Almost immediately after Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House and the Department of Education launched a shock-and-awe assault against its perceived foes in higher education, announcing a new investigation or seizure of funding seemingly every week. Their targets appeared overwhelmed by the speed and severity of the offensive. By the end of November, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern had all made deals with the administration to stop the onslaught. Harvard was rumored to be close to reaching a deal as well.But the aggressive pace that won the administration so many early victories eventually proved to be its great weakness. The government could move so quickly only by skipping almost all of the procedural steps required by federal law. Once universities and their allies recovered from their shock and challenged the Trump administration, they were able to block many, if not most, of the White House’s moves in court. Trump has certainly left his mark on America’s universities. But he has not broken them. So much has happened during Trump’s second term that it can be hard to remember just how focused the administration once was on persecuting universities. In February 2025, Trump’s Education Department ordered colleges to end DEI trainings, stop awarding scholarships reserved for nonwhite students, and shut down any other programs, including affinity-group housing, that distinguished students by race or ethnicity. In a letter outlining its interpretation of legal precedent, the department argued that even race-neutral efforts to increase diversity could be illegal. And just as the Education Department was launching its anti-DEI offensive, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies began announcing that they would cap so-called indirect costs for university research—which help pay for research facilities and administrative expenses—at 15 percent, down from individually negotiated rates that could be as high as 70 percent. This represented a huge financial blow to universities that received federal research funding.In March, the administration canceled $400 million of Columbia’s grants and contracts, ostensibly as punishment for the university’s failures to address anti-Semitism. It followed that up by freezing or canceling billions of dollars more in funding for research at Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and UCLA. (To restore funding, several of these schools later reached settlements with the administration either to pay the government or to fund local workforce development.) Last spring, Trump banned international students from dozens of countries,… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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