The Boston Globe
Trumpian critics of academia are determined to rescue universities from the Marxists and social justice warriors they say unduly influence them.
They are right-wing activists and conservative congressional staffers. They include higher education specialists at the Heritage Foundation who contributed to the audacious Project 2025 governing plan, and lawyers who specialize in attacking diversity and inclusion bureaucracies. They are leaders of the very few institutions of higher education that fit the Trumpian view of what a college should offer.
As Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, a new conservative higher education cognoscenti, espousing views long considered fringe by the liberal-leaning academic world, are ascendant. They see this moment as one of extraordinary opportunity: Higher education is rarely more than a blip in presidential politics, but Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, made elite schools — their cost, their culture, their politics — a red meat issue in their campaign. Trump vowed to “reclaim” the university from “radical leftists,” and Vance went so far as to applaud the state takeover of public universities in Hungary by that country’s authoritarian leader.
Trumpian critics of academia are determined to rescue universities from the Marxists and social justice warriors they say unduly influence them. They aim to use federal funding, accreditation boards, taxation, congressional investigations, and, potentially, changes to the Higher Education Act to achieve their goals.
These conservative thinkers share a view of “higher education as hostile to the kind of society they think they ought to have,” said Brendan Cantwell, professor of education at Michigan State University.
For the sector, he said, it ”brings a great deal of uncertainty.”
Perhaps the most influential and provocative spokesperson for Trump World’s views on higher education is Christopher Rufo.
A right-wing activist and writer, Rufo rose to prominence in the summer of 2020 after an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. He set off a national firestorm by popularizing a critique of critical race theory, a term he wrested from its legal studies roots to include a wide range of teachings about race and racism, calling it an “existential threat to the United States.”
Not long after, the Trump administration tapped him to help draft an executive order to limit how government agencies and contractors talk about race and racism in employee trainings.
“He’s been all over this space and gradually become more and more influential in these MAGA circles,” said Steven Brint, professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California Riverside.
In the years since, Rufo, 40, has increasingly focused his attention on higher education. A senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, Rufo graduated from Georgetown University and Harvard University’s Extension School before becoming an activist journalist. He was unavailable for an interview.
Last year, he played a prominent role in what he told Politco was an orchestrated campaign to oust Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay. At the time Gay was already under fire for her testimony at a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism when Rufo helped circulate accusations that she had plagiarized in her academic works.
He has also targeted new immigrants in his advocacy work in recent months, fueling false narratives about Haitian migrants.
Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, called Rufo one of the “main influencers” who “gives [Trump] ideas about higher ed policy.”
Several higher education watchers believe Rufo could be tapped by the Trump administration in an official role, while others expect him to continue influencing higher education policy from his current platform.
The way Rufo sees it, universities have fomented a “cultural revolution” in America. Leftist professors and administrators, along with their student acolytes, are leveraging identity politics to advance an anti-American, anticapitalist agenda, a phenomenon Rufo contends began during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
“The training ground for the New Left’s capture of institutional power was the university,” Rufo wrote in his 2023 book, “America’s Cultural Revolution.”
He calls for a “counter-revolution,” in which conservatives should use federal funding and the “civil rights regulatory apparatus” to reshape institutions, and “devise a strategy for laying siege to the institutions” to reorient them “toward the nation’s eternal principles.” In short, Rufo says, conservatives must root out the ideology that undergirds DEI programs, which proponents say make campuses fairer and more inclusive, but that Rufo contends perpetrate their own form of discrimination.
“From one perspective, the current battlefield may appear overwhelming,” Rufo wrote in his book. “The Left has achieved cultural dominance over the entire range of prestige institutions. But from another, there is the possibility of reversal.”
If there’s one institution many Trump supporters in higher ed repeatedly point to as a paragon of academic virtue that they want colleges and universities to emulate, it’s Hillsdale College in Michigan.
As a nonsectarian Christian liberal arts school, Hillsdale offers the kind of “classical education,” based on Western thought, that Rufo and allies — and Trump himself — have said should form the basis of a US college education. (Rufo is a fellow at Hillsdale, where he teaches classes.)
In the context of American higher education today, the school is radical in its refusal to place any value in racial or ethnic diversity: It has no diversity and inclusion policies. It has no classes in ethnic or women’s studies, and no focus on diversity in admissions or among the faculty or leadership. (A spokesperson for the college would not say whether there are any faculty or directors of color. The school pays “no attention to race,” the spokesperson said in an email.) The college does not track the demographics of the student body.
Its longtime president, Larry Arnn, declined requests for a phone interview, but said in emailed responses to questions from the Globe that progressives in higher education “emphasize learning how to remake society” rather than knowing “things that last.”
“This shifts the focus in education toward the wielding of power,” he said. “This shift in emphasis has led to a decline in knowledge, poor graduation rates, demonstrations and violence on campuses, and a proliferation of unserious courses. If you teach young people to seek power rather than knowledge, it dampens their curiosity. That is a great loss.”
The 72-year-old administrator also views modern conceptions of diversity as an affront to American principles of equality and antidiscrimination. Hillsdale’s founding documents, he often notes, were written by abolitionists in the pre-Civil War era, and he contends the school’s refusal to track the racial demographics of its students is a continuation of an honorable ideal.
“We are a community of people willing and able to teach and learn in pursuit of truth while certainly paying no attention to race,” Arnn said.
Arnn faced backlash in 2013 for his testimony before Michigan lawmakers when he recounted a charge by state education officials that Hillsdale had violated diversity standards because “we didn’t have enough dark ones,” according to news reports.
”No offense was intended by the use of that term except to the offending bureaucrats, and Dr. Arnn is sorry if such offense was honestly taken,” the college said in a news release.
Arnn has already distinguished himself in Trump’s orbit. He is on the board of the Heritage Foundation and, during the first Trump administration, co-chaired the president’s 1776 Commission, which produced a report on American history that was a rebuke of the “1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine series that sought to reframe US history as beginning when enslaved Africans were first brought to the British colonies in America.
Arnn’s work on the 1776 Commission and statements of doubt about the results of the 2020 election have made him an outsider in higher education. He used to serve on the advisory board of the Salvatori Center, a research institute at Claremont McKenna College. But when his term expired, the center’s director, George Thomas, declined to renew it.
“Both reveal a disregard for truth, which is central to the academic mission, and a tendency toward propaganda,” Thomas said in an email.
Hillsdale, however, has been an influential force in the conservative circles that have the president-elect’s ear.
The college has attracted a parade of Trump World luminaries in recent years — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the commencement address in 2016. And Hillsdale served as a guide star to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who visited in the spring of 2023 as he sought to remake the New College of Florida, a public liberal arts institution. The DeSantis administration had just fired the college’s board members and replaced them with ideological allies, including Rufo. The goal, he said in public remarks, was to turn the school into the “Hillsdale of the South” and to provide “a classical education similar to what our Founding Fathers had when they went to universities.”
Trump higher education allies share a distaste for the elite segment of the sector, which they claim promotes anti-American values that have seeped into other facets of society, including the business world.
Here, Virginia Foxx, an 81-year-old Republican congresswoman from North Carolina and former community college president, has already exerted enormous influence.
As the powerful chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, Foxx has focused her efforts on exposing what she sees as a toxic culture that allows discrimination against white and Jewish students at the most competitive colleges in the country. Her committee called a prestigious cadre of university presidents to testify about antisemitism on their campuses after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, a series of high-stakes public interrogations that ultimately contributed directly to the ouster of three Ivy League presidents. At the first of these, she and other Republican members used the forum as a platform to air other grievances.
”For years, universities have stoked the flames of an ideology which goes by many names — antiracism, anticolonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality, the list goes on,” Foxx said in her opening remarks at the Dec. 5 hearing. “This value system taught in universities is absolutely foreign to 99 percent of Americans.”
Earlier this year a spokesperson for Foxx’s committee called a Harvard professor who teaches about race in America “a race agitator,” a term historically used to disparage Black thinkers and civil rights leaders.
The Committee on Education and the Workforce is expected to name a new chair in the coming weeks, but higher education watchers said Foxx will continue to drive distrust of elite universities through a “rhetorical culture war” and push for policies like increased taxes on large endowments, said Cantwell at Michigan State.
Peter Wood, an anthropologist who served in a variety of administrative roles at Boston University and now heads the right-leaning National Association of Scholars, which advocates for academic freedom, lacks the celebrity status of Rufo and Foxx. But he’s among a group of conservative intellectuals who, in online publications, books, and think tanks, articulate profound skepticism of contemporary campus culture.
Wood, the author of a book critiquing the 1619 Project, is disillusioned with what he sees as the collapse of intellectual freedom on college campuses, whose leaders, he said in an interview, “are perfectly fluent in the vocabulary of liberal education and are willing to deploy it at the drop of a pin — but they don’t mean it,” he said.
Most US universities have fostered “hysteria” instead of reasoned debate on topics ranging from what he calls the “transgender movement” to climate change, he said.
Students should only go to college if they’re willing to be challenged by work that is difficult, sometimes boring, and often unsettling to their beliefs, Wood said. American colleges and universities have strayed far from this ideal in their attempt to attract students, he said, dropping course requirements that once transmitted bedrock knowledge from one generation to the next. And as colleges cater to students’ reluctance to be challenged intellectually and ideologically, he said, students have become psychologically frail.
“You don’t go to college now to get an education, you go to become whole, to be healed,” he said.
The best thing Trump and Vance could do for higher education, he said, is to refuse to continue subsidizing these institutional failures. He wants to “wean Americans away” from the federal student loan and grant system over time, and reform the college accreditation system that he believes has become too politicized. His organization has also been working for months on an audit of the federal Department of Education, which he views as bloated and ripe for aggressive cuts. Under a Kamala Harris administration, he presumed his group’s work would be irrelevant.
“But in this circumstance,” he said, “I imagine it just might prove to be a useful planning document for the new administration.”