President Trump, under the cover of the culture war, is attempting to pull billions of dollars in funding from universities unless they agree to his ideological demands. After Harvard refused and sued the Trump administration, Trump tried banning all of its 27 percent of international students last week. Dana Milbank, Catherine Rampell and Jason Willick discuss why the president is so obsessed with attacking universities, and what the consequences might be for future students.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Impromptu, The Washington Post.
It is very light treatment but with serious messages. Very moderate, in terms of conservative language. Reflects how far right the Trump administration has moved. The Australian situation has a different context, but the same problems and threats are in Australia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/impromptu/can-universities-survive-this/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter
CAN UNIVERSITIES SURVIVE THIS?
Dana Milbank: A quick thing before we get started. As a listener of Impromptu, you obviously value different perspectives, and you understand that journalism is more important than ever. If you haven’t taken the step yet to become a subscriber of The Washington Post, right now you can sign up for just $2 every four weeks for your first year. After that, it’s just $12 every four weeks. You can cancel any time. You can grab this offer through the link in our show notes, but don’t wait, it’s only around for a limited time. Hit pause and check out the show notes now. Or go to washingtonpost.com/subscribe. That’s washingtonpost.com/subscribe. Thank you for listening, and hope you’re a subscriber soon if you’re not ready. Here’s the show. Should the University of Pennsylvania rescind Donald Trump’s degree?
Catherine Rampell: Yes, but not because of the reasons we are gathered here to talk about, Trump’s attacks on universities, but because he clearly learned nothing about basic economics. Maybe they should give him his tuition back, honestly.
Dana Milbank: What do you say Provost Willick?
Jason Willick: I don’t think you want to get into the business of partisan revocation of degrees.
Dana Milbank: I have a third way on this. I think they should let him keep his degree, but they should release his transcript, which would be the most damaging.
Catherine Rampell: Or maybe they should make him take some remedial classes.
Dana Milbank: Or perhaps rename his degree in gender sexuality and women’s studies. [music] This is Impromptu from Washington Post Opinions, a show that brings you conversations about the news we can’t stop worrying about. I’m Dana Milbank, and this week, we’re talking about the Trump administration’s relentless assault on higher education. Since President Trump took office, he’s been threatening to bankrupt colleges and universities that don’t adhere to his ideological mandates. His top target is Harvard, which has now lost some $3.2 billion in grants and contracts, the entire sum of the federal government’s relationship with the school, because it didn’t give Trump say over who gets admitted and what they are taught. The last week, the administration banned all international students from attending Harvard, which would eliminate about 27% of its current student body. The universities sued to stop both punitive actions, and a judge on Friday temporarily stayed the ban on foreign students. On top of all that, the big ugly bill that the House Republicans passed last week would cripple many of the nation’s top private universities by increasing the tax on endowment income from 1.4% to as high as 21%. Today, we’re going to talk about the consequences of this war on higher education, why Trump is so obsessed with it, and if any of these actions could actually pass legal muster. I am joined by two of my colleagues who are elite, but not elitist, and wise, but not woke. [laughter] Would you both introduce yourself?
Catherine Rampell: I’m Catherine Rampell. I’m a columnist at The Washington Post. I primarily write about economics and related policy issues, and somewhat regularly education.
Jason Willick: I’m Jason Willick. I’m a columnist at The Washington Post, write about law and politics.
Dana Milbank: It is an honor to have you both here. Thanks for joining me. Why do you all think universities are such a big target for the Trump administration? Does he really think they are full of Marxists or hotbeds of anti-Semitism, or is it about vengeance and punishing people for their political views, or some third option I haven’t considered?
Jason Willick: Elite universities have been moving to the left for many years. This shows up in the statistics on faculty political affiliation. It shows up in some of the measures that they’ve been taking internally around speech and DEI. I don’t think it’s any mystery. These are very progressive parts of society. They’ve been getting more progressive. They have not done a good job reflecting the country. That doesn’t make it lawful for the executive to unilaterally do various things to them, but I don’t think it’s any mystery why Republicans have a problem with the way things are going at elite universities. Then, of course, the post-October 7th stuff around Israel and anti-Semitism is the most recent point of friction.
Catherine Rampell: I would say it is true that elite universities have been moving more to the left in many ways. I think that’s part of the reason why they have become a political football, but it’s not the entirety of it. I think that in lots of countries that have made more authoritarian shifts or democratic backsliding, intellectual elites of various kinds are among the first to be targeted because there’s populist resentment against intellectual elites because maybe the intellectual elites are more likely to be at odds with the more authoritarian leading leadership. I think that there is a grain of truth to the fact that the schools have become more liberal and there have been anti-Semitic incidents on these campuses. I don’t think that this is really a genuine crusade against anti-Semitism, at least based on the context of other things this administration has done and its top officials have said and done. I think this is more of a regular pattern that we see when the government moves far right, particularly far right populist.
Jason Willick: I agree for the record that the anti-Semitism piece of it is, for the Trump administration, very convenient in that they wanted to go after these universities anyway, but that doesn’t make it not a real issue. Catherine said the word authoritarian. Some of these universities, to Conservatives, feel authoritarian themselves in the ideological litmus tests that they have increasingly been imposing. As far as I’m concerned, they have to some extent, made their bed with some of the bad decisions they’ve been making in the last few decades. That doesn’t mean they’re not protected by the law, and it doesn’t mean that things that Trump does aren’t necessarily legal, but this political clash has been in the works for a long time, and I think lots of university leaders are probably looking back at some of their decisions over the last few years and decades and saying, gosh, maybe we shouldn’t have written off half the country politically in this way.
Catherine Rampell: I also want to clarify that the retribution-type actions that are being taken against universities are not only being targeted at famous elite schools like Harvard. You also see publics, University of Alabama, lots of non-flagship publics that people have probably never even heard of getting targeted, having their grants taken away, finding that their international students are being swept up, whether or not they were involved with campus protests, because they had traffic tickets or whatever. I know that that’s the case at Arizona State University. Then other actions being taken against international students in general. Just to be clear, Trump talks the biggest game against Harvard and has definitely saved his most powerful firepower for Harvard, but it’s all universities that are feeling this right now.
Dana Milbank: Now, at the risk of outing myself as a woke Marxist maniac, I was just at my 35th reunion at Yale over the weekend, and I can submit this data point. The most recent head of the Yale Political Union was, in fact, the chairman of the Conservative Party, but I don’t know how far that data point will take us. But let us stipulate that universities have moved to the left. Surely, there was a more surgical way of getting things back on track than this all out attack. Do you think, Jason?
Jason Willick: Yeah. One thing you’re seeing is civil rights law being used very aggressively. Traditionally, civil rights law has been used to ensure representation of what we think of as underrepresented minority groups, women and LGBT and non-Whites, and so on. The Trump people are taking the university’s practice of what you might call identity politics or affinity group emphasis and turning it around, and saying, that itself violates the Civil Rights Act, these categories that you’re using violate the Civil Rights Act. Theoretically, in civil rights law, you first find a civil rights violation, you have a hearing, you have a process, then you tailor the penalty to the violation. That’s different from the sledgehammer that’s being used, which is revoking huge numbers of grants ahead of these more specific findings. I would certainly prefer if you are going to do things by the book, and I think that’s why they’re going to lose in court, because they’re not following the rules here with a lot of this revocation of money.
Dana Milbank: That was actually another question. Do you think they’re going to lose both on the foreign students and on the grants?
Jason Willick: All of these are very complicated. There’s very complicated laws governing the grants, different conditions, under different grants that you can revoke them. The foreign students, also, there’s an administrative process, probably. But I think, ultimately, yes, on both of those cases, where the executive is unilaterally taking these huge swings without the appropriate paperwork, first, they’re eventually going to lose. It can do a lot of damage in the meantime.
Dana Milbank: On the international students, it’s obviously outrageous to affect the current students, 27% of Harvard’s student body just for the chaos and the lives destroyed. But at the risk of sounding like an America first guy, have we gotten to a point where there are too many foreign students coming into American schools? We obviously should be encouraging the best and the brightest from around the world to study here and then live here and contribute or perhaps go run governments that will be more friendly to the United States, but do you guys agree is there a problem now with too many international students, or is that a wrong way of looking at it?
Catherine Rampell: I think that’s absolutely wrong. I think that our ability to attract global talent from around the world has been a superpower. Historically, it is part of the reason why we have been head and shoulders above the rest of the world, basically for the past century, in science, innovation, technology. It’s because the best and the brightest from around the world want to come here, they want to study at our top schools, and then they want to found businesses here, and some huge fraction of founders of companies in the Fortune 500 are immigrants themselves or maybe children of immigrants. Just from a self-interested standpoint, I think our ability to get these people to come here is great. Even from the perspective of other students, it’s actually extremely helpful because at a lot of schools, the international students pay full freight at a higher tuition level, effectively cross-subsidize American students. They pay more, and then that allows the schools to charge lower tuition and offer more aid to American students. Just dollars and cents, it’s very effective for US students. But also, I think you alluded to our soft power around the world, that a lot of these students come here. If they don’t stay, they go back home, they bring back American values. This was, I think, a pretty deliberate strategy under the Reagan administration, to make friends around the world. I don’t know what they’re learning about American values today, may be different, but historically, this has been such a huge boon to the United States on many levels.
Jason Willick: As a general proposition, I think it’s good to have international students and attract the best and brightest, and so on. The fundamental problem is that these universities are getting interfered with by the federal government because the federal government is so entwined with funding and subsidizing them. I do think it’s a political winner or at least a political wedge the Trump administration can use if they say, look, our taxpayers are subsidizing this for the benefit of so many foreign students. I guess what I’m driving at, in this whole controversy, is that the universities are probably going to need to find a way to decouple somewhat with a federal government that has such wide swings between the parties in how it thinks the universities should be running their political and educational programs. I think it is a problem to have a lot of foreign students that are subsidized by the United States taxpayer, although as Catherine points out, it doesn’t maybe actually work that way if foreign students are paying full freight. But I do think that is a difficulty. It’s the subsidy.
Catherine Rampell: The question is, when you say decouple from the federal government, for a lot of these research institutions, the funding is for medical research. That’s where the big bucks are. At Harvard and elsewhere, and at the University of Alabama, and the University of Michigan, and ASU, and all these other places. Who is going to pay for that? It feels like all of these other things that we’re talking about, whether it’s the schools are too liberal or they have too many international students. Those are just excuses for the current federal government to exact retribution against these schools. The biggest losers from all of that are not the foreign students, although they will lose out, it’s what are all the cancer cures that don’t get developed, and there isn’t a substitute source of funding right now.
Jason Willick: I think Catherine is absolutely right. That’s the irony here. The federal government’s beef, the Republican Party’s beef that we’ve been talking about from the beginning is basically politicized stuff, identity politics stuff, sociology departments, humanities and social sciences. But the weapon that they have is defunding the expensive stuff, which is the hard sciences. I don’t know the answer, maybe it’s impossible, but I guess I would have in mind, just spitballing, some way that the college is one entity, and the hospital and the linear accelerator and the Medical Research Institute are separate in some corporate way so that the beef between the college and the liberal arts and the politicians can be walled off from the cancer research. But that’s a tough thing to do. But it’s fundamentally what’s happening. Is the science grants a bludgeon for the stuff that the Republicans are really upset about, in some cases with good reason.
Dana Milbank: I have managed to out myself as both an America firster and as a woke Marxist lunatic in the first half here. Hopefully, I’ll do better in the second half after this brief break. [music] Welcome back. I’m Dana Milbank, and this is Impromptu. Let’s turn to the endowment income tax increase, a 15-fold hike in tax bills for certain universities with the largest endowments. This would cost Harvard alone about $850 million per year. Schools say this would make college dramatically more expensive because about half of this endowment income pays for financial aid, giving students of modest means reduced or free tuition. It would also force universities to abandon long term investments in favor of those generating immediate income. Is there any chance colleges can convince the public on this, or is that just a loser? Or I guess, more importantly, they don’t have to convince the public, they just have to convince the Senate not to go along with what the House did.
Jason Willick: I’m against a lot of the stuff Trump is doing unilaterally because I don’t think it’s lawful for the executive to do it unilaterally. If Congress wants to change the way entities are taxed, that’s totally within its rights. At a time when we need a lot of revenue, I think these are very wealthy entities that could, frankly, pay more tax. I mean, the people running these endowments are getting paid millions of dollars. These are very luxurious, in some cases, institutions and cozy institutions, and I don’t have any problem with Congress deciding that it’s going to remove a tax exemption for the endowments.
Catherine Rampell: I think the politics of this are really hard for some of the reasons that Jason laid out, but I still think it is a bad policy. Again, these endowments, they are used to fund financial aid. They are used to fund research. They’re generally quite restricted. These are non-profits like any other non-profit. The idea that you would tax whatever the nest egg of some other non-profit, whether it’s a religious institution or an anti-poverty outfit or anything else, that wouldn’t fly there. The question is, why is this being levied today against this particular handful of schools given that they are fulfilling their not-for-profit mission, even if Trump and Republicans don’t necessarily like the way that they’re doing it. This is not about raising revenue, in my view, this is not about fairness, this is just about finding a way to punish a few big name institutions that for all of their flaws, and they have many, and I have written about them, they are doing a lot of good. These endowment funds are used to create chairs in physics and pay for lab equipment, and allow lots of American students to go to these schools on the cheap, effectively, there’s a very high sticker price.
Jason Willick: And to build very luxurious dorms and fitness facilities.
Catherine Rampell: That’s generally not what the endowment is used for. The endowment money is usually earmarked for specific programs and for specific research.
Dana Milbank: But regardless of what it’s spent for, I was just reading this piece from the Cato Institute that’s saying, fundamentally, this is using the tax code to punish people for their ideology, which they’ve acknowledged that that was at least part of the goal here. Jason, is that okay to be doing? Couldn’t that be turned around by a Democratic administration and say, right now we’re going to tax Liberty University and Christian Home School? We don’t want to go down that path, do we?
Jason Willick: Well, the tax code is an expression of Congress’ political values, when it says we’re going to tax the rich or we’re going to create a carveout for this activity. If the idea is that, at the current moment in American history, the institutions that need a tax subsidy are not Harvard, we’re already giving Harvard billions and billions of dollars, we’ve allocated them in grants. Maybe Trump is going to illegally revoke clubs, and so on.
Catherine Rampell: For cancer research. I’m sorry. This is not to build lazy rivers on school campuses or whatever. The grants are specifically for things that people at the NSF and the NIH think after a competitive grant review process are worthy of taxpayer dollars.
Jason Willick: I support giving them grants. I don’t support the amount of subsidy that we’re giving through the endowment, which is basically a large financial institution with very sophisticated financial gambles in real estate and private equity and other things run by people making millions of dollars. The cliche is that Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached. These are rich institutions. Again, to me, I’m a procedural nerd. I care about the process. My biggest problem with the grant thing is that it’s being done against the will of Congress, which has the purse strings and is allowed to set the process for getting grants. But the tax code is totally Congress’ choice, and it can raise taxes on rich people. It can cut taxes on people with kids. It can do a whole bunch of things.
Catherine Rampell: I’m not disputing the ability for Congress to do this legally, I’m disputing the actual intent. I’m not saying that they don’t have the ability to change taxes, I think they totally have the ability to gut Medicaid or SNAP, or whatever, I just don’t think they should.
Jason Willick: What do you think about the mortgage interest deduction.
Catherine Rampell: I think that’s bad too, I think they should get rid of it.
Jason Willick: You want them to keep the deduction for rich colleges’ endowments.
Catherine Rampell: These are non-profits. That is what this is about. These endowments are their nest egg that they use to pay for the programs as they see fit. As long as those programs are within the scope of what a 501(c)(3) is allowed to do, I don’t know why we would be treating them any differently from any other non-profit institution, except that this is Congress using its, again, constitutional powers, legal powers, I’m not disputing that, to punish and basically drive out of existence schools that it has decided it doesn’t like or its voters don’t like. That’s my objection here. It’s not about the procedural stuff, it’s about these schools are going to go out of business. To go to Harvard, to go to Yale, to go to Princeton, I know, boohoo, I’m sure people listening to this feel really bad for all those students. Their tuition does not cover the full cost of their education. It’s all of these other sources. Endowments are just people giving money to the school, people donating money to the school.
Jason Willick: Which they also get a tax break on, by the way, when they get a tax write-up.
Catherine Rampell: It’s the same tax break.
Jason Willick: But I don’t agree that these are only different in that Republicans don’t like them. They’re different in that they’re extraordinarily rich. I don’t know of any non-profit that has $60 billion in the bank. Anyway, look, it gets to your values. I think, frankly, the cost of tuition has gone up too much. It shouldn’t be that it’s so expensive to go to these places. They may need to innovate to find ways to lower costs.
Catherine Rampell: That is the innovation. The sticker price is not what everyone pays. The innovation is that they’re able to price discriminate, and they’re able to say, if you are low income, which at these schools is like the vast majority of the population, because they have this money socked away that helps them cross-subsidize.
Jason Willick: You really think that Harvard’s going to go out of business if their endowment is taxed without this tax break?
Catherine Rampell: I think it is an existential threat for a handful of universities in the country, yes. If you look at their finances, if you suddenly say, all of these dollars that were donated are no longer tax free, and we are going to impose instead basically a wealth tax on these universities. You’re taking away that money. You’re taking away their federal grants, all of these things together.
Jason Willick: No, the federal grants are an existential threat, if that, that really is. But the endowment tax, please, that’s just a totally normal tweak of the tax code, a slight redistribution from the richest institutions of the thing Congress does all the time, and that they could easily withstand.
Catherine Rampell: I don’t think that’s true.
Dana Milbank: Regardless, it’s something that could be tweaked right back in a couple of years time. Anyway, I think one thing we all agree on is that nobody’s going to shed any tears for these schools, but let’s talk about what it means potentially for the country, Catherine. I don’t know how many hundreds or thousands or millions of kids will be lower income kids, will be facing higher tuition, but how could the case be made why ordinary Americans should actually care about a bunch of rich schools having to pay more in taxes or losing their grants?
Catherine Rampell: Again, some of the things we’re talking about would target just the very richest, most elite schools. A lot of them target every institution, whether that’s the international student stuff, the grants. There are also a bunch of other international student issues that we haven’t gotten to, including that this administration wants to take away the ability of newly minted international student graduates to work afterward. There are a lot of ways in which this will intersect with the rest of the economy. As I alluded to earlier, this has been our superpower, is being able to attract international talent from around the world, and having these engines of growth at universities. We are in, right now, as I understand it, a battle with China over the future of AI, over the future of EVs, over lots of other cutting edge technologies. Where does that basic research come from? It’s coming from other big research institutions. A lot of these state schools, flagships. There are a lot of big land grant universities that do really cutting edge work. If people care about winning the 21st century against China or any other place, this will affect them. I think it is a fundamental role of the federal government to seed basic research, and the main way that they do that in addition to the internal institutions that they are gutting, like the NIH, is through giving funds to established research institutions that show they can be responsible with that money and create cancer cures and new battery technology, and things like that. There are a lot of ways in which individual families in America will be hurt, but also the broader US economy and our ability to have higher living standards going forward.
Jason Willick: I agree. It’s very dangerous to threaten America’s innovation engine, and that’s the bludgeon that they’re trying to use. At the same time, we have this culture war that has set this off and that has given Trump that opportunity. I think you’re starting to see some universities try to realize that if they want subsidies and tax exemptions, that they’re going to have to be seen politically not as very far on one end of the spectrum. I don’t know what the compromise is, other than you asked at the beginning, should Penn revoke Trump’s degree? I think Harvard should maybe give him an honorary degree, that maybe what he wants. In fact, Andrew Jackson in his second term was given an honorary degree by Harvard against the objections of many New England elitists who thought that Jackson did not deserve an honorary degree. Anyway, this is obviously a contest of ego, a contest of political power. But it is dangerous, and I guess I’m seeing fault on both sides to some extent.
Dana Milbank: What should the degree be? Is it Doctor of Laws, maybe Doctor of Executive Orders?
Jason Willick: Deals. [laughter].
Dana Milbank: Master of Deals. Guys, we’re going to wrap this up. Thank you very much. That was a terrific discussion, and I appreciate you being here.
Catherine Rampell: Thanks, Dana. Thanks, Jason.
Jason Willick: Thanks. Good to see you guys.
Dana Milbank: [music] This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson and Regina de Heer, edited by Damir Marusic, Chris Suellentrop, and Allison Michaels, and mixed by Emma Munger. Special thanks to Mili Mitra and Deirdre Byrne. Thanks for listening to Impromptu. Please let us know what you think about the battle between Trump and elite universities. Send an email to [email protected]. See you next week. A reminder that right now and for a limited time, you can become a Washington Post subscriber at an incredible offer, $2 every four weeks for your entire first year, and then $12 every four weeks thereafter. You can cancel anytime. You can become a subscriber right now through the link in our show notes or go to washingtonpost.com/subscribe. That is washingtonpost.com/subscribe. [music]
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