American Higher Education in the Era of Trump

Introduction: The Faustian Bargain

Higher education in America long ago sold its soul to corporate America. Whether through its heavy dependence on corporate funding for business schools and scientific research, the rebranding of students as “customers,” the evisceration of tenure to promote flexibility in hiring, or the adoption of top-down, management-heavy infrastructures, universities have steadily drifted from their ostensible mission of education. College athletics, once part of a broad liberal education, have been transformed into big-money marketing spectacles.

Decades ago, American higher education fully embraced its role within a capitalist society—not as a bastion of independent thought, but as an institution subsidizing corporate profitability and producing the next generation of compliant workers.

Artist: Drew Martin

This transformation has not been accidental. From their inception in Europe, universities have been shaped by a fundamental contradiction: they are institutions of learning and creativity, embodying the Enlightenment ideal of “sapere aude”—“dare to know,” as Immanuel Kant urged—while simultaneously serving as tools of domination and control. Francis Bacon’s dictum “knowledge is power” captured this duality: knowledge could liberate, but it could also be harnessed to entrench authority. Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment  argued that reason itself had become instrumentalized, reduced to a tool for control, calculation, and efficiency. The history of higher education is thus a story of competing forces—innovation and curiosity on one side, state and corporate control on the other.  It has always been an institution of contradictions, and it persists today into the Trump era.

Origins in Exclusivity

American higher education began as an unapologetically elitist project. Its function was not to democratize opportunity but to reproduce privilege. The Ivy League prepared white, Protestant men to rule; elite women’s colleges groomed the daughters of privilege for socially acceptable leadership roles as dutiful wives. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) offered a parallel track for a small segment of African Americans, but within a segregated structure that reinforced racial boundaries.

This was not a system designed to expand opportunity—it was designed to police it. The idea that higher education could serve as a ladder for social mobility was, for much of its history, a fiction. Its real function was to ensure the continuity of power across generations, right down to the legacy admissions that guaranteed family dynasties their place.

Post–World War II: Expansion with Strings Attached

The GI Bill after World War II marked the first large-scale breach in the fortress. Millions of returning soldiers entered universities, bringing with them a new set of needs and expectations.  Here is where one of several  contradictions in the mission of higher education  became  apparent. This expansion of  higher education was a form of democratization, but it came with a Cold War twist: education was a tool for capitalist development and ideological warfare with  communism.  Free speech and thinking  was good—so long as it was the right free speech and aided the Cold War and demonstrated the superiority of market capitalism.

While many remember the McCarthy hearings and the House Un-American Activities Committee targeting communism in the US government, it also went after alleged infiltration  in  colleges and universities, resulting in the requirement that professors sign loyalty oaths. The University of California system’s 1949 oath is the most famous example, leading to the dismissal of dozens of faculty who resisted. Even when faculty were not formally sanctioned, the atmosphere of suspicion stifled debate. Courses in political economy, Marxist theory, and labor history were curtailed or quietly removed from curricula.

Universities were mobilized to fight the Soviet Union not with bullets but with ideas and technology. Federal dollars poured into scientific research, much of it serving military and corporate objectives. Tenure and academic freedom were paraded as proof of America’s openness—symbols as much as protections.

But the expansion had unintended consequences. As universities opened their doors to a broader range of students, they also opened themselves to critique. The 1960s saw those students—many from outside the traditional elite—turn the tools of critical inquiry back against the state, the military-industrial complex, and the universities themselves.

The 1960s: The University as Counterculture

Colleges and universities thrived and grew and there was support for them in the 1950s and 1960s as they were seen as public goods worthy of public support.  But then the universities got out of control. The university became both a sanctuary and a staging ground for dissent. Opposition to the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and anti-imperialist causes found a home on campus. For a brief moment, higher education seemed to fulfill its Enlightenment promise—serving as a space where reason could challenge power.

Students sought universities as a refuge from the draft, they were the epitome of counter cultural.  It was not so much sex, drugs, and rock and roll, or Timothy Leary’s “tune in turn on, drop out” as it was tune in,  turn out, turn against. Higher ed was expanded to serve the needs of a capitalist elite but it produced its own critics. The democratization of higher education by expanding access produced counter cultural forces  opposed to the institutions that created it.

But this same openness was intolerable to the political and corporate establishment. Ronald Reagan’s governorship in California and Richard Nixon’s presidency marked the beginning of a campaign to discipline universities back into compliance.   The latter’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, captured their attitude perfectly when in his October 19, 1969, speech he indicted higher education.

Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

Reagan railed against “free speech” campuses as dens of anarchy; Nixon’s administration monitored and infiltrated student groups. Kent State’s “four dead in Ohio” became a literal warning shot to any who would mistake the university for a protected zone of dissent.

The First Counter-Revolution: The Corporate University

By the late 1970s, the economic crisis gave political leaders the perfect excuse to reshape higher education in the corporate image. State funding was slashed, and student grants were replaced with loans, tethering graduates to decades of debt. Universities began talking openly about “customers” and “products.” Administrative layers multiplied, often staffed by people with business backgrounds rather than academic ones.  No longer was higher education seen as a public good—it was a private benefit  that would now shift the costs to the  student-customer.

Tenure lines were frozen or eliminated, replaced with contingent faculty who were cheaper and easier to control. Professional programs—especially MBAs—exploded, not because of student demand for critical management theory but because corporations demanded a steady supply of trained managers. Naming rights for business schools and sports facilities cemented the symbolic merger of university and corporation.

College sports, particularly football and basketball, became cash machines, commodifying athletes while maintaining the fiction of amateurism. The notion of athletics as part of a well-rounded education was replaced by the reality of athletics as entertainment branding.

The result was an institution that still claimed the rhetoric of the Enlightenment but had fully adopted the operating system of corporate capitalism.

The Second Democratization: A More Diverse Challenge

The early 21st century brought a new wave of students—more racially diverse, more likely to be immigrants or first-generation college-goers, and more willing to challenge institutional orthodoxies. They did not simply want access; they wanted transformation. They demanded that curricula reflect multiple histories, that faculty and leadership mirror the student body, and that universities take public stands on climate change, racial justice, and LGBTQ rights.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives proliferated. Universities divested from industries like tobacco and fossil fuels. Courses on critical race theory, gender studies, and environmental justice flourished. For a moment, it seemed as if the university might again lean toward its emancipatory potential.

Corporate Tolerance and the Backlash

Corporate America initially embraced DEI—up to a point. A diverse workforce was good for branding and recruitment. But when campus activism began questioning the deeper structures of inequality—labor practices, environmental destruction, political lobbying—tolerance evaporated. The university’s critique had cut too close to the bone.

The cultural gap between the university and the 62% of Americans without a college degree widened. For many in this group, universities came to represent an alien set of values, from marriage equality to transgender rights. Conservative politicians and media seized on this gap, framing campuses as radical enclaves disconnected from “real America.” Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position” was playing out in real time: the battle to control intellectual life was no longer abstract—it was in the headlines, legislative bills, and trustee boardrooms.

Crises of Legitimacy

The 2008 financial crash ripped away any illusion of economic security for higher education. Over-reliance on tuition, ballooning student debt, and stagnant wages for graduates all fed a crisis of legitimacy. Stories of administrative bloat and $70,000-per-year tuition became political fodder.  It is hard to democratize  and promise  equity and access at tuitions few can afford.

Inside the academy, inclusivity efforts sometimes collided with academic freedom, as in the Hamline University case  (where I teach) where a contingent faculty member lost her job for showing an image of the Prophet Mohammed. This episode revealed a new contradiction: universities, in trying to appease a consumer-student model and corporate-style risk management, could end up undermining the very principles they claimed to protect.  It also pitted  liberal sensibilities of faculty against  students who had been coddled into the belief that education was not meant to challenge their sensibilities but to  reflect their world view.

Trump’s Offensive: The Cultural Counterattack

By the time Donald Trump rose to power, the stage was set. The corporate university had already absorbed much of higher education’s critical capacity, but the second democratization wave threatened to re-energize it. Trump’s attacks on “woke” universities, DEI programs, and critical race theory were not isolated outbursts—they were the culmination of decades of backlash.

Ironically, his approach combined populist anti-elitism with elite interests’ desire to discipline the academy. By casting universities as Democratic Party outposts, cultural enemies, and intellectual elites, Trump harnessed both the resentment of non-college-educated voters and the strategic goals of corporate and political elites.

The Costs of Control

Ironically, suppressing higher education’s independence may backfire on capitalism itself. With birth rates declining and the “enrollment cliff” approaching, discouraging immigrants and international students from studying in the U.S. will deprive the economy of talent. Restricting research funding and academic freedom will slow innovation, ceding scientific and technological leadership to other countries.

Historically, universities have been a cost-effective way for corporations to outsource training and research. Undermining them in the name of ideological conformity risks dismantling that arrangement. The logic of “knowledge is power” cuts both ways: by narrowing the scope of inquiry, elites may find they have also narrowed their own future options.

The Weaponization of Higher Education: Trump, Project 2025, and the Elites

Trump’s attacks on higher education—what some critics call his “Department of Government by Efficiency (DOGE) approach—should not be seen only as a series of personal vendettas but rather as part of a coordinated ideological campaign. His tirades against “woke professors,” “indoctrination,” and diversity initiatives are designed to resonate with populist resentment while serving deeper structural interests. This is not just culture war rhetoric; it is a deliberate effort to discredit institutions that produce knowledge, cultivate critical thinking, and often resist authoritarian politics.

The alignment between Trump’s offensive and Project 2025, the sweeping policy blueprint drafted by conservative think tanks for a future Republican administration, makes this clear. Project 2025 explicitly calls for curtailing federal support for DEI programs, restructuring or even dismantling the Department of Education, and imposing new restrictions on federal research funding. These moves are designed to discipline universities, forcing them into ideological conformity,  similar to the  McCarthy era  efforts, while undermining their ability to act as independent centers of critique. What Trump presents in rallies as spontaneous anger at “liberal elites” is codified in Project 2025 as a structural reorganization of higher education along authoritarian lines.

This campaign is also useful to segments of the tech and financial elite. For Silicon Valley leaders and hedge fund managers who have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to liberal universities, the attack serves multiple functions. First, by weakening elite institutions like Harvard and Columbia, they undermine centers of cultural authority that often critique corporate power. Second, by delegitimizing traditional universities, they create space for alternatives—online academies, credentialing platforms, and privatized educational ventures—that tech elites control and profit from. In this sense, Trump’s assault on higher education dovetails with the libertarian ethos of the tech sector: dismantle the old institutions, then rebuild education as a marketplace for profit and influence.

The recent focus on Harvard and Columbia illustrates how this strategy works in practice. Both universities have faced intense scrutiny and political hearings over alleged failures to curb antisemitism on campus. While antisemitism is a serious issue that deserves genuine attention, the political uses of these scandals are clear. Conservative politicians and media outlets seize on such controversies not primarily to protect Jewish students, but to delegitimize universities as bastions of liberalism and diversity. By painting Harvard and Columbia as hypocritical, corrupt, or hostile to “real American values,” Trump and his allies mobilize cultural resentment while weakening institutions that often serve as intellectual counterweights to his agenda. The attack on antisemitism thus becomes a pretext—a convenient wedge to advance the broader project of dismantling what the right sees as liberal strongholds.

What emerges is a strange alliance: Trumpist populism, conservative think tanks, and segments of the tech elite converging around the shared goal of disciplining higher education. Each has different motivations—cultural revenge, ideological control, or economic profit—but the convergence is powerful. Together, they threaten to redefine universities not as spaces of inquiry or democratic debate but as regulated factories of compliance. The irony is that in destroying these institutions, they may also erode the very infrastructures of innovation, research, and workforce development that American capitalism has long depended upon.

Conclusion: The Contradictions Endure

From the cloisters of medieval Europe to the sprawling campuses of 21st-century America, higher education has been a battlefield between liberation and control. It has served as a refuge for dissent and as a factory for conformity—often at the same time. The Enlightenment promise that knowledge could free us has always been shadowed by the reality that knowledge can also be harnessed to rule us.

In the United States, the democratizations of higher education—in the postwar era and in the early 21st century—each triggered waves of backlash that reshaped the university in more corporate, controlled forms. The current wave, sharpened under Trump, seeks to clamp down on the second democratization before it fully matures.

The contradictions are not going away. The corporate university can never entirely kill the critical university, and the critical university can never entirely escape the corporate university. They are two sides of the same institution, locked in a permanent struggle. What remains to be seen is which side will be ascendant when the next crisis hits—and whether the university will still be a place where daring to know is possible at all.