Politico Astonished By Academia’s ‘Stunning Speed and Scope’ In Surrender to Trump

Should we feign surprise? Academia administrators spent most of the past two years surrendering to their own students, or at least the ones that looked scary … while leaving all the rest to fend for themselves.

With that in mind, one has to look skeptically at Politico’s claim that “universities are caving to Trump with a stunning speed and scope.” They may be caving, but the speed and scope of their pusillanimity hardly seems stunning:

Colleges and universities across the country are capitulating to President Donald Trump with staggering speed, moving to slash progressive policies and crack down on student activism as they face compounding threats from an administration hellbent on reshaping higher education.

Columbia University on Thursday appeared poised to submit to a list of Trump administration demands that threaten core tenets of the school’s mission in an attempt to release itself from a $400 million federal funding freeze. The University of California’s board moved on Wednesday to cut diversity statements from recruitment requirements. Dartmouth College on Monday announced it had hired the Republican National Committee’s former chief counsel — an outspoken critic of birthright citizenship — as the college’s top lawyer and leader of its immigration office. And dozens of universities last month rushed to scrub diversity, equity and inclusion policies from their websites and cancel related events.

It’s a stunning display of how some of the country’s oldest, wealthiest and enduring institutions have swiftly folded to Trump, who is acting on longstanding conservative criticisms of universities as elitist and progressive. In the path of the Trump administration’s threats — and with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake — schools are being tested on how their values, jobs and research stand up to today’s political realities.

It’s not “hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.” It’s billions of dollars at stake, and more accurately tens of billions of dollars. Just at Columbia alone, the US federal funding at risk amounts to $5 billion. The Trump administration began peeling it away with the first $400 million it could cancel, and got up closer to $450 million before Columbia cried uncle. But Trump and his team had a long runway left at Columbia, and Columbia knew it.

So do these other schools. They sounded defiant about Trump’s re-election right up until he decided to make an example of Columbia University and a handful of other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania. After that, the warning sent to 60 other schools suddenly looked a lot less like a stunt and more like the end of a business model. 

And of course, the arrests of Hamas sympathizers involved in campus intimidation campaigns must have caught Academia’s collective eye, too. 

Even the University of Maine has hit reverse. That cave comes after Maine Governor Janet Mills attempted to play chicken with Trump over the issue of males competing in women’s sports in a White House meeting last month. At the time, Mills and state AG Aaron Frey threatened to take Trump to court to restore any funding cutoffs while defending the practice of stripping women of opportunities and dignity:

“If the President attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of federal funding, my Administration and the Attorney General will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides,” Mills said. “The State of Maine will not be intimidated by the President’s threats.”

That was then … this is now:

The University of Maine, for example, agreed it will not allow “men to participate in individual or team contact sports with females,” to win back $30 million in Agriculture Department funding, the agency announced Wednesday — another issue where conservatives have found political traction.

So Courage! Much Fortitudishness!

Would Maine have lost in court? I tend to think so, but perhaps not at first, given the judicial activism on display in district courts these days. In the long run, though, all of these grants are discretionary, and federal grants have always come with strings attached. That’s especially true of Title IX strings; the federal government has always used funding eligibility as its enforcement measure. 

But Trump had already taken the measure of the cowards running these institutions. They are all talk and no action, and their campus temperaments prove it. It didn’t take much to send them running, which again we have seen ever since October 7, 2023 — if not for years before that. They have proven themselves to be gutless chumps. Trump is simply leveraging that to bring common sense back to Academia — at least for a while.