The detention of Mahmoud Khalil signals a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s promise to crack down on campus dissent. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to punish colleges and universities that allowed what he characterized as “illegal protests” against Israel’s conduct in Gaza, singling out Columbia University for special opprobrium. His administration followed up on that threat on Friday by canceling roughly $400 million in grants and contracts. Combined with an earlier interruption of funds from the National Institute of Health, or NIH, and the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, that affected research centers and medical schools at colleges and universities across the nation, the Trump administration’s actions on Friday meant that the loss in funding for the Manhattan-based Ivy could total as much as $1.5 billion.
Last Friday, in the hopes of forestalling these reprisals, Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong asserted in a statement that “Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus.… This is our number one priority.” Less than 24 hours later, Columbia demonstrated just how much it prioritized getting back into the good graces of President Trump—to say nothing of an influential group of antagonistic alumni—when it allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, into a university-owned residence to take Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil into custody. To reiterate: Columbia University invited enforcers handpicked by ICE’s leader, the controversial Tom Homan, onto its private property to abduct someone in retaliation for a constitutionally protected act of political protest—a stark contrast to how other civic leaders have treated prospective ICE incursions.
While these deplorable actions have generated outrage and protest, defunding Columbia is part of a coordinated plan to stifle the independence of colleges and universities across the nation. Less discussed nationally is how the cuts at NIH and HHS will undermine important regional institutions like the University of Alabama at Birmingham. While the students there did not engage in widespread protests against the Israeli state’s conduct that some misconstrued as antisemitic, and while Alabama is a deep-red state that has elected two sycophantic MAGA senators, this did not stop UAB from suffering projected cuts that threaten to upend employment in the region.
If the cuts stand, UAB will be collateral damage in the larger MAGA project to reshape the United States in the image of Victor Orbán’s Hungary, where there are no independent institutions capable of fomenting dissent through criticism or demonstration. To this end, Linda McMahon, newly confirmed to lead the Education Department, announced a list of 60 schools that, like Columbia, were under investigation for antisemitism and might lose federal funding as a result. But the colleges and universities included on the list—and the ones that are rather conspicuously missing—give the game away: The list of colleges and universities currently under investigation for antisemitism reveals that the Trump administration’s true motivation is to identify institutions receptive to bullying.
UCLA, San Francisco State, George Washington University (or GWU), and Wesleyan are all conspicuously missing from the list of colleges and universities under investigation by the Department of Education. This despite the well-reported clashes at UCLA between student protesters and supporters of Israel in May; despite San Francisco State being the epicenter for citywide demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza and recently divesting from three firms associated with human rights violations; despite GWU hosting protests on its downtown campus that included students and faculty from nearly all the colleges in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area at a park just steps from the White House; despite Wesleyan president Michael Roth’s refusal to disband student encampments during the spring of 2024 and his vociferous defense of academic freedom in recent weeks.
Contrasting the craven behavior of some of the institutions on this list of 60—with the UNC system and Ohio State University two notably spineless examples—with those omitted from the DOE’s list makes it clear that Trump, McMahon, and Homan are looking for cowards that they can bully; for institutions whose first instinct is to apologize and comply rather than defending themselves and their students in the public square.
Like the federal bureaucracy—which is also currently under attack—colleges and universities have traditionally been insulated from the tyranny of the market. This means that, despite the fervent desires of ideologues, colleges and universities have largely been left to pursue their research and educational missions as they see fit, even as the GOP has sought ways to cut their funding. The combination of relative freedom and declining federal and state support led to the corporatization of colleges and universities (and ballooning student debt). But the corporate university has come to replace or augment the functions of the federal and state government across the nation, leading to stability and even wealth in unlikely places like Boise, Idaho, and Ashville, North Carolina, which are dominated by first-rate state universities.
The flourishing of these regional institutions has created a higher-education infrastructure that remains highly resistant to political change, for better or for worse. While many academics—including yours truly—push for greater state and federal investment in U.S. education rather than military and policing budgets, one only has to look at the slow-motion collapse currently underway in the United Kingdom and the international demand for seats here to understand the underlying strength of the—underfunded and overly cautious—colleges and universities in the U.S.
It’s precisely this economic independence—not the lofty and abstract ideas of academic freedom but the indispensable fact that colleges such as UAB and UNC Ashville and Boise State have become the sole economic engines in their regions—that Trump and his acolytes want to curtail. The MAGA movement demands the supplication of the corporate university, and the spineless capitulation of not only Columbia but most of the 60 schools on the Department of Education list show that they are well on their way to achieving this goal. But there’s a clear lesson for those who want to emerge from this era intact: Supplication to Trump will not save you.
