How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The swiftness and the severity with which the Trump administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many people, not least to university presidents and faculties from Harvard to UCLA. But for conservatives, this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming. Staff writer Emma Green has been speaking with influential figures in the administration and in the larger conservative movement about why they decided to wage this battle and how they mapped it out for Trump's return to power.

0:47Trump versus Harvard, if we can boil it down to that, is nothing less than a conservative campaign to change the way private and state colleges operate. Emma Green's reporting appears in The New Yorker this week. Emma, how has the education agenda changed from the first Trump administration to the second? Because so much has changed. So for this story, I spent a lot of time talking to both administration officials who work for the president now, but also people who were in that first Trump administration. And the thing that all of them have said is that they wish they had gone farther. Their perception was that their job was to come in, change some of the stuff that Obama had done that they didn't like, put some policies in place that could make incremental progress forward.

1:36But they were coloring within the lines. Even one of these officials who I talked to who was an advisor in the first administration in the Ed Department said that the things that they were doing now in 2025 would have been unthinkable in 2017. For example. So, for example, taking on a school like Harvard aggressively to say, we believe that you have violated your federal contract with us. You've had this rampant anti-Semitism. That's a violation of federal statute, but it's also a violation of your agreement with us. We're going to freeze literally hundreds of millions of dollars. That kind of muscular approach to higher education and trying to aggressively step outside of incremental change to this idea of paradigm shift in the sector.

2:23That's the huge shift. Well, we'll get to the question of, quote unquote, rampant anti-Semitism, whether that's a reality or that was a battering ram used by the Trump administration. But tell me this, how much of what we're seeing now, would you say, is a reaction to perceived overreach on social justice issues and diversity coming out of the Biden years and before versus a real long term strategic plan on the part of Trump and his circle? I think reaction is definitely a good word for it. And that tracks with how President Trump got reelected in 2024, the sense of backlash to where our culture had gone.

3:05And I was talking to this advisor in the education department who had worked under the first Trump administration, and he spoke about living through those Biden years and watching things like, for example, Leah Thomas win the NCAA championship. The swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania. That's right, the first transgender athlete to win a women's championship. Seeing the protests after October 7th, seeing the development of DEI infrastructure, which was nudged along by the federal government, and coming to feel as though the two parties had come to this almost unbridgeable worldview. And I think that unbridgeable worldview is really important because it shows why the Trump administration has been able and willing to act this aggressively in the higher ed sphere.

3:54They see higher ed as the common theme in all of this cultural change. And they see that cultural change as being extreme, something that needs a really muscular response. A crucial person in your piece who I didn't really know much about at all is a woman named Mae Mailman, who you interviewed. And she turns out to have had a singular role in this new administration's approach to higher education. Tell me about Mae Mailman. She was a policy deputy for Stephen Miller. She left her former role in the administration at the end of the summer, although she's still advising them on the university deals.

4:30One of the things that she was responsible for coordinating was this higher education agenda. So she would take the policy directives from the Domestic Policy Council, the White House, the president, and she would make sure that there was this coordinated effort across the different agencies. There was an anti-Semitism task force with representatives from Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, Department of Education. They would report up to her, tell her what was going on. But she would also make sure that when there was going to be an action, when they were going to take on a school or take on an issue, that they were marching in lockstep.

5:07that all of the different agencies were aligned, that they were going to take actions of their own. And it created this kind of remarkable effect. It was almost like a strike force where when the administration decided to take on a particular school, they would have these series of letters or press statements or announcements that would happen, boom, boom, boom, one right after another. It was all lined up. So in a way, she is to higher education, what Stephen Miller is to immigration, or Russell vote is to the economy. Does that sound right? I think that's right. Her position is not a senior, meaning she's not the person at that senior, you know, shock calling level, but she was running the show.

5:48And this is a description I've gotten from her and from lots of allies in the administration. She, you know, tries to be modest about it, right? She's the coordinator, the implementer. But in terms of the person who was actually making the agenda actually happening on the ground, it was Mae Mailman. Tell me a little bit personally about Mae Mailman and why she came to this ideological place. So she grew up in Kansas in a pretty rural community that's pretty white. Her mom is Korean. Her dad is white, so she's biracial. And she's spoken in an interview with The New York Times about how that made her tough, how it made her really be willing to sort of hold her own.

6:26And she's kind of a do-gooder. She went to the University of Kansas, and then she went to Teach for America. and she spoke at length with me about the kind of do-gooder motivations for that. Teach for America went through a shift between my first and second year. The first year, they really were trying to help us teach. So they gave us like how to teach math and use these rhymes and do this. And then the second year, the focus was a little bit different. It was like understand racial inequity. It was like a little more feelings-ish. And I was like, well, this is a problem because I need to teach my kids math tomorrow.

7:02And so actually what I'd like to know is how to do that. She spoke a lot about how, as she described it, the victimhood thing really bothers her. This idea that she has about college in America, which is that kids are going to these schools and they're taught that they're victims. They're taught about all of the ways that structural racism or sexual harassment or gender discrimination or whatever has made people into victims. So it was interesting to me that someone from this really do-gooder background wanted to help kids in need also develop this allergic reaction, I think through experiences like Teach for America, to this idea that kids would be taught about their lack of power.

7:45In fairness, though, it sounds a little bit like a cartoon. In other words, of course it's important to learn math, but it's also important to understand the history of your own country and its strengths, its weaknesses, its inequities. Why is that incommensurable? You know, I think what she would say is that there's a culture within our education system. Here she was talking about K-12, but also in higher ed, there's a focus of certain types of ideas, certain types of analysis, and they are negative. They are trying to deconstruct things. They are probably, she would argue, anti-American. She told me American schools are mostly educating kids who like to go to riots, right?

8:32Her perception is that our education system is skewed in this way. That's not helping kids to learn how to better themselves and believe in something and, you know, fight for their country and do cool, amazing, make America great again things. They're learning something else. No one is more committed to academic freedom than conservatives because for so long, it's like, you can't say this, you can't teach this. You didn't do the pronouns, you know, like the whole thing. So we want to give power to individuals and to universities to be able to shape what they're teaching. But at the same time, when you have federal grants, you do not need to be funding racism and racial hierarchies and violence and harassment.

9:17So I think that line is do what you want to do, but we don't have to fund it.

9:28Policy analyst May Mailman, speaking with The New Yorkers, Emma Green. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

9:49This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The New Yorker has just published a major report by Emma Green called Inside the Trump Administration's Assault on Higher Education. And nearly everyone looking at higher ed these days, not least at the cost of a college degree, can agree that the system just isn't working. But we don't agree on how to fix it. Some of the most highly regarded schools are caught now in a very difficult bind. If they give in to demands from the White House concerning, say, admissions policy and curriculum, then they're giving up their independence and alienating students and faculty.

10:26But stand up to Trump and they risk losing critical funding for research, student loans, and much more. I'll continue my conversation with staff writer Emma Green.

10:40So college campuses have long been ground zero for culture wars, not just now, but in the 60s and other periods of time. What's unique about the moment that we're in right now? Why was this the moment to go after federal funding at universities? So I think it's a couple of things. October 7th splashed campus protests all over the news. These ideas about DEI and how to fix structural racism has been such a part of the cultural conversation. There's so much political salience to it. And that's paired with this other running current that is bipartisan and very widely held in America, this idea that higher education isn't that good of a deal.

11:27It's really expensive. People are under these crushing loads of debt. And often people get out of school after having worked really hard and they can't get a job that pays them a living wage. This idea that, you know, the bargain of higher ed, you go to college and you better yourself, you better your family, you better the next generation. People don't believe that that fair deal is playing out. And so what a lot of people said to me as I was reporting this story is that this sort of cultural frisson of all of the culture wars on campus gave political permission to go farther. So what you're saying, I think, in part, is that figures like Barack Obama and Joe Biden were blind to this.

12:11So I don't think it was that Obama and Biden were blind to this. In fact, I think Biden and the fact that he took on student debt as such a central part of his policymaking showed that they see the populist anger here. But that wasn't the cultural side of things. That's right. They're sort of taking on all of the discontent around higher ed from this different angle. They have different solutions, and they also don't share the analysis of the cultural solutions. It's sort of like an equal and opposite reaction, right? Biden was trying to take this on in a huge way, and Trump is now taking this on in a huge way.

12:46So I talked to this guy, James Cavall, who was an undersecretary at the Department of Education under President Biden, but he'd also worked in the Obama administration and the Clinton administration. He's just a Democrat policy guy through and through. And he was the person in charge of implementing the structural reforms in the Biden administration. So a lot of their projects to eliminate student debt, for example, were under James Cavall. So I met him this summer, and, you know, the Trump agenda on higher ed has been unfolding. And he was very introspective because he was willing to say, I think the Biden administration did some things that, you know, didn't fully recognize what was happening in this moment.

13:35And I am, you know, reflecting on this populist anger that has been undermining higher education. We need to recognize that we shouldn't be making loans to people who are unlikely to be able to repay them. It's not doing someone a favor. Even if your goal is creating opportunity for a low-income student or student of color, or helping people pursue a career in the arts or go to divinity school, the right way to finance that is not a loan the student cannot afford to repay. So I think it is a step forward that we now have agreement across the parties on that. Recently, we had Robbie George on, who's a conservative political scientist and very interested in religion and philosophy.

14:24I've interviewed him many times. At Princeton. And when he said when he got to Princeton, he was the only, as you put it, out conservative. And he said, now there are 23. In other words, it reflected some self-awareness that there was something off. It's not a new problem, right? People have been talking about the lack of ideological diversity on campus for a really long time. And I don't think people who challenge that status quo, especially at the elite level, I don't think they're making it up. I think what Robbie George said is real, that, you know, it's kind of like you're the one conservative that they keep over as a pet in the corner.

15:07The giraffe. That's right. They make sure they have you to show that they have you. But let me ask you this. It's very interesting to me that this has to be most prevalent and most pronounced in the area of studies that is diminishing at a rate that's extraordinary. I'm talking about the humanities. When I was in university, which admittedly was some time ago, 40-odd percent of the majors were in the humanities. Now at that same place, it's a fraction of that. So A, did that happen because people feel like they can get better jobs coming out of the university with STEM? Or are people reacting to this ideological imbalance?

15:47Wow, that's like a, you know, at least 10 ,000 more words that I have to write for you, David. So give me the assignment. But I think what I was describing earlier about this potent mixture that we have in the culture right now, where there are these political, cultural clashes centered on campuses, paired with populist discontent about how hard it is to get ahead and how higher ed isn't helping people get ahead. I think there's probably an echo of that here, right, which is there's a perception that if you're going to go to college, well, at least you might as well get an engineering degree because what are you going to do with an English major, right?

16:26Something my parents ask me roughly once a week. And here you are, David. You did well for yourself. You proved them wrong. A complete piece of luck. You know, I think there's that sort of usefulness aspect, wanting to actually game the system and get ahead. In terms of the cultural piece, though, I think we're in this really unsettled moment about what the humanities as a sort of set of disciplines can do about campuses being biased, about, you know, them only presenting very particular points of view and the university not being a place where these great clashes of ideas can happen. I think it's really unsettled how universities will respond to that and what kind of structures they'll put in place to try to answer that.

17:15What makes this curious to me, I mean the Trump administration's policy, is that they're doing many things at once. But one of the big things is that they're slashing budgets. They're making sweeping cuts at universities. And where is it most pronounced? In the departments that have nothing to do with what we're talking about. The medical school, the engineering school, computer science. That's where the real budgets are. They're not in the classics department. It's not in gender studies. So how sincere is this attack, or is it just a way to cut elites down to size? They care about prestige, which this certainly has been a hard thing for prestige, but also, and especially, they care about money.

18:00And that's where the leverage was, was the science money. There seems to be an element of vengeance to it. Some of that is coming from a kind of different motivation within the administration, which is DOGE. They mostly did keyword searches and they found, you know, grants for things that they thought were woke and canceled those grants. Some grants have been canceled through the administration trying to change universities or influence universities to comply with what they see as federal law. The Trump administration is offering funding advantages to schools that adopt their conservative priorities, among them prohibiting consideration of gender or race for admissions, scholarships or programming and the capping of international enrollment.

18:44Do you think many colleges and universities will take them up on this? Hard to say because it's playing out right now. They just unveiled this at the beginning of October and they selected a handful of schools to consider this compact on excellence in higher education. What does that mean? The compact is this 10-page letter that they sent out, and they basically say, if you agree to not use race in admissions, if you agree to have ideological diversity, institutional neutrality, all of these different things that matter to them, we will give you preferred access to federal funds. It's the carrot to the carrot and stick, arguably.

19:22And the idea is that they're trying to incentivize universities to sign on to this vision culturally of what they should be like, the kinds of standards they should uphold in order to get access to the federal funds that they need to be competitive, to do research, to advance scientific agenda. So there's a lot of conversation happening right now about what these universities are going to do. There have been strong statements by, for example, organizations that represent professors against signing on to any such compact. And the concern is that it's basically manipulation, that it's the federal government trying to tell these independent institutions how to pursue truth and pursue knowledge.

20:05It would limit their academic freedom. I think what's been interesting about the Trump higher ed assault is that they've keyed in on this fact that universities take the money. They take hundreds of millions of dollars, not just for federal contracts, but also federal student aid. And this is their business model. And there's been this kind of assumption that they wouldn't have to really be held to account for it. Especially ones with gigantic endowments. Yes. Let's hear more from your interview with James Kvall on that. You cannot build a higher education system that delivers more value to students by raising the cost of student loans and slashing funding for universities and, you know, putting them under assault from all different kinds of financial resources.

20:56So there is a blueprint for strengthening universities that's happening at many public colleges and universities in red and blue states that involves investing in helping all students succeed and connecting programs more closely to careers and finding new sources of data that you can use to close the gap between campus and workplaces. That's not what they're doing. So one side of the argument is look at Columbia, look at this one and that one, they're folding. They're folding like cheap suits, they're knuckling under, they're taking the knee, all the phrases that we hear all the time. It seems to me that they're a lot more than just that, that even Harvard, which kind of self-admiringly described itself in courageous terms, is now also making its arrangements with the federal government.

21:51is the picture more uniform than we might have thought six months ago? I think that any university president understands realistically that if they are an R1 institution that's getting significant federal funds for research, that they have to play ball because their business model and their research depends on it. And I think that kind of speaks to the efficacy and the insight of the Trump higher ed agenda, which is you can make them come to the table. You, as Mae Mailman told me, conservatives have a seat at the table now and Harvard has to come sit. After all your reporting about this, and you've been reporting about this not just for this piece, but for quite a long time, what do you think the end game of the conservative movement is when it comes to higher education?

22:42At what point do they feel mission accomplished? I think the goal is culture change. And what's interesting to me, this is something I wrote about in this piece, but I've been reflecting on throughout my reporting, is the shifted relationship to federal power. conservatives learning to stop worrying and love federal power, the idea that they're in charge of the government, they can do stuff. And they want to do stuff and they want to use the levers that are available to them to make change. There's a recognition among the people that I interviewed that the administration cannot come in and script to universities, this is what you will teach and this is the degrees that you will offer and just script it from top to bottom.

23:30First of all, that would be not legally possible. And it also, I think in some ways, violates core instincts that conservatives have around academic freedom because a lot of these people have been on elite campuses and had the experience of being told that, you know, their views weren't acceptable and, you know, been pushed around intellectually. A lot of them have a reflexive rejection of that. But I also think there's this other impulse, which is to say, okay, we're in charge. We think higher ed is a problem. We think the culture of higher ed is a bigger problem for the American populace and American culture than just the campuses.

24:05We're going to try to change this. We've mentioned a number of times along the way in this discussion about anti-Semitism. And in the administration, it seems to me it's a given that anti-Semitism is enormous and prevalent on campus. what of the argument that, of course, there are anti-Semites at a university, there are anti-Semites at a gas station, there are anti-Semites in society. And there's probably no doubt that anti-Semitism has been exacerbated in recent years. But this also comes at a time, for the last two years, there have been demonstrations on college campuses about the Middle East, the war in Gaza, and that an enormous number of the demonstrators, I would argue the great majority of them, were not anti-Semites, but rather they were outraged about the way this war was waged.

25:03There's a difference. And I am quite concerned, to put it mildly, that this is being used as a cudgel on campus. I think some of it is an earnest concern for what are clearly some instances of Jewish students facing harassment on their campuses. Jewish students being blocked from accessing their classrooms or libraries. Jewish students not being able to cross through a certain part of the campus because it's a Jewish exclusion zone. These things, I think, are issues of real concern. And I think there are people in the administration who see those as illegal. Legitimately so. Yes. And they want campuses to change it.

25:45Okay. I think that's one piece. I think clearly there is also this impossible to define boundary between what is anti-Semitism and what is anti-Zionism or anti-Israel sentiment or whatever. they see a really strong and expansive definition of anti-Semitism, which is to say, if you are critiquing or deconstructing the colonial nature of Israel or whatever it is— That by nature is anti-Semitic. That by nature is anti-Semitic. Okay, so a lot of people disagree with that, right? A lot of people agree with that and a lot of people disagree with that. It's a very contested area. And I think there is an argument then by critics who would say, actually, you know, a lot of this is just using the Jews.

26:36It's just using the Jews to crack down on campuses that you hate. And, you know, there's craziness that happened after October 7th. You were very politically opportunistic and are using that now to your advantage to try to bring universities to heal. Let me ask you this. Donald Trump presumably is only going to be president for another few years. Presumably. You want to expletate on that, David? And it is entirely possible, it's entirely possible that there may be a political pivot ahead of us. A Democrat might be elected. Does the war just go in a different direction? I think Democrats would say, and a lot of the people I interviewed would say, we aren't like them.

27:25What they're doing is an abuse of power. We may have a strong agenda, but, you know, at least we follow the law. I don't think anybody on either side is going to cop to coloring outside of the lines in order to aggressively pursue their agenda. But what I will say is that I think we're in this really interesting moment where there's a lot of curiosity on both sides about executive power and being able to forcefully use the presidency to pursue your agenda without the inconvenience of going to Congress. And I don't foresee without my crystal ball that we're going to be in any less interesting or aggressive times no matter who becomes president after Trump.