Can Higher Education Survive? | The New Yorker
Trump’s trade war has officially begun. In today’s newsletter, a breakdown on what the tariffs might mean. But, first, reporting on a year of protest at university campuses—and what will happen now that the President has threatened to cut federal funding for higher education. Plus:
“Administrations, not only at Harvard, are behaving in a way reactionary to political pressures,” a professor said. “It’s not based on principle.”Illustration by Ricardo Tomás
Nathan Heller
Staff writer
Big changes, in the United States, often show up on campuses first. In this week’s issue, I report on the speech battles and protests that consumed colleges and universities last year. Now the Trump Administration is pressuring the same schools ideologically, threatening to cut off their federal funding for a range of ostensible infractions—including “illegal protests.” I focus on Harvard as the flagship of American higher education and as a place where these pressures have reached a dauntingly high point.
The piece, as is true of much of my reporting, grew from my own incomprehension and curiosity about what was going on. Like many of us, I had spent 2024 reading reports of tents and police and doxing trucks on campuses across the country. I had heard accounts of friction around D.E.I. programs, and of fraying trust between schools’ faculties and boards. But I didn’t understand how these tensions fit together—what story they were actually telling—and how they were connected to the headlines of what was a fractious year. To take a measure of the situation, I spoke with dozens of students, faculty members, administrators, and donors at Harvard and elsewhere.
What I found was a sense of profound crisis across American higher education. Caught between their academic missions and demands from donors and the government, schools like Harvard are struggling with when to give in and when to stand defiant: how to save their lives without losing their souls. “There’s no university in the country that could survive the loss of federal money,” a philosophy and law professor at the University of Chicago explained. The future of this country’s greatest universities—long the jewels of the American century—is in question, and the stakes are high. “This is not about any one institution,” a Harvard Law School professor told me. “It’s about higher education in the United States, and whether it is going to survive and thrive or fade away.”
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Source photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty
Breaking Down Trump’s Tariffs
As tariffs go into effect today on goods from Canada and Mexico, and China’s tariffs are doubled, stock markets dropped sharply, and business leaders from the likes of Target, Ford, and Best Buy are preparing customers to expect higher prices. Canada and China have announced retaliatory tariffs, with Mexico promising similar measures in the coming days. “The tariffs that Trump is proposing are much broader than the ones he introduced in his first term, so it’s only reasonable to assume that the costs associated with them will be bigger,” John Cassidy, who writes The Financial Page column, explained in a recent breakdown of how tariffs work, and who is likely to pay for them. Here are a few takeaways:
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