It’s Bigger Than Harvard

The recent wave of attacks on higher education may feel like an unprecedented crisis. But they are a generation in the making. And if we want to protect the truth, and the institutions that uphold it, we must understand the harvest we are reaping. 

In 1968, Nixon faced an uncomfortable reality: college students and civil rights activists were well-organized, vocal, and unflinching in their opposition to his presidency. His campaign’s response was calculated: delegitimize the institutions that gave these movements power. That included universities. 

One tactic was to associate activists with criminality. As Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman later explained: 

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities… We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The broader aim was to erode the moral authority of those who opposed him. They were indifferent to the damage, including the devastating impact of the War on Drugs, one of the key components of this strategy. They only cared about maintaining political power.   

Fast forward to today, and the echoes of Nixon’s strategy to undermine his opposition, regardless of the social cost, are unmistakable in the relentless attacks on higher education under Trump.

Since returning to office in 2025, the Trump administration has launched a sustained assault on universities. Within weeks of taking office, the Department of Education threatened universities that refused to eliminate DEI programs. Columbia faced the loss of $400 million in federal grants. The University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maine, and eventually Harvard, all became targets, with Harvard facing the loss of $8.9 billion in federal grants and contracts. Since then, nearly every week has seen new dust ups between the administration and elite universities, threatening their non-profit status and even attempting to ban international student visas. The rhetoric around Harvard in particular turned petty with Harvard correcting the grammar of a directive from the administration and conservative talking heads asking aghast why Harvard needs a federal handout but does not expect to comply with federal orders.

But these headline skirmishes are smoke. The fire is in the fine print. 

Buried in the administration’s large, ugly budget legislation is a provision that would raise the tax on incomes from university endowments from 1.4% to as much as 21% for the nation’s strongest universities. At places like Yale College, where I chair the African-American Studies department, endowment income accounts for two-thirds of our operating budget. For most institutions, even a 15% budget cut would mean eliminating entire units, slashing student aid, and freezing research initiatives.. 

This is not about fiscal responsibility. It is about control. 

I say this not only as a scholar, but as someone who straddles both the academic world and the nonprofit sector. I am a professor at Yale, where the pursuit of evidence-based research is paramount. I also lead the Center for Policing Equity, a research nonprofit that partners with communities, law enforcement, and policymakers to address systemic racism in public safety. Both depend on independent knowledge. And both are vulnerable to the erosion of truth. 

Universities across the country stand to lose billions in endowment income, resources that support everything from cancer research to first-generation scholarships. According to the Tax Foundation, the tax hike on endowment investment income would extract as much as $70 billion from higher education over the next ten years, decimating one of the key engines that sustain scientific research—and a global competitive advantage that has kept the nation “great” in the eyes of the world and ourselves. 

The loss of this global advantage also has global consequences. The U.S. is the world leader in scientific output being home to more than 400 research universities. That is not an accident. It is the result of a deliberate investment ecosystem that marries tuition, alumni giving, and endowment income to produce the infrastructure necessary for science with federal grant dollars that supercharges the best scientific ideas, teams, and opportunities. Undermining that ecosystem does not just hurt students and faculty, it risks ceding leadership in cancer research, quantum computing, biotechnology, and climate science to countries willing to fund the future.  

What is happening is not the byproduct of some populist concern about academic elitism or novel urgency about anti-Semitism. It is part of a generation’s long attack on higher-education as a breeding ground for political opposition to conservatives that has seen the public legitimacy of universities plunge from 57% a decade ago to 36% in 2023, according to Gallup polls. How much further might it dip if—stripped of the economic stability and international talent that made us the envy of our peers—we no longer produce the innovations that shape the future?

The stakes are not only the U.S.’s standing on the global stage or our engines of innovation, however, but the ability to tell the truth. A rounding error in the broader university budget, historians and social scientists often have the seemingly impossible job of keeping our political conversations honest over the long haul. As I have written elsewhere, this would seem to be an added benefit for the current occupant of the White House. For those who care about our nation’s ability to govern itself, however, it may be the most consequential casualty of the assault on higher education.

What, then, are we to do while we wait for courts to staunch the bleeding and universities to muster their courage? And by, “we,” I mean more than faculty and students. There is a role for all of us to play to make the end of U.S. higher education as difficult to achieve as possible.

If we want truth to endure, we need a proactive strategy, one that does not just protect our institutions, but strengthens the ecosystem around them. . Some modest suggestions:

We must know our history. If the current assault on colleges and universities sprung anew in this moment as a response to concerns about immigration or protests, it would not be possible to make sense of the eagerness with which the current administration appears to be weakening our nations’ strongest colleges and universities. For journalists and everyday people, knowing that this moment was generations in the making—and explicitly about partisan politics—helps keep the focus on what is going on and what is a distraction.

We must build parallel infrastructure. In the short term, we will lose ground. Philanthropy, tech, and nonprofits can step in, providing crucial support for research facilities, data storage, and infrastructure. By creating deeper networks of support for universities, we may be able to maintain these vital institutions even under assault. 

We must strengthen civic infrastructure. We need to fortify the broader ecosystem that allows science, justice, and democracy to thrive. Truth must have multiple strongholds, whether inside universities or outside them, so that science and democracy can flourish regardless of who occupies the White House. Nonprofits, while also vulnerable, are less dependent on federal funds and more adaptable in building broader support. With investment, they can generate robust research and serve as trusted sources of public insight, especially in times of crisis. 

We must shift the narrative. Higher education must rebuild trust. That means telling a better story, one that reaffirms universities are not isolated ivory towers, but engines of knowledge, opportunity, and national progress. 

If we do all of this, there will still be loss. But we will not have stood by while the truth was buried under the weight of political spite. We will not have wasted our energies chasing distractions while those who benefit from the country moving backwards celebrate. And, most importantly of all, we may have a chance of preserving what makes the nation’s education system—and so much of the nation itself—a light to the world.