The NIH Cuts Are Part Of An All-Out War On Higher Education

In a presidential administration with an unlimited capacity for chaos, colleges and universities have become targets of this early phase of right-wing assault. This is not so surprising: Many of the key political threads that comprise today’s Trumpism share an opposition to the academy and all it represents. Chris Rufo has presided over the dismantling of New College of Florida and succeeded in smuggling his bespoke interpretations of concepts like “DEI” and “critical race theory” into state law and now federal policy. JD Vance has appeared at gatherings of national conservatives to say that “professors are the enemy.”

Trump’s newest allies in Silicon Valley may worship a narrow idea of intelligence, but they view the long apprenticeship, not to mention the still-broad education required of the traditional college student, as a waste of time. And then there is Trump’s traditional base, which splits decisively along educational lines: educational attainment now reliably predicts support for the Democratic Party. Trump, for his part, has said that he loves “the poorly educated”—and they love him back! From another quarter, the battle is joined by MAHA types, COVID skeptics, and Big Pharma truthers who see the country’s medical research apparatus as a machine for laundering money into dubiously valuable experiments that make Americans sicker and the pharmaceutical companies that sell medical remedies richer. What Americans really need, in their view, is raw milk, beef tallow, and a few weeks on the happy farm.