Since Donald Trump was inaugurated, his administration has announced cut after cut to federal funding for education and research in the United States, affecting education programs from early childhood literacy efforts to major research institutions. These cuts are sabotaging the education of US citizens and residents, reducing the country’s capacity for education and knowledge production in everything from math to languages to history to the sciences.
Trump’s ire has been particularly focused on higher education, with massive reductions in federal grants to major research universities like Columbia University and MIT. These cuts are already impacting higher ed, with many major institutions rescinding offers of PhD admission from students they’d already accepted and others putting a moratorium on all hiring of any kind. New rules and changes are being announced constantly, part of the Trump administration’s strategy to “flood the zone” with so much noise and volatility that producing a coherent narrative feels near-impossible.
We can in fact make sense of these moves, however. Just as many of Trump’s other plans were on full display in Project 2025, his goals for higher ed are following a clear pattern. They’re an accelerated version of what happened in Hungary when the American right’s favorite European strongman, Viktor Orbán, came to power. In fact, this program has already been partly carried out in Florida, where the state government went after its New College. Trump is now bringing these tactics to the national stage.
The fall…
Auteur: Craig Johnson
