How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

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The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

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🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

The swiftness and severity with which the Trump Administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many, not least university presidents and faculties from Harvard to U.C.L.A. But for conservatives this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming. The staff writer Emma Green has been speaking with influential figures in the current Administration as well as in the larger conservative movement about how they mapped out this battle for Donald Trump’s return to power. “There’s a recognition among the people that I interviewed,” Green tells David Remnick, “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. First 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 élite campuses and had the experience of being told that their views weren’t acceptable.” Green also speaks with James Kvaal, an education official who served in both the Biden and Obama Administrations, and May Mailman, a conservative education-policy activist who worked in the Trump White House and coördinated its attacks against universities. “When you have federal grants, you do not need to be funding racism and racial hierarchies and violence and harassment,” Mailman told Green. “I think that line is: do what you wanna do, but we don’t want to have to fund it.”

Emma Green’s “Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education” was published on October 13, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the political scene. I'm David Remnick.
0:08.3	Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:16.1	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:22.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The swiftness and the severity with which
0:30.6	the Trump administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many
0:36.3	people, not least to university presidents and faculties
0:39.9	from Harvard to UCLA.
0:43.0	But for conservatives, this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming.
0:48.5	Staff writer Emma Green has been speaking with influential figures in the administration and in the larger
0:53.8	conservative movement
0:54.9	about why they decided to wage this battle and how they mapped it out for Trump's return to power.
1:01.8	Trump versus Harvard, if we can boil it down to that, is nothing less than a conservative campaign
1:07.3	to change the way private and state colleges operate.
1:13.6	Emma Green's reporting appears in The New Yorker this week.
1:21.9	Emma, how is the education agenda changed from the first Trump administration to the second?
1:23.5	Because so much has changed.
1:34.2	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.
1:49.9	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 can make incremental progress forward.
1:52.0	But they were coloring within the lines.
2:03.9	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.
2:04.7	For example.
2:21.7	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
	...

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