Reflections: Higher education
Columnist Allan Winkler writes that President Donald Trump is making an effort to dismantle the education system in America.
President Donald Trump is making a concerted effort to dismantle the American system of higher education.
His secretary of education, a former wrestling executive, is seeking to demolish her entire department.
And the president is engaged in a single-minded, vicious attempt to destroy Harvard University, one of the most important educational institutions in the country, and indeed the world.
Trump’s actions make no sense, outside a quest for political gain. He is waging a personal vendetta that makes no rational sense. He first cancelled $3 million of federal contracts, most of which went to scientific experts doing research that benefits all of us, then cancelled another set of grants. He has sought to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and he attempted to remove Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, including those already present at the university. Most recently, he has voiced his plans to revoke the visas of those students already here.
The attack is not just aimed at Harvard. Trump has directed his State Department to cancel all appointments of international students abroad seeking to come study in the United States.
Why this vendetta?
Trump claims that Harvard is a hotbed of antisemitism and needs to be punished.
To be sure, in the past year, the Harvard campus, like campuses all over the country, was heated in response to the dastardly Hamas attack on Israeli citizens, and the vicious and obscene Israeli response in Gaza.
It is also true that antisemitism is flourishing in America. In just the past few weeks, there have been brutal attacks, including the killing of two people outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago, and more recently the attack on protesting Jewish citizens in Colorado last week.
But Trump’s own attitude toward antisemitism is dicey. In the episode at Charlottesville, during his first term, when Nazi sympathizers attacked protesters, his response was that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Harvard did not handle the Arab-Israeli episodes particularly well last year. No university or community did. But Harvard is hardly antisemitic. Its president is Jewish. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a student there in the 1960s, and as a Jew, I never felt one iota of antisemitism on campus. Nor do I see it there today.
Trump’s attacks on Harvard have implications for universities around the country.
His effort to keep foreign students away has important implications for Miami University. In the pre-Covid era, Miami relied on full-paying Chinese students whose tuition payments helped the school prosper. Those numbers fell during Covid, and remain lower than ever before. Now, they may go away entirely.
Commentators around the country have noted the important benefits of international students and have recorded the extraordinary contributions they have made. Throughout my entire 50-year career, I have sought to make opportunities for foreign students available here, with gratifying results.
The American system of higher education has been the best in the world. It has led to extraordinary advances in science that benefit us all.
The attacks on higher education, both through President Trump’s policies and in reflective policies like those in Ohio to hamstring the university system, have serious consequences that we will feel for years.
Allan Winkler is a University Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Miami University, where he taught for three decades. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press.
