May 20, 2026
Trump’s Attack on Higher Education
Joan Wallach Scott
Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Trump’s Attack on Higher Education
Joan Wallach Scott
Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Joan Wallach Scott and Olin Ferris, introducer
Minutes of the 31st Meeting of the 84th Year
President George Bustin called the meeting to order. Francis Slade led the invocation. George Buston announced the election of twelve new members of the Old Guard for the 2026-27 year. There were five guests at the meeting. Ferris Olin introduced Ruth Koizim (proposed for membership); Marcia Snowden introduced Ann Halliday; Joan Girgus introduced Tom Wright; and Julie Denny introduced Lolly and Robert Braunschweiger. There were 136 members in attendance.
George presented this year’s Exemplary Service Awards to J Rogers Woolston and Cynthia Woolston-Waltenfort for “their patience, perseverance and technical skills” in managing the Old Guard’s technology function. Cynthia accepted the award on behalf of herself and her father who had recently passed away.
George announced that this would be his last meeting as President and thanked the membership for the privilege of serving them. The membership present returned his thanks with applause.
Ralph Widner was to have read the minutes of the previous week’s meeting’s talk "The New Interventionism," delivered by Jacob Shapiro, John Foster Dulles Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University. Unfortunately, Ralph was ill and the meetings were not read but can be found on the Old Guard website.
Ferris Olin introduced our distinguished speaker, Joan Scott, who held the Harold Linder Chair in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where she is now Professor Emerita and an adjunct faculty member at CUNY. Dr. Scott is considered one of the nation’s leading intellectual historians, especially in the areas of feminist history, sexuality, and gender studies. The holder of numerous honorary degrees, her many books and scholarly articles have been translated into languages that span the globe.
In recent years, Professor Scott has focused on academic freedom. She has chaired the AAUP Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure and is a frequent commentator on this timely issue.
“I want to give a trigger warning. This is not an optimistic, upbeat talk,” she began, noting the “dramatic, unprecedented attacks” on higher education from the current administration and Conservative groups. While faculty and faculty-led organizations have resisted, university administrators have largely accommodated the administration through direct negotiation or “anticipatory obedience."
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out the blueprint for challenging institutional autonomy, which gives faculty the right to decide what is taught, how it is taught, who teaches and to whom. US institutional autonomy has sharply declined in the last ten years, putting us on a par with such peers as Hungary, Turkey, and India. This decline is the culmination of a history and strategy to rein in democratic advances in education that began with resistance to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Trump administration’s efforts, while unprecedented in their scope, are not an innovation but rather a fulfillment.
The democratizing 1960s saw affirmative action, new focuses on gender, race and class, student protests, and the endorsement of multi-culturalism as part of the university’s mission. Conservatives viewed these critical perspectives as an attack on their long-held values.
In a 1971 confidential memo to the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, future supreme court justice Lewis Powell called for a more activist response from corporate leaders, urging them to identify, promote and fund faculty who could counter leftist scholarship. “Critical thinking is dangerous and needs to be put aside,” he wrote. This is a “long-term and difficult project and not one for the faint hearted.” Powell’s writing paved the way for groups on the right, including the Heritage Foundation.
In the 1970s, James M. Buchanan, a Nobel-prize winning economist at George Mason University, provided the underlying philosophical premise for Powell’s activist campaign. Buchanan, a libertarian economist, wrote that education should not be seen as a public good that benefited society as a whole, but rather as a private resource, something to be purchased to enhance the human capital of individual students. If students had to pay full tuition, they would be less inclined to protest than if education were perceived to be “free.”
The convergence of Powell’s activism and Buchanan’ s theories gained traction in the 1970s as state legislators shifted the cost of public education to students now defined as “consumers.” Student debt replaced public support and placed a heavy burden on the middle class and lower income families. As universities lost public support, they raised tuition and looked for ways to economize, chiefly by hiring contingent or adjunct faculty who received low pay, no benefits, and were ineligible for tenure, thus cheapening the educational product. Between 1987-2023, the makeup of the US academic workforce shifted from mostly full-time, tenured-track faculty to contingent appointments.
These trends intensified during the 2008 financial crisis, and the status of higher education declined. Universities were perceived as elitist price-gaugers; they coddled student radicals and promoted identity politics. Higher education did not provide the job training that enabled graduating students to earn enough to pay off student debt. These perceptions paved the way for Trumps’s all-out war.
Professor Scott showed a series of charts that dramatized the transformation of education from a public to a private good. College tuition increased by 100% between 1978-2000 and outstripped rises in medical care, housing, and food. At the same time, state funding declined sharply and tuition became the main source of university support. Student debt became the focus for resentment and the attacks on higher education.
The 50-year process begun by Powell and Buchanan prepared the ground for the frontal attack on higher education today. Instead of the stealth and subterfuge that Powell thought necessary, today’s attacks are carried out openly through watch lists of college professors, the repurposing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for conservative ends, and the rewriting of state history curricula to remove divisive concepts, such as slavery.
Project 2025 envisions removing the federal government from the business of student loans entirely. The Trump administration has begun the process of winding down loan forgiveness programs and Pell grants, thus making higher education even more expensive and reducing the enrollment of low-income and minority students. Project 2025 recommends the replacement of accreditation agencies with state oversight commissions who would set performance-based standards based on a graduate’s earning capacity. The takeover of higher education by the states is “deeply antithetical to those of us who believe that the autonomy of the academy is vital to the production of a critical democratic citizenry,” Dr. Scott told the Old Guard.
In answering questions from the audience, Dr. Scott was not optimistic that these trends could be reversed. The trends reflect the culmination of a long history. Opponents of Trump’s actions and conservative initiatives to undermine higher education have not developed a comprehensive counter strategy... But she ended on a defiant tone: Despite all the power of the opposition we face, nevertheless we persist.
Respectfully submitted,
Jane Silverman
George presented this year’s Exemplary Service Awards to J Rogers Woolston and Cynthia Woolston-Waltenfort for “their patience, perseverance and technical skills” in managing the Old Guard’s technology function. Cynthia accepted the award on behalf of herself and her father who had recently passed away.
George announced that this would be his last meeting as President and thanked the membership for the privilege of serving them. The membership present returned his thanks with applause.
Ralph Widner was to have read the minutes of the previous week’s meeting’s talk "The New Interventionism," delivered by Jacob Shapiro, John Foster Dulles Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University. Unfortunately, Ralph was ill and the meetings were not read but can be found on the Old Guard website.
Ferris Olin introduced our distinguished speaker, Joan Scott, who held the Harold Linder Chair in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where she is now Professor Emerita and an adjunct faculty member at CUNY. Dr. Scott is considered one of the nation’s leading intellectual historians, especially in the areas of feminist history, sexuality, and gender studies. The holder of numerous honorary degrees, her many books and scholarly articles have been translated into languages that span the globe.
In recent years, Professor Scott has focused on academic freedom. She has chaired the AAUP Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure and is a frequent commentator on this timely issue.
“I want to give a trigger warning. This is not an optimistic, upbeat talk,” she began, noting the “dramatic, unprecedented attacks” on higher education from the current administration and Conservative groups. While faculty and faculty-led organizations have resisted, university administrators have largely accommodated the administration through direct negotiation or “anticipatory obedience."
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out the blueprint for challenging institutional autonomy, which gives faculty the right to decide what is taught, how it is taught, who teaches and to whom. US institutional autonomy has sharply declined in the last ten years, putting us on a par with such peers as Hungary, Turkey, and India. This decline is the culmination of a history and strategy to rein in democratic advances in education that began with resistance to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Trump administration’s efforts, while unprecedented in their scope, are not an innovation but rather a fulfillment.
The democratizing 1960s saw affirmative action, new focuses on gender, race and class, student protests, and the endorsement of multi-culturalism as part of the university’s mission. Conservatives viewed these critical perspectives as an attack on their long-held values.
In a 1971 confidential memo to the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, future supreme court justice Lewis Powell called for a more activist response from corporate leaders, urging them to identify, promote and fund faculty who could counter leftist scholarship. “Critical thinking is dangerous and needs to be put aside,” he wrote. This is a “long-term and difficult project and not one for the faint hearted.” Powell’s writing paved the way for groups on the right, including the Heritage Foundation.
In the 1970s, James M. Buchanan, a Nobel-prize winning economist at George Mason University, provided the underlying philosophical premise for Powell’s activist campaign. Buchanan, a libertarian economist, wrote that education should not be seen as a public good that benefited society as a whole, but rather as a private resource, something to be purchased to enhance the human capital of individual students. If students had to pay full tuition, they would be less inclined to protest than if education were perceived to be “free.”
The convergence of Powell’s activism and Buchanan’ s theories gained traction in the 1970s as state legislators shifted the cost of public education to students now defined as “consumers.” Student debt replaced public support and placed a heavy burden on the middle class and lower income families. As universities lost public support, they raised tuition and looked for ways to economize, chiefly by hiring contingent or adjunct faculty who received low pay, no benefits, and were ineligible for tenure, thus cheapening the educational product. Between 1987-2023, the makeup of the US academic workforce shifted from mostly full-time, tenured-track faculty to contingent appointments.
These trends intensified during the 2008 financial crisis, and the status of higher education declined. Universities were perceived as elitist price-gaugers; they coddled student radicals and promoted identity politics. Higher education did not provide the job training that enabled graduating students to earn enough to pay off student debt. These perceptions paved the way for Trumps’s all-out war.
Professor Scott showed a series of charts that dramatized the transformation of education from a public to a private good. College tuition increased by 100% between 1978-2000 and outstripped rises in medical care, housing, and food. At the same time, state funding declined sharply and tuition became the main source of university support. Student debt became the focus for resentment and the attacks on higher education.
The 50-year process begun by Powell and Buchanan prepared the ground for the frontal attack on higher education today. Instead of the stealth and subterfuge that Powell thought necessary, today’s attacks are carried out openly through watch lists of college professors, the repurposing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for conservative ends, and the rewriting of state history curricula to remove divisive concepts, such as slavery.
Project 2025 envisions removing the federal government from the business of student loans entirely. The Trump administration has begun the process of winding down loan forgiveness programs and Pell grants, thus making higher education even more expensive and reducing the enrollment of low-income and minority students. Project 2025 recommends the replacement of accreditation agencies with state oversight commissions who would set performance-based standards based on a graduate’s earning capacity. The takeover of higher education by the states is “deeply antithetical to those of us who believe that the autonomy of the academy is vital to the production of a critical democratic citizenry,” Dr. Scott told the Old Guard.
In answering questions from the audience, Dr. Scott was not optimistic that these trends could be reversed. The trends reflect the culmination of a long history. Opponents of Trump’s actions and conservative initiatives to undermine higher education have not developed a comprehensive counter strategy... But she ended on a defiant tone: Despite all the power of the opposition we face, nevertheless we persist.
Respectfully submitted,
Jane Silverman