For four generations now, the university has been central to the United States’ prosperity and power. Universities played a decisive role in helping the country win World War II—including the place where I teach, Columbia, which was integral in advancing the science involved in nuclear fission and the development of the atomic bomb.
Since then, universities have been the setting for the birth of the internet, as well as breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals, molecular biology, engineering, and computer science—to name a few of the sectors that have shaped what was once widely known as the American Century.
Universities have not just advanced the sciences. U.S. excellence in higher education has also been a prime magnet in attracting immigrants. Arguably more important than international students are the millions of parents who have come to the United States committed to hard work and sacrifice so that their children can climb the unique ladder of upward mobility that a U.S. degree has offered one generation after another.
Even that does not cover everything. As I suggested in a previous column, universities have been central to defining the United States in cultural terms: They have advanced notions of the rule of law, equality, and inclusiveness; worked as tireless engines of historical self-examination, holding a mirror up to society like no other U.S. institution; and fostered literature and cinema, among other arts.
Given these realities, the question of what U.S. President Donald Trump’s aims are in attacking the funding and independence of universities should be a matter of universal concern.
Trump’s main justification for his administration’s series of hostile measures against universities is his claim that they have been unacceptably slow and weak in combating antisemitism on their campuses. Early on, the administration used this claim to cudgel Columbia by canceling $400 million in federal funding and refusing to consider restoring that money unless the university undertakes a series of deeply intrusive and deliberately divisive measures involving both campus policing and academic governance.
This quickly revived an atmosphere of crisis at Columbia, whose administration was plunged into turmoil by frequent campus demonstrations during earlier phases of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed around 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals. More than 50,000 Palestinians have died as a result of the Israeli attacks on Gaza that have followed.
Columbia’s former president, Minouche Shafik, whom faculty widely viewed as inept, resigned last August after only 13 months on the job. Last week, after making several substantive and controversial concessions to the Trump administration, her interim successor also resigned. Now, the institution is in the hands of another temporary leader.
With a victory over Columbia seemingly in hand, the Trump administration has predictably expanded its target list, threatening funding to a growing list of universities. So far, these have included Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, and—the ultimate prize—Harvard, the country’s oldest, richest, and most prestigious university. Harvard’s name is virtually synonymous with the U.S. reputation for educational excellence. Now, it is scrambling to prevent the loss of $9 billion in federal funds.
What is really going on here? It beggars belief that antisemitism—which has a long and ugly history at Columbia and, indeed, in the story of the United States—is the real motive. As a professor at Columbia, I do not believe that my university has been overrun by antisemitism or that it is the site of a major crisis involving this loathsome kind of hatred. But this is a subjective judgment.
This does not amount to saying that no Jewish students have ever been insulted, felt uncomfortable, or, in rarer instances, found themselves the victims of aggression on the basis of their identity. Of course, no amount of the latter is tolerable, but as an African American, I feel the need to remind readers that identity-based antagonism permeates society and always has. The solution is not turning our campuses into police zones, banning demonstrations, or overzealously restricting speech.
The reasons to distrust Trump’s motives, however, lie elsewhere. Combating antisemitism is a worthy cause, but just look at who is raising this banner. Last month, Trump made the preposterous and offensive claim that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore.” This has nothing to do with Schumer’s ancestry, but with his political opposition to Trump. That is a real giveaway.
In reality, Trump’s supposed campaign against antisemitism is all politics. He has used accusations of antisemitism to attack universities, a longtime target of his, precisely because of the charge’s potency. Wielded well, it is an almost unrecoverable accusation.
Never known for consistency or carefulness, though, Trump has left clues everywhere that his true motives lie elsewhere: He is seeking to destroy the sources of institutional, intellectual, and cultural resistance to his political program.
Remember that in January, Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, publicly performed what many people took to be a modified Nazi salute, which he later made light of. Musk has a record of making remarks that seem to absolve Adolf Hitler for the death of millions of Jews in the Holocaust and to call for Germany to “move beyond” Nazi guilt. Strange, then, that Trump, who has relied so deeply on Musk, should believe that antisemitism is a problem so grave that the destruction of U.S. higher education is required to eradicate it.
More broadly, Trump’s record in his second term has relied on hoisting bogeymen to attack policies and groups of people that his movement has long dreamed of combating.
Trump has planted the idea that the United States is overrun not only with migrants, but also with murderers, rapists, and escapees from foreign prisons and mental asylums, to justify a sweeping and opaque deportation program that makes a mockery of due process. He has also used the claim that diversity programs have weakened the country’s military and air traffic control system, among other sectors, as an excuse to roll back federal measures that seek to promote civil rights and racial and gender-based inclusivity.
Likewise, the grotesque exaggerations about government waste and fraud made by Musk and others in the Trump realm are being used to ravage the country’s civil service and imperil its social security system. Because the latter was such a bedrock of the political compact during the American Century, making changes to it requires some of the biggest lies—including the whopper that there may be tens of millions of dead people born more than 100 years ago who are receiving retirement benefits.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has worked steadfastly to punish longtime friends and undermine alliances that have been foundational to Washington’s prosperity and security, imposing high and arbitrary tariffs while griping that they are ripping off the country—a claim undermined by the United States’ world-leading wealth.
This demolition of the U.S. government has functioned almost entirely on the basis of misdirection. There has been no disclosure of genuine motives. Trump’s frequent campaign-season denials that he had any connection with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for his second term, should stand as sufficient warning of the degree of deviousness involved, given how closely the president has hewed to its program while in office.
The battering of universities is of a piece with this. Trump and the people committed to advancing his program simply see higher education as standing in their way. Antisemitism on campus is not entirely a fiction, but its elevation to the central crisis of U.S. higher education is. And that narrative should be seen for what it really is: a way to obscure a political program that remains dangerous and undisclosed.