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By now, it should be obvious. The Trump administration’s attack on American universities is not about combating antisemitism. This is an attempt to bring institutions that nurture independent thought under the control of the government.
For the Trump movement, universities are the heart of the American liberal establishment. If liberalism is to be defeated, the top universities need to be taken down.
In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech entitled “The universities are the enemy”. The future vice-president argued that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country”.
It is important to note that the Vance speech was given two years before the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. But the campus Gaza protests gave the Maga movement the opening it was looking for. Now Trump, Vance and others are cynically instrumentalising the charge of antisemitism to pursue a vendetta.
Trump and his followers have taken a kernel of truth and built something grotesque from it. It is true that in the aftermath of the Hamas attack some academics and students, at various American universities, crossed the line into antisemitism and glorifying terrorism. Some Jewish students were harassed and even felt it necessary to disguise their Jewish identity. College presidents, testifying before Congress on the issue of antisemitism, gave boneheaded replies — and some paid with their jobs.
But the demands laid out in a letter sent by the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force to Harvard on April 11 went far further. In the name of enforcing “viewpoint diversity”, the letter essentially demanded the federal government be given the power to vet student admissions, the hiring of faculty and the political views of both students and faculty. Harvard, unsurprisingly, rejected them.
In an interview last year, Vance cited Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a model for dealing with universities. Under Orban, the Central European University was forced out of Hungary. Vance suggested that American universities should also be given “a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching”.
The Trump administration is threatening Harvard’s federal funding, tax-exempt status and ability to admit foreign students. If it can cow America’s most famous and richest university into submission then others can all be expected to fall into line. Academic freedom in America would be dead.
Putting charges of antisemitism at the centre of the attack on universities is cynical but tactically astute. Hatred of Jews is widely and rightly regarded as shameful. Open antisemitism — or even failing to combat antisemitism with sufficient vigour — can put your job or your funding at risk. It suits the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government to elide the difference between opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and antisemitism. But they are obviously not the same thing. Many of the campus protesters at Columbia, Harvard and elsewhere were Jews.
The administration’s campaign against universities is now — presumably deliberately — creating a climate of fear on campuses that extends well beyond pro-Palestinian activists. Over 1,000 foreign students are thought to have had visas revoked or legal status changed often on vague grounds — and some taken into custody.
The more-than-one million foreign students in the US are being advised to tread carefully. Boston University, for example, has urged them to have “personal safety plans” — including emergency contacts and friends authorised to pick up their children from day care if the parents are detained.
For decades, American colleges have pulled talent into the country from all over the world. The fact that the US is the home to most of the world’s leading universities is one of the country’s greatest strengths. Destroying the university system is the very opposite of “making America great again”. But it could help entrench Trump and his heirs in power.
As well as being a tragedy for the US, the attack on academia is a potential disaster for American Jews, for whom the country’s great universities have provided a haven and an avenue for advancement. Louis Brandeis, the first ever Jewish Supreme Court justice, came up through Harvard. So did Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee and one of America’s most influential diplomats. Jews are significantly over-represented at Ivy League universities, relative to their proportion of the population.
Vance is a conservative Catholic and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary who has charged Harvard with failing to protect Jews, is an evangelical Christian. Alan Garber, the Havard president who signed the rejection of the administration’s demands, is Jewish. So are many of the distinguished academics leading Harvard’s fightback — including Steven Pinker, Lawrence Summers and Steven Levitsky.
Antisemitism is a problem in America. But it is arguably at least as prevalent on the far right as on the left. The “great replacement theory” that blames Jews for allegedly promoting mass immigration has a considerable purchase on the Trump-supporting right.
America’s top colleges are far from immune from criticism. They got plenty wrong — on everything from cancel culture to admissions policy. But the Trump administration is not offering friendly advice. It is on a mission to destroy.
gideon.rachman@ft.com
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