened some of them. Columbia settled for close to $400,000. Still, Mr. Lichtman believes that the university is so rife with hatred and disrespect for Jewish interests that it “should be taken over by the federal government” — at least in the short term, he said to me recently.

Just before Mr. Khalil was apprehended, the Trump administration took the comparatively modest step of canceling $400 million of Columbia’s federal grants. A few days later, it warned 60 universities that a similar fate could await them. Among the schools listed were Harvard, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, where Michael Bloomberg, who once called President Trump “a carnival barking clown,” made a $1 billion gift in July.

The goal of the current White House to dismantle higher education — while running for the Senate, JD Vance plainly called universities the enemy — has elicited alarm from many quarters, but it is striking how little we have heard from the megadonor class. Their contributions of billions of dollars to major universities would suggest a significant investment in the mission (or at the very least a vain interest in keeping alive the buildings and centers and divisions to which they have purchased naming rights).

The quiet was punctured this week when Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager who was instrumental in getting Claudine Gay removed from the presidency at Harvard last year, weighed in on X. He did not express concern about potential cuts to universities; rather he wanted to say that only “financial and legal pressure” will get them back to a point at which “sanity” might prevail.

Under a different set of conditions, it would be easy to imagine wealthy Ivy League Democratic donors rising up to fill in the gaps left by an unwelcoming government. But in the current environment, the grievances of those donors — against diversity initiatives and unruly agitators — stand in precise alignment with the agenda in Washington.

Even before the cuts were announced, the Stand Columbia Society, a consortium of alumni and current and former faculty committed to dissecting the wonkier aspects of campus operations, laid out in its newsletter just what would be at stake if the university lost hundreds of millions dollars in federal grant money. The society has pushed both for Columbia to take a position of institutional neutrality, as the University of Chicago has done for decades, and to work harder to fight campus antisemitism (so that the university does not “dissipate due to the actions of a violent and nihilistic fringe mob”). It also made a persuasive argument that the disappearance of so much money would be catastrophic.

Reviewing the university’s 2024 financial statements, the writers pointed out that of the $1.3 billion Columbia receives annually from federal agencies, the bulk — $747 million — comes from the National Institutes of Health. About half the money goes to overhead, the cap for which has now been reduced. Whatever visions “overhead” conjures of boondoggle trips to conferences in Prague, much of the money that does not go directly to research covers expenses like salaries, lab renovations, student supports and the administrative work required to comply with federal regulations, 168 of which were adopted over the last decade.

Prestigious universities have come to find adversaries in many worlds, among the working class, among rich alumni, among highly educated progressives who find them self-regarding. “Universities are good targets for resentment,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University who has written about modern campus politics. “They take such enormous pride in how many people they reject.

“We at universities have not done enough over the years to pay attention to those groups — conservative groups, religious groups — around the country that are essential parts of a democratic culture. The isolation makes us very vulnerable.”

It has become common in the narrative of the current moment to compare campus upheaval to the disruptions of the late 1960s, but the sense of vindictiveness and distaste directed at the academy now can seem of a different order entirely. In 1968, Richard Nixon — famously hostile to campus radicals, and soon to be president — was asked by an interviewer about the public pressure “to get tough and crack down on the student rebels.”

What, the interviewer wanted to know, was his view of the role of dissent on the college campus? “I’m for it,” Nixon responded. “I’m for dissent, because as I look back at the 190-year history of this country, I find that dissent is the great instrument of change.”