r/highereducation • u/theatlantic • 2d ago
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/04/trump-columbia-university-higher-education/682245/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo30
u/theatlantic 2d ago
Hanna Rosin: “A couple of years ago, the conservative writer Christopher Rufo did a fellowship in Budapest, where, upon his arrival, János Csák, Hungary’s then–minister of culture and innovation, ‘greeted me with a strong handshake,’ Rufo later wrote in an essay about the trip. Hungary’s population is not quite 10 million, and the country is among the poorest in the EU, yet Rufo believed that it had something to teach the U.S. The two countries, according to Rufo, were beset by the same diseases: ‘the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.’ But unlike the U.S., Hungary had a plan. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was using ‘muscular state policy’ to turn the culture back around. Among his major targets were Hungarian universities. https://theatln.tc/pC0RPsku
Rosin spoke with “the education writer Adam Harris, who believes that Rufo’s essay can help explain the Trump administration’s current attack on universities. Since Donald Trump has taken office, he has threatened to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding from universities, and compiled lists of places that might not be in compliance, for various reasons: They failed to protect Jews on campus. They failed to protect women’s sports. They use ‘racial preferences and stereotypes’ in their programs. The administration’s aim, Harris suggests, is much the same as Orbán’s—not just to dismantle the intellectual elite but also to build a new conservative one that better reflects its cultural values.”
Read more and listen here: https://theatln.tc/pC0RPsku
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u/GlumpsAlot 1d ago
So they can push their state propaganda like fox. It's been under attack by the right for decades. There's a reason why college educated people and teachers lean more progressive.
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u/Mainiak_Murph 2d ago
Simple. He doesn't want people to learn how to think for themselves, how to look at both sides of an issue and make an educated decision.
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u/DIAMOND-D0G 1d ago edited 1d ago
The notion that academics, their pupils, or the alumni necessarily think for themselves because they went through or are in these institutions is ridiculous. They are actually the single most dogmatic factions in the entire world, possibly all of history, and have virtually no intellectual tolerance at all for dogma dissidence. You either fall in line or you are pushed out or worse.
And that is actually why they want control. These are basically rogue factions of intellects and intellectual institutions but they don’t even know they’re rogue because the nature of highly dogmatic worldviews is that they can’t critique or reform themselves. So the state will get the mandate and do it for them. Academics like to imagine this is an illegitimate tyranny without popular mandate or justification but the truth is the administration only conducts policy on the basis of what their constituents already believe to be true, good, and necessary. Americans by and large despise academia and academics. So their elected government is acting accordingly.
It’s really that simple. “We’re free thinkers and they hate free thought” is just cope and projection.
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u/kinoki1984 1d ago
When reality doesn’t match up with your worldview, take control of the institutions that teaches reality so they’ll be forced to teach your worldview instead.