The Trump Administration Takes On Higher Ed

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Jeepa Shivaram.

I cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

And joining us on the show today is NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo.

Welcome back to the podcast, Sequoia.

Thanks for having me.

All right.

So today on the show, we're getting into the Trump administration's fight with the nation's top universities.

In the last couple of weeks, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and Duke universities, among others, have all been in the news over these conflicts.

So Sequoia, what is at the center of these conflicts?

So at the center of many of these disputes, though not all, is the alleged mistreatment of Jewish students at these elite colleges and the Trump administration withholding funds or freezing funds in response to that treatment.

In many cases, the Trump administration is saying that these schools failed to foster a safe environment for Jewish students during the protests over the war in Gaza.

So you'll see a lot of the disputes citing anti-Semitism as a reason for the investigations, but it's definitely not just anti-Semitism.

You can look at somewhere like Duke, for instance, where that isn't mentioned at all in the freezing of their funding.

Instead, it's talking about preferential treatment in hiring based on race.

Or at many schools, the administration is investigating admissions practices based on race, which isn't something unusual for colleges.

The Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education is pretty much there to investigate complaints like this, but there is a protocol for these investigations.

There are steps that you have to follow legally in order to solve the complaints.

And the very last step is that you can withhold funding.

And they typically don't.

The Trump administration is skipping all that and withholding funding first.

And even when all the schools are saying we haven't done anything wrong, they are withholding funding and then launching investigations.

And that's where you see someone like Harvard taking this to court saying they are acting in an illegal way, while others are just biting the bullet in some ways and saying, like, let's get this money back and let's just settle.

Okay, got it.

And so these settlements, I mean, what do they look like?

What have you been seeing with that?

So the one that's made the biggest headlines is definitely Columbia.

It's a lot of money.

They paid $220 million to the federal government, and they agreed to dissolve existing DEI programs and also

really bring in a lot of resources to combat anti-Semitism, including a school-wide anti-Semitism training.

But maybe the most controversial part of that settlement was their agreement to a resolution monitor.

So that will be someone who's a third party.

They're not part of the government or part of Columbia.

But they're going to be coming into Columbia to make sure that the school sticks to this agreement.

And many people are worried about what that caveat means for academic freedom because Columbia is a really rich university.

They're able to kind of broker this deal.

But if you put up that outside monitor is something that the government's allowed to put into schools, that gets a lot of people worried.

Okay, so you mentioned Duke University.

What did that situation look like?

At Duke, there was a letter that went out a few days ago from the Education Department and also from Health and Human Services that was looking at both Duke Health as well as Duke Law Review and how they're alleging preferential treatment in hiring and sometimes in admissions.

And Duke is the most recent one to receive a letter like that.

Okay, but there's kind of a different situation with Brown.

Talk to me about how that unfolded.

Just yesterday, actually, Brown announced a settlement.

This has been a a school that has been found of no wrongdoing, and they were also up against those allegations of admissions and hiring practices under Title VI, but the administration found nothing.

And so they did settle.

And it's a little bit different.

They're paying $50 million over 10 years for professional development in Rhode Island.

So they're not paying anything to the federal government, but there is money going out.

And there's a few other demands.

I mean, they have to have a third-party campus climate survey.

And there's no oversight like there is at Columbia, but this was still a university settling with the administration when there was no wrongdoing found.

Aaron Powell, yeah, that's interesting.

Domenico, I mean, talk me through some of the politics that are at play here.

This isn't happening in isolation.

Aaron Powell, no, and this is part of what Trump ran on in 2024.

Really, he was fueled by the culture war and culture war ideology.

So he's going after these universities, which have long been punching bags for Republican rhetoric, Past campaigns, you've heard lots of candidates saying things like, this must have been an idea cooked up in the Harvard faculty lounge.

And that was always a big piece of it.

And, you know, I mean, we should say there were some very real issues on some campuses, you know, where Jewish students didn't feel comfortable or protected.

But what we're seeing with the Trump administration is a redefinition of civil rights.

It's often now when you see, oh, there was a civil rights complaint that was filed, it really doesn't have to do with the traditionally marginalized or discriminated against groups.

It more often than not has to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion, and really what they see as anti-white bias.

And I mean, Sekoya, I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about the response that students are feeling and faculty are feeling as these lawsuits kind of play out.

And Dominico, I also am curious how the public has been responding to this from a political perspective.

Yeah, you're going to see these schools frame them as successes, right?

Because it means that the investigation is over and that the funding is released.

But when you start talking to people about what it means, there's definitely a lot of trepidation, especially from academics, especially from legal scholars who just see,

like I said, like Harvard is in court arguing that

the Office of Civil Rights has not followed correct protocol and they have a really good legal argument there.

So when you're seeing schools desperate enough to kind of jump over that and say, let's just finish this and get it done, there's a lot of feelings from the staff and from the students.

And with Brown's announcement yesterday, they had an entire section that was like, why did Brown settle?

And they went through every single reason.

Because I think that they knew, seeing what happened with Columbia, they knew that people were going to be nervous about something like this.

You know, there is a sense when you talk about public opinion.

that the Trump administration is going too far on a lot of different things.

But there's huge splits, obviously, by political party, which, you know, I feel like we can talk about with every single thing that the Trump administration does, because there was a poll, for example, in May from the Associated Press and NRRC that found 56% of people disapproved of how Trump was handling issues related to colleges, but 83% of Republicans approved of Trump's approach.

Half of them wanted to withhold funding from universities.

Strong majorities, though, of Democrats, as well as two-thirds of Independents, said that they disapproved of how Trump was handling these things.

All right, we're going to take a quick break there, and we'll be back in a moment.

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And we're back.

Sequoya, we've been talking about investigations at a few private universities, right?

Columbia, Brown, Duke, et cetera.

But the administration has also been investigating public schools across the country and these public colleges.

And give us a sense of what's playing out there and is it similar?

Yeah, so back in March, actually, the administration released a list of 45 schools, the majority of which were public universities.

And public universities just have a lot more to lose.

We saw a kind of high-profile version of this a few weeks ago with the University of Virginia, where the president stepped down after mounting pressure from one of these investigations.

And that was a really powerful message to send to a lot of colleges.

I think we hear the most about these private schools because, number one, they have the money to fight and they have the resources to kind of get through a few months without this federal funding, but public universities, it's a totally different ballgame.

And they sometimes don't even have the money to pay out a settlement.

So they're a lot more at the whim of the federal government.

Aaron Powell, Dominico, I mean, you mentioned this earlier, right, that Republicans have for a long time criticized liberal elite universities, the chatter that's happening in the Harvard Faculty Lounge, et cetera, et cetera.

But in the context of this, especially when you consider Trump's first term versus now, is what they're doing new?

Well, I think a lot of it is new.

I mean, before it was often just talk.

You know, Trump, though, using federal money as leverage to get what his administration wants is very new.

I mean, you know, there's been a lot of talk, you know, with Republicans feeling irked that the most elite schools in the country they feel push kids or pressure them to be more liberal and they want access to those schools and they don't want those schools turning out kids who they feel are never going to be conservative.

But this use of government funds for things that are totally unrelated sometimes, you know, pressuring schools, you know, that are taking money for medical research and the like, you know, to say if you don't change your DEI policies, then we're going to withhold those funds.

That's not really something that any previous administration has been willing to try and go do.

Yeah.

Sequoya, I mean, let's talk about how this affects students, right?

For students who are currently attending these schools, undergrads and graduate students, I mean, what does this really mean for them?

It's a great question.

We don't totally know the answer yet, but just in terms of the way these settlements are structured so far, it looks like undergrads would likely have little interaction with changes other than like if you're at Columbia and you'll now have to undergo a school-wide anti-Semitism training.

There are things like that that could impact your day-to-day.

For grad students, it's a little bit more complicated.

There's a lot of PhDs whose funding is tied up in these fights, and it just puts academia academia in an unstable place, which is difficult to then attract students.

Aaron Powell, and I have to say, you know, what they're doing on universities and colleges isn't in a vacuum.

You know, I mean, this is part of an ideological push by the Trump administration to go after the pillars of American society, the institutions that they feel have made things socially more liberal than the administration wants to see it.

So this is a really multi-pronged attack on these places.

Aaron Trevor Barrett, and a lot of this funding, it's not going to what you would think of when they're citing it as like an attack on liberal-leaning universities.

A lot of this is like cancer research.

A lot of this is long-term trials for little kids.

Like there are real people who are being caught up in this far past just the students.

Yeah.

All right, we're going to leave it there for today.

Sequoia Carrillo, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

I'm Deepa Shivaram.

I cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Matinaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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