I started today’s post about six times. Between attacks on the federal workforce and various government departments; vote suppression moves; erasing Black, Hispanic and female stories from government websites; threatening Panama, Greenland, and Canada (Canada?!); and decimating support services for military veterans, there are just so many options to choose from in the How to do a Fascism playbook. Except maybe not that last one—going after the military makes no sense whatever flavor of Authoritarian you’re trying to cook up. Then, over the past weekend we had Overt Violation of the Rule of Law when deporting people, so that one’s going to have major ramifications going forward, too.

Because it happens to be the thing I’m most ticked off about today, let’s talk Higher Education. Going after academic institutions is very much part of the anti-intellectual playbook for authoritarians, who like to portray universities as variously hotbeds of Commie propaganda, breeding grounds for terrorists, or stuffed full of people working for foreign interests.

I don’t know how much of the goings on over here are getting attention in the wider world but the assault on universities, and especially on biomedical research programs, is staggering. What we are seeing is a combination of a chilling attempt to curb protest and free speech, a visceral loathing of science, and an attempt to re-segregate higher learning.

Curbing Free Speech

The first round of targeting students’ free speech has been made in the name of “protecting Jewish students on campuses,” a level of hypocritical hogwash that beggars belief. Yes, some of last year’s campus protests in support of the Palestinians of Gaza did cross the line into overt and frightening antisemitism. But the Trump administration is using this as an excuse to start interfering in academic freedom to an astonishing degree.

This issue first gained national attention last week when Mahmoud Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent who had been involved in the protests at Columbia University, was arrested in the middle of the night by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (the infamous ICE). He has Green Card and is married to a US citizen. I have no idea what Mr. Khalil may have said or done and it’s entirely possible that I wouldn’t agree with him. But that’s beside the point. More relevant is the fact that he has not been accused of any crime. The Trump administration simply said it can deport any foreign nationals it deems a national security threat.

The government has also pulled $400 million from Columbia University over what it described as the Ivy League school’s failure to curb antisemitism on campus. And NPR has reported that federal officials sent a letter to the University demanding that Columbia place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years,” requiring them to create a full plan to do so by March 20. The letter reportedly gives no reason why this department was targeted.

But Columbia is far from the only institution being targeted. Another 60 colleges and universities, including famous names like Cornell and Yale, have received a letter from the Education Department warning they could lose federal money and face “potential enforcement actions” if officials determine the schools fail to protect Jewish students on campus.

Attacking Science

Some of the assault on science and biomedical research is the result of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s absurd beliefs; but it also reflects the knee-jerk authoritarian distrust of science in general. This strand of the attack on higher education risks setting back research in this country by a generation. It’s a lot easier to destroy something than to build it.

In February, the Trump administration announced deep cuts to National Institutes of Health grants for research institutions. To give just one example, Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget looks set to be cut by more than 10 percent. With some 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee dependent on biosciences research, the impact on jobs and on the state economy could be devastating. 

Social media post from a biomedical engineer and vice chair of research for neurosurgery at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School:

Just as horrifying, Kennedy’s HHS has stopped all communications about NIH grants; throttled peer-reviewed grant-review meetings; and threatened to fire hundreds of expert reviewers and core staff at the agency. It has ordered the review of dozens of keywords in thousands of existing grants and is issuing funding termination letters based on what it finds. It has placed a cap on the indirect costs that underpin basic scientific and medical research; and according to one report “put woefully unprepared, lower-level career staff in charge of key functions at the agency.”

All of this has seen the work of the NIH—the world’s gold standard of biomedical research—grind to a halt. Some programs are rescinding offers of places in PhD programs. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research. These are the kinds of research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving medical breakthroughs in the past quarter century.

Image of an abandoned lab, from RichardLewisPhotograpy.com

Attempting Re-segregation

The final strand in all of this is the ongoing assault on DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Which is shorthand for “stop including people we don’t like.”

The U.S. Department of Education reportedly has launched investigations into 52 universities in 41 states, accusing the schools of using “racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.” 

A few days ago, the department’s Office of Civil Rights said that 45 schools, particularly their graduate programs, violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act by partnering with The PhD Project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups earn doctoral degrees in business. The program focuses on supporting Black, Latino and Native American students. Six additional institutions of higher education apparently are being probed for awarding alleged “impermissible race-based scholarships.” And another has been accused of “administering a program that segregates students on the basis of race.”

Once again, the government is taking some of the language of equality and civil rights and turning into something else—namely, narrowing the access pipeline so that only mediocre white boys can succeed.

This isn’t new, of course. Ever since the aftermath of the civil war and the subsequent rise of Jim Crow, America has seen periodic convulsions of those in power attempting to re-segregate all aspects of American public life. And now, between the election of a Black president in 2008 and the candidacy of a Black woman in 2024, some corners of white America have pretty much lost their collective minds.

Segregation sign from the 1950s

What Next?

The combination of curtailing free speech, going after scientific research, and shutting down any hint of diversity programing has stunned academia. Over the last two weeks, more than a dozen institutions have announced limits on hiring for faculty and staff positions, including Harvard; MIT; the University of Pennsylvania (where I got my own PhD); North Carolina State University; and many, many more.

Harvard said their hiring freeze was “meant to preserve our financial flexibility until we better understand how changes in federal policy will take shape and can assess the scale of their impact.”

Most universities have responded publicly to these attacks with strategies of self-preservation. They are lying low, avoiding public debate, and trying to appear cooperative, in the hope of mitigating the assault.

One notable exception has been the President of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth. Wesleyan, located in Connecticut, has just over 3,000 undergraduates and is one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. It also happens to be the spouse’s alma mater. In an interview with Politico Magazine published on March 12, Roth said, “The infatuation with institutional neutrality is just making cowardice into a policy.” He noted that “the idea that we now have a list of words we shouldn’t use is shocking. Schools are scrubbing their websites.”

Roth added that, with the current administration thinking of retribution as a legitimate political tactic, we are seeing “the greatest fear in civil society, including in the higher education system, since the McCarthy era.”

Ah yes, McCarthy. The US Senator whose incendiary claim in February 1950 that he had a list of known Communists working in the State Department ballooned into years of persecution that expanded to include gays and anyone he deemed guilty of “perversions.”

In 1953, one of the institutions targeted by McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations was the Voice of America, an international media network funded by the government and launched in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda. Despite weeks of VOA personnel being grilled in front of television cameras and a packed press gallery, McCarthy never managed to shut the VOA down.  

Today, the VOA, which includes entities like Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, claims to have over 400 million listeners worldwide every week. 

Or at least, it did, until Trump signed an Executive Order last Friday stripping the VOA of its funding because it is “radical” and “anti-Trump.”