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.