August is upon us, and the high school class of 2025 is busy putting together “inspo boards” to visualize how their dorm-room comforter will coordinate with the blue-neon sign that says “Stay Wild” from Dormify.com. But the future policy makers and politicians among them may have paused in their happy, summer-before-college spree to notice that the landscape of higher education has shifted radically and frighteningly under their feet.
Since January, so much has become uncertain for the future college graduates of 2029 — most notably, how they will fund their education and what classes they may or may not be permitted to take.
The radical rightists in the executive branch are using the leverage of funding cuts to demand changes to academic programs that, on an ideological basis, it deems impure. That’s just for starters. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is poking its nose deep into the admissions departments. As seen at the University of Virginia, the D.O.J. is issuing sweeping edicts in pursuit of control over who gets to come to campus. According to the website Insider Higher Ed and other sources, the D.O.J. has recently asked U.V.A. to produce “all admissions data for the past five academic years” as well as “any and all relevant documents about your policies and procedures relating to scholarships, financial assistance, or other benefits programs.”
It should be noted that the ideological-purge method of using keyword searches to identify scholarships that are unacceptable in the eyes of the Trump administration includes keywords pertaining to racial identity but not keywords pertaining to other identity groups, such as, say, an award to students of Italian heritage from the Knights of Columbus. Down in Chapel Hill, something called the Oversight Project, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation, is using the courts to investigate which classes at the University of North Carolina may mention “racial equity,” “implicit bias,” and even “sexuality” in their course-catalog descriptions.
Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Northwestern, U.V.A., and other pillars of American academic greatness — of groundbreaking scientific and medical research — have been in the bull’s-eye. Duke University apparently is next.
The Big, Beautiful Bill is, meanwhile, slicing and dicing funding sources for the students themselves, flipping the switch on college loans, capping federal funding for postgraduate studies, and even changing the way low-income students access health care.
With all that’s happening in the world, from famine in Gaza to shutdowns in Washington, D.C., those readers who don’t happen to be college kids or the parents of college kids may have missed just how broad the attack on American higher education is right now, but it’s need-to-know for all Americans: The federal government is going where it has never gone before. To do all this in the name of “academic freedom” is Orwellian in the extreme. Has “1984” been purged yet from the syllabi?