Every university and college in the United States is facing a direct, multi-pronged assault from the Trump administration.

Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP):

“This is obviously the most intense assault on higher education by the federal government in the history of the United States,” he said. “Everyone is coming into fire.”

“Students and faculty heading back to US colleges and universities from summer break are returning to bruised institutions reeling from the Trump administration’s unprecedented campaign to bend higher education to its ideological will, and are bracing for more uncertainty ahead,” according to The Guardian.

“At the University of Utah, the Black student union has lost its funding and campus space – one of many student groups to face the brunt of Donald Trump’s anti-diversity measures. Indiana’s public universities have cut or merged more than 400 degree programs, about one-fifth of their academic offerings, while scores of other universities have made similar cuts as their budgets are on the line. At Harvard and Columbia, certain forms of criticism of Israel will now be punishable as antisemitism. And across the country, schools will see their international student population plummet after the administration erected a host of new barriers to students seeking to travel to the US.”

Unfortunately, many U.S. citizens and journalists seem to be focused primarily on the Trump administration’s coercion of elite Ivy League universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. Some attention is being paid to the plight of flagship public research universities like UCLA, Virginia, and Indiana.

However, President Trump’s political appointees and operatives in the so-called DOGE, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Program, and other federal agencies are pursuing a nation-wide assault on higher education that is already transforming universities and their research and teaching missions.

State universities, regional comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges are all feeling the effects of the Trump administration’s anti-democratic policies that restrict student visas, harass international and undocumented students, restrict academic research topics, remove scientific data from federal agency websites, freeze grant funding, terminate grants and fellowships, politicize peer review processes, restrict academic publications, alter research findings and museum exhibitions, distort academic research presentation, and threaten academic freedom.

The Trump administration has also unlawfully targeted students, researchers, and professors directly by detaining students and researchers, stripping student and researcher visas, threatening to remove students’ and researchers’ permanent resident or citizenship status, firing research officers and administrators, packing university and academic boards of directors, threatening and firing museum directors, and coercing university presidents and pressuring them to resign.

Make no mistake, the Trump administration’s clear goal is to disrupt the entire American model of higher education, destroying university autonomy, research integrity, democratic access to higher education, and academic freedom in the process.

Speri, Alice. “‘Everyone is Coming into Fire’: Students Return to US Campuses Bruised and Changed by Trump’s Assault.” The Guardian (23 August 2025).