In his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, Ronald Reagan weaponized public frustration with campus activism to launch a broader attack on California’s university system. He campaigned on the promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” casting student demonstrators as communists, beatniks, sexual deviants and a threat to the American way of life. He strongly opposed affirmative action, calling it “reverse discrimination,” and believed that education should service the economy, not democracy.
His contempt for working-class intellectual empowerment was made explicit by his education adviser Roger A. Freeman in 1970.“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” Freeman said. “That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college]. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Education can be radicalizing, in other words, and shouldn’t be available to the working masses.
The crisis is not simply about campus unrest. It is about who controls knowledge, who defines the boundaries of acceptable discourse, and who gets to access the means of intellectual and political empowerment. Donald Trump is reviving this very playbook, albeit with updated language and a different set of enemies. Trump, similarly, has called universities “indoctrination centers” and vowed to “vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses.” This effort is not a break from the past, but its logical continuation.
Trump has taken Reagan’s playbook and pushed it even further, asserting direct control over the university curriculum in unprecedented ways. In March, the White House pressured Columbia to place its Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under academic receivership—a rare and dramatic move that strips faculty of their governance and installs an external chair. In response, Columbia appointed a new senior vice provost to oversee a sweeping review of the department’s programs, including the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. The university also announced a ban on face masks and protests inside academic buildings, and pledged to reevaluate its admissions policies. Taken together, these actions have been widely seen as a chilling assault on academic freedom and institutional self-governance that threatens to undermine the character of American higher education itself.
At the same time, institutions like Hillsdale College, a Christian, conservative school in Michigan, and the (currently unaccredited) University of Austin have swooped in to fill a supposed gap in the ideological spectrum. Palantir Technologies, too, has encouraged high schoolers and recent graduates to “skip the debt” and “indoctrination” and sign up for their “Meritocracy Fellowship” – a four-month paid internship which they’ve dubbed the Palantir degree. Together, these efforts are early steps toward the formation of an “alternative” university system, designed to circumvent traditional education entirely.
The wave of arrests, expulsions, legislative and financial threats is certainly about punishing those who contradict U.S. foreign policy, but it’s also about reasserting top-down control over institutions that have also historically served as incubators for social movements, critical thinking, and progressive coalitions.
This logic often isn’t spoken out loud, but it animates much of the GOP’s educational policies from attacking student loan forgiveness to cutting off funding. These attacks function as a mass disinformation campaign to instill distrust in our institutions and steer young people away from attending. Roughly a third of Americans express a great deal of confidence in higher education, down from nearly 60 percent a decade ago, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Of those who lack confidence, 41 percent mention schools as being “too liberal” or trying to “brainwash” students, while fewer of those who express doubt cite rising costs, educational quality, and not teaching relevant skills. These figures are likely to get worse with Trump’s ongoing standoff.
The stakes are huge. If Republicans succeed, the result won’t just be fewer protests. There will be a higher education system that is poorer, narrower, and more obedient—one that serves authoritarianism instead of challenging it.
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