The Universities Are the Enemy

So think our new hard-right revolutionary overlords

President Donald Trump signs an executive order to reduce the size and scope of the Education Department alongside school children signing their own versions, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on March 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

My headline is cribbed from the Vice President of the United States. JD Vance gave a keynote address with this title on November 2, 2021 at a National Conservatism conference. Back then, he was less than a year into his conversion from Trump critic to Trump acolyte and apologist, and in the early stages of a right-populist run for a Senate seat from Ohio, a campaign that would be heavily financed by Vance’s right-wing Silicon Valley friend and former employer Peter Thiel.

What would this very intelligent and extraordinarily ambitious graduate of Yale Law School choose to talk about in his high-profile remarks at a prominent gathering of the new, harder, nationalist right? The topic he chose was higher education—and the tone was a diatribe, the kind of ill-informed, red-meat rant Tucker Carlson honed throughout the first Trump administration every weeknight in prime time on Fox News: Come out of gate with guns blazing and never relent. Concede nothing to any less severe view of the topic. Reject any form of nuance. Illustrate the absolute truth of one’s position by giving a handful of outrageous-sounding anecdotes cherry-picked to demonstrate the absurdity of holding any other position.

On that day three years ago, it took Vance exactly 40 seconds to declare how important it was for conservatives like himself to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country”—just as it took just a few weeks for the second Trump administration to follow through on precisely this agenda.

Destructive Zealotry

I am not the right person to give a full-throated defense of higher education in the United States. I have a Ph.D. I currently teach at an Ivy League University. But I haven’t built a career as a professor. I taught for a couple of years after completing graduate school. I published a handful of peer-reviewed articles. But then I left the groves of academe for intellectual journalism. I’ve never held a tenure-track position, let alone received tenure. I worked as an acquisitions editor at Penn Press, where I published scholarly books, but I’ve never published one myself. (My own two books were written for an audience of generalists, not specialists.) For the past two years, while teaching in the political science department at Penn, I’ve come and gone from campus a couple of times a week without having to attend faculty meetings or sit on committees.

All of which means I live, and have long existed, on the periphery of the university. I love some of the work that’s done on college campuses, but much of it isn’t for me. I have criticisms about resource-allocation at elite schools. I don’t share the political passions or views of a lot (though hardly all) of the people who teach in the humanities. It’s a mixed bag.

But I know enough about what goes on in the country’s universities to recognize that the right-wing thugs currently running the executive branch and taking a baseball bat to higher education are utterly full of shit. They are poised to do an immense amount of damage to something valuable and good. And much of the broader public appears not to care—in no small part because of the incendiary lies the ideological propagandists behind the MAGA movement have been propagating for years. I won’t say they must be stopped, because I don’t know if they can be stopped. Still, it’s important we recognize exactly what they’re doing and the price our country and our world are going to end up paying for their destructive zealotry.

Penn in the Crosshairs

I’m going to focus on what’s happening at the University of Pennsylvania because I know it best from observing it up close. It should go without saying that this doesn’t imply I think that what’s happening at Penn is necessarily worse than what is happening elsewhere. I also want to be clear that in writing this post I don’t speak for Penn, its administration, or anyone who works in the School of Arts & Sciences or the Department of Political Science, besides myself.