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MAGA 101: Inside Trump’s fast-track masterclass in undermining academic freedom
A year ago, I asked whether academic freedom could survive Donald Trump’s plans for thought control. We now have the answer. Trump’s most effective weapon to this end has been the financial mechanisms linking state and academia. In the first week of his presidency, Trump ordered a “temporary pause” on billions of dollars in funding for education and scientific research already approved by Congress. This was followed by a wave of 30 Executive Orders and legislation relating to higher education in the first 75 days of the new administration. Collectively, these have had a devastating impact on independent research, threatening to engineer compliant instruction in America’s universities.
The trend toward limiting academic freedom is not limited to the United States. In the United Kingdom, research intensive universities have begun to prepare for the worst. As reported in The Times of London this week, Cambridge University have been “cosying up” to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, amid fears that it will copy Trump’s approach to academic freedom if they form the next UK government. During the electoral campaign last year, Reform promised to “cut funding to universities that undermine free speech [sic]”; with this threat in mind, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice warned the university’s governing council that “what the US example reminds you is you have to worry about what’s coming next.”
A mapping of the impact of the Trump administration’s cull by the Center for American Progress documented that it had targeted the termination of more than 4,000 grants across over 600 universities and colleges across the country, alongside funding cuts of between $3.3 billion and $3.7 billion. In the resulting fallout, clinical trials for cancer, covid and minority health have been stopped, satellite missions halted, and climate centres closed.
Funding freezes have been justified on the pretext of allegations of antisemitism in America’s universities, alongside claims that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices constitute “discrimination” against some students. According to a memo dispatched by the Executive Office of the President in January 2025, “[t]he use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”
This dual framing produces contradictory and uneven demands: universities are under pressure to suppress some forms of free expression while tolerating others. In March, Trump warned institutions that a failure to crack down on “illegal protests” could jeopardise their eligibility for federal funding. DEI was cast as evidence of thought policing; professors have lost funding for researching “woke” subjects, and even been fired for allegedly teaching “gender ideology”. All this reinforces a climate in which activities or speech seen as “liberal” are punished, while opinions aligned with the administration are protected. This perception was reinforced by the firing of up to 40 educators for comments made on social media following the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September, leaving many professors unsure what they can say online.
The first casualty was Columbia University – $400m in grants were pulled over campus protests – the university settled, as did Brown. The Trump administration also dramatically ramped up enforcement of university reporting of large foreign gifts or contracts from countries like China and the Middle East. Several top institutions including Berkeley and Harvard
An article in Inside Higher Ed provides a vivid account from a PhD student of the impact of this squeeze on higher education in the United States. “Our institution is just scrambling to figure out what DEI is and what programs will be affected,” the doctoral researcher said. “I study the development of disease, which tends to affect populations of certain ethnic and cultural backgrounds more than others. Is that DEI?”
According to a poll of 1600 scientists conducted by Nature, three-quarters of respondents were considering leaving the United States following the Trump upheaval, with Europe and Canada cited as the most favoured destinations for relocation. This is hardly surprising, given the uncertainty of the moment. But is the grass truly greener on the other side? The events of the last year have sent tremors internationally, largely because of the influential status and respect accorded to US academia. As Rob Quinn, executive director of US body Scholars At Risk, told The Guardian, “We are witnessing an unprecedented situation – really as far as I can tell in history – where a global leader of education and research is voluntarily dismantling that which gave it an advantage.”
As noted above, there are fears of a similar attack on higher education in the United Kingdom. Universities are already facing similar dilemmas concerning contradictory interpretations of the right to free speech. The Office of Students has threatened to sanction universities if campus protests over Palestine and the war in Gaza are deemed to constitute “harassment and discrimination” – while in parallel rolling out similar sanctions against universities for actions taken to prevent transphobic abuse and harassment. Countries around the world are watching developments with apprehension and Scholars At Risk have warned that the Trump administration’s assault on universities is turning the US into a “model for how to dismantle” academic freedom.
Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, has argued that the Trump administration’s actions are not in accordance with the law. “They don’t have any statutory or regulatory authority to suspend research on the basis of accusations.” Fansmith sees the freezes as a way “to force a negotiation so they can claim victory when they lack any sort of authority or any sort of evidence that would allow them to do it in the appropriate way.”
In October, dealmaker-in-chief Trump offered a “compact” to nine universities, offering them preferential funding arrangements if they acceded to a list of demands. These, PEN America reported, included a prohibition on employees “making statements on social or political matters on behalf of the university”, and screening international students for “anti-American values.” Other requirements included an enforcement of a binary definition of gender, a freeze on tuition rates charged to American students for five years, and the removal of diversity as a factor for consideration in admissions decisions. Seven of the nine targeted institutions declined the offer and no major research universities agreed to sign; it seems clear that entering into such a compact would, in effect end academic independence and institutional autonomy.
The Trump administration’s tactic of extracting concessions by manufacturing crises that it then offers to resolve has had some wins though, with some universities “obeying in advance” as Timothy Snyder might say. Under significant pressure – by way of a $790 million funding freeze and a Title VI civil rights investigation – Northwestern University recently reached a $75 million settlement (albeit without conceding liability) with the Trump administration. As part of the settlement agreeement, Northwestern agreed to investigate claims of antisemitism and make statements on transgender issues that reflected Trump’s Executive Order on the issue, and promised that admissions procedures will no longer take into account “race, color, or national origin”.
Beyond funding, accreditation has become another pressure point, with professional bodies being pushed by authorities to eliminate requirements relating to diversity or social justice. The American Bar Association, for example, is reviewing its accreditation standards and has suspended enforcement of its DEI standard for law schools – an indication of the federal government’s success in pushing accreditation bodies into shifting existing norms.
All this said: in the face of potentially dire outcomes, a number of states, universities and grantees have challenged the Trump imperative in court, offering to the academic community examples of principled resistance and coalition building. Even as UCLA continued to negotiate a $1 billion fine levied on it by the administration, its frustrated faculty launched a suit to defend the institution, successfully securing a preliminary injunction preventing Government from using funding threats to override the First Amendment.
Mechanisms like regulatory friction, funding conditions, and culture war mobilisation do not need to eliminate dissent for their effect to be felt. They only need to make dissent administratively burdensome and financially risky. Academic freedom in a democracy dies not through troops taking direct control of campus, but in thousands of bureaucratic changes and risk-averse decisions – each justified as temporary, each rationalised as necessary. University administrations tend to see a clear strategic trade-off between short-term compliance and securing resources for the longer term. But the cost of this trade-off is sacrificing the freedom to think and speak that would be impossible to reverse: turning independent research, in effect, into a theatre of political compliance. When the world’s most powerful research sector is pressured into ideological alignment, it also sends a powerful message to far right political movements in the United Kingdom and everywhere else: independent scholarship can be subordinated, teachers tamed, compliance secured, if you simply follow the Trump model. The stakes could not be higher, and American universities must unite in support of their faculty to both defeat the current assault and win the larger war.
Ukraine: Trump’s peace plan is none of those three things
The long-running corruption scandal surrounding the diversion of funds from Ukraine’s energy sector proved to be both a prelude and stimulus to yet another round of “peace talks” initiated by the US Trump administration.
The scandal seemed to create fertile soil into which the White House could plant ideas for achieving peace in Ukraine. We now know that they were not trying to plant fresh saplings, but Putin’s old “forever” plan of total domination over Ukraine. The apparently fertile soil was the Ukrainian leadership’s weakened position due to the corruption scandal, which led to resignation of apparently the most powerful man after President Volodmyr Zelensky – the head of President’s office Andriy Yermak.
Ukrainians didn’t believe Yermak would resign until the very moment of his resignation. Essentially, Zelensky will have to reinvent himself as a president-without-Yermak. How easy or possible this will be is unclear. Regardless of the outcome of the criminal investigation, Yermak protected Zelensky from his own people and from others, practically controlling access to him.
Many in Ukraine believed that Yermak made all the decisions in the presidential office. In fact, if you analyse all of Yermak’s statements, you’ll see that Zelensky and Yermak said the same thing. In essence, Yermak was an “extension” of Zelensky – a kind of doppelganger only without the charisma. Some people who have met Yermak have noted that he possesses a rather negative charisma, but he always repeated Zelensky’s ideas, using more or less the same words.
At meetings with foreign partners, like Zelensky, he demanded military aid and support rather than asking for it. As the president of a country at war, foreign partners have forgiven Zelensky his forthrightness and occasionally insufficiently explicit expressions of gratitude for assistance provided. However, since the scandal with JD Vance at the White House over “ingratitude”, Zelensky has made a point of thanking foreign partners, especially President Trump much more often than before.
Some high-level guests to Ukraine didn’t immediately understand that Yermak was an extension of Zelensky, his most trusted confidant. However, they would almost certainly picked up on the feeling in Ukrainian society that Yermak was disliked.
Yermak’s reputation among Ukrainians was very negative, but not as sinister as the oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk’s under Ukraine’s Russian-sympathising second president Leonid Kuchma who was in office until 2005 and whose legacy still casts a shadow.
But then again, Yermak represented Zelensky’s inner circle of friends and business partners, which existed before Zelensky entered politics. Now, no one from this “inner circle” remains. At first, it seemed that the entire corruption affair, starting with Zelensky’s and Yermak’s attempt to wrest independence from National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP), to businessman Timur Mindych’s reported escape to Israel (just before his office was due to be raided by anti-corruption police over kickbacks from the energy sector), coincided too closely with the new negotiations about Trump peace plan.
Since independence, Ukrainian presidents have had eighteen heads of administration, and not all of them earned themselves negative reputations. Some came and went without being embroiled in high-profile corruption or political scandals. The latest scandal, however, is bound to cast a shadow over the entire office of the President since Mindych was co-owner of Zelensky’s Kvartal 95 production company, for which Yermak provided legal services before Zelensky’s official entry into politics.
Few Ukrainians can understand how it could be that a group of people like Mindych, his partner Oleksandr Zukerman and others so close to the presidential office, could have allegedly spent months siphoning money from state-owned enterprises in the energy sector. Why was it that only NABU signaled that something was wrong and that it involved Mindych? Why didn’t other intelligence agencies and law enforcement bodies stop their criminal activities sooner?
On Tuesday of last week, NABU representatives announced that more than 520 files containing personal information on 15 NABU detectives, National Security Services employees, journalists who write about corruption, and deputy ministers of justice, members of Parliament were discovered in a secret office belonging to Mindych’s group. This personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers, and so on, could only have been obtained through the police or other law enforcement agencies.
Now it appears that a real possibility that the peace negotiations could have been an attempt by the Zelensky administration (which meant Yermak) to resume negotiations in order to shift attention of Ukrainians from the Mindych case to the “peace process.” In other words, the initiative this time may have come from Zelensky.
Today Zelensky’s position, and therefore Ukraine’s one, is much weaker than before the Mindych scandal. Only very quick and decisive personnel changes can improve (but not correct) the situation. It would be better to change the tradition altogether and either rename the position of “head of the presidential administration” to something more political, or abolish it, replacing it with some narrow “office of political advisers.”
As to the peace plan, the obvious Russian origins of the plan, which was also proved by statements from US secretary of state Marco Rubio, sparked immediate controversy, first in Ukraine, and then in the United States itself.
It was precisely because of the protests from inside the USA that President Trump was at first forced to abandon his plan to aggressively force what he considered a weakened Zelensky into publicly accepting these most recent proposals. Within two days, the pressure on Zelensky was relaxed and the “plan” – a list of demands Ukraine should accept in exchange for peace or a ceasefire – began to shrink in scope and mutate, resulting quickly in rejection by Russia.
Under the original Putin-Witkoff plan, Ukraine was supposed to reduce its army, renounce possession of long-range missiles, withdraw from its own territory, and guarantee non-accession to NATO. For good measure, the plan also promised the US a 50% share of the profits from the reconstruction of devastated Ukraine, but omitted to make any demands on Russia – the aggressor country that has violated all possible international treaties and obligations. The idea that the USA should take 50% profits from reconstruction of Ukraine is so surreal it is hardly worth mentioning, except as a joke.
Even if Ukraine had agreed to all the demands, the plan would have remained a roadmap for Russia’s further aggression against Kyiv because it lacked the one element required to bring the aggression to an end – a change to the Russian Constitution.
The original 28-point plan guarantees the continuation of the war because it does not demand that Russia rescind the inclusion of four Ukrainian regions and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in the Russian Constitution. At the very least, Russia should first remove from its constitution the two regions through which the front line currently runs – Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts.
In Russia, every captured Ukrainian village is called “liberated” precisely because, in early October 2022, Putin signed constitutional amendments, which the Russian State Duma dutifully voted for. According to the amendments, five Ukrainian regions became the so-called “new territories” of Russia. Until they are are repealed, Russia will continue not only to occupy Ukrainian territories but also to seize further territory.
In just a couple of days, a 28-point pro-Russian plan has morphed into a draft of a 19-point, more pro-justice plan that Russia will not sign up to. Trump is no longer demanding Zelensky’s immediate agreement to negotiate, but preliminary talks are ongoing. Moreover, information has emerged about contacts in Abu Dhabi between Russian and Ukrainian intelligence officials and while Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, states that Russia rejects this “American” plan, other Russian politicians are less categorical.
Last week another information bomb exploded across the world. Bloomberg gained access to recordings of phone calls between Steve Witkoff and Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, as well as a conversation between Dmitriev and Putin aide Ushakov. These conversations confirmed the theory of the “peace plan’s” Russian origin.
But, what appears far more dangerous for Ukraine, it became clear that Witkoff, through Dmitriev, was advising Putin on when to call Trump and how best to communicate with the US president. Although Trump has so far defended Witkoff in this situation, just as Zelensky defended Yermak until it wasn’t possible any more, it is clear that Trump represents Russian interests more than those of Ukraine and Europe in the peace negotiations.
These are very dangerous times for Ukraine as the country seeks to negotiate a peace plan with Russia, backed by an unreliable US administration, all the while uncovering a major corruption scandal which goes to the heart of its president’s office.
Is academic freedom at risk in the UK?
Last week was a bad press week for Sheffield Hallam University after it was revealed they paused research into human rights abuses in Xinjiang because of a run-in with Beijing. Following research by Professor Laura Murphy on Uyghur forced labour, the university experienced threats against its China-based staff and blocked access in China. The university’s insurer pulled back and then university administrators barred her from continuing the work, at which stage Murphy threatened legal action for violation of academic freedom. The university has reversed its decision, albeit only after an unnecessary struggle. A shocking story for some, but not for us, and indeed the many other UK academics who came forward this week with similar stories.
People often ask me about “cancel culture” on campus. My usual response is: yes, it’s a problem but you know what’s also problematic and not talked about nearly as much? Chinese influence. We’ve been shouting about this for ages, and have dug deep via reports, follow-ups and panel discussions. As was the case with Sheffield Hallam, the influence is usually exerted through stick and carrot: the stick = harassment of students and staff, the carrot = access to China’s lucrative market. Given the growing number of Chinese students in the UK and the proliferation of UK joint institutes in China, we urgently need to address this problem. China is an incredibly important story. It can’t be airbrushed.
Questions about academic freedom aren’t confined to China-related issues or to cancel culture, as another academic freedom story from this week reminded us. This one concerns SOAS, who next June plan to host a conference by a group called Brismes, a well-respected UK-based organisation within the field of Middle Eastern studies. SOAS isn’t just renting a space to Brismes. They’ve issued the call for submissions on their own site too. As part of that call, participants are asked to declare whether their university is “built on captured land”. Several organisations that campaign for academic freedom have accused them of breaking free speech rules. They’re right to make the accusation. It’s a thinly veiled attempt to exclude Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian academics, who either might not support the framing or might find themselves in jeopardy if they do.
I have issue with compelled speech, as I’ve written about. It mirrors the tactics of authoritarian regimes, not open democracies. And in a university environment, it’s especially problematic. They should be about dialogue not dogma. Sadly such ideological purity tests (as one academic I spoke about this story called it) aren’t unique to SOAS or to this specific issue, which I reference to provide context not justification.
Of course there are usually other universities people can speak at, just as there might be other universities one can research China’s human rights abuses. But is that the point? Any university closing its doors to academics – whether out of fear of losing funding or because of demands for thought conformity – is bad, made all the worse because it’s part of a broader pattern.