Eight Legal Experts on Trump’s Assault on Higher Education

Jonathan Feingold, Veena Dubal, Samuel Bagenstos, Alexander Chen, Dallas Estes, Sarah Sherman-Stokes, Jeremiah Chin, Sameer Ashar

Jonathan Feingold and Veena Dubal

Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has waged open warfare on higher education. The speed, scope, and volume of executive orders and agency actions have been overwhelming. If the goal was to create chaos and “flood the zone,” the president has delivered.

The entries that follow—which cover the administration’s assault on federal grant funding; on trans students; on non-citizen students; on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and on pro-Palestinian activism—aim to break down and clarify the legal implications of these various executive actions for higher education institutions. The authors explain what the executive orders purport to require, analyze what they actually require, and assess how colleges and universities ought to respond. As these experts ably demonstrate, the legal details matter, and, as with many Trump-world policies, little if any care has been paid to these details.

Yet to understand these disparate actions, we must understand that they are united by a more fundamental aim. Donald Trump is coming for America’s universities and higher education workers for the same reason that Mussolini demanded loyalty oaths in 1931 and Viktor Orbán launched a “vicious smear campaign” against Hungary’s premier university in 2019: Our commitment to open inquiry over propaganda, to persuasion over coercion, to democracy over dictatorship provides a check on authoritarian rule. As Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels presciently observed following the Taliban’s attack on the American University in Kabul in 2021, “Independent universities unnerve authoritarians because everything that these institutions strive to achieve is inimical to the autocrat’s devotion to the accumulation and arbitrary exercise of coercive public power.” The Trump administration is not hiding its agenda. In an interview published in The New York Times in early March, for instance, Trump ally and right-wing activist Christopher Rufo situated these attacks within a broader campaign to make universities feel “existential terror.”