The Push to Make America Dumber
By slashing funding & targeting DEI, Trump and his far-right allies aren’t just reshaping campus culture. They’re deciding what counts as truth and who wields power in a future remade in their image.
Cornell University could soon lose $1 billion in federal funding, the White House said late Tuesday. At Northwestern, the figure is $790 million. Columbia is facing $400 million in cuts, and Trump may seek judicial overview of the school for years. Brown University is also facing $400 million in losses.
Princeton — which announced that dozens of research grants have been suspended, including a key look at climate change — has $210 million at risk. And Harvard? Brace yourself. The Trump administration has issued a list of demands the university must meet to hold on to roughly $9 billion in grants and contracts, including ending all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
It boggles the mind, but more than 50 universities are being investigated by the Trump administration for alleged racial discrimination as part of a dogged campaign by him and his racist far-right enablers to end DEI programs on campus. Trump officials insist these schools are purposely excluding white and Asian-American students.
But let’s look more closely. The percentage of Asian-Americans at Harvard last year made up about a third of the student body, white kids made up another third while Hispanic or Latino students were at 16% and Black students at 14%. Bottomline, neither Asian-Americans nor white kids seem particularly discriminated against. The percentages for black and Hispanic or Latino students run pretty much on par with the percentages of 18-to-24 year-olds in the U.S. population overall.
Historically, the numbers show a changing, and necessary, dynamic. In 1952, the year I was born, there were just four Black students at Harvard, among 1,000 students overall. And a decade after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, Black students still constituted no more than 1% of the student bodies at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
The Trump administration’s financial bullying, hitting universities where it hurts the most, is a clear effort to drag the country back to a 1950s Father Knows Best era, when white men ruled the roost.
These institutions aren’t ivory towers or “woke” training camps. They’re pipelines to the commanding heights of American life: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, media, politics, and law. The far-right architects behind Project 2025 know this. And with Trump’s long history of racist hostility, they’re moving fast to remake academia in their own image.
Cutting off federal funding will make colleges more expensive and less accessible, especially for working-class students and Black and brown communities. That narrows the worldview of the people who will one day hold power. And without diverse perspectives in the room — in the newsroom, the courtroom, the boardroom — we lose touch with what’s real in the shared spaces where America actually lives.
We lose the ability to see the country in full, and to solve its problems in a just, honest, and durable way.
Meanwhile, the administration is continuing to gut research funding at universities that have long produced America’s top scientists, engineers, and medical pioneers.
Grants are being frozen or revoked not as collateral damage, but as deliberate punishment for perceived political defiance, and to wipe clean the progressive ideas that have developed so naturally over the past 50 years.
Princeton, for one, is losing roughly $4 million in federal funding for climate research after the Trump administration claimed the work promoted “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and fueled “climate anxiety” among young Americans. The projects on the chopping block? Studies on how global warming drives sea-level rise and extreme weather events.
You think that kind of research might be useful to places like Florida and Texas, red states already feeling the brunt of climate change? Or how about something close to my heart: Long Island?
Florida is one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to rising seas. Miami and much of South Florida sit barely above sea level, and the state loses more coastline to flooding every year. Texas, meanwhile, has faced a relentless barrage of record-breaking heatwaves, brutal droughts, and catastrophic floods, sometimes all in the same year.
And Long Island? Let’s make this personal: We were battered by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, a so-called once-in-a-century event that wasn’t the least bit “implausible” for those of us who lived through it.
These short-sighted, ideologically driven cuts to university research rob young, brilliant minds of the chance to make a difference. They mean fewer breakthroughs, fewer labs chasing bold ideas, fewer scientists trained to push the frontiers of knowledge.
It’s a quiet assault on the country’s brainpower, and its diversity. The result isn’t just control over the present, it’s a deliberate kneecapping of the future. And I suspect that may be the point. The dumber you make America, the easier it is for Trump and his hard-right enablers to tighten their grip on power.
Ideological Control
Trump’s demands on Columbia University are a blueprint for ideological control, not so much campus safety. They’ve forced the university to fast-track disciplinary actions through a new Office of Institutional Equity with the power to defund or shut down student groups that initiate protests.
On top of that, 36 new NYPD-appointed “campus patrol officers” now roam Columbia’s private property, unarmed but authorized to remove or arrest students during what the demand labels as “disruptions.”
Let’s be honest about who these rules are meant for. This isn’t a general policy to keep students in line. It’s a targeted strike against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, plain and simple. And it comes at a time when Trump is proposing emptying Gaza of the Palestinians who have made it their home to create a beachfront playground for the wealthy.
You think Trump’s sons and son-in-law — Jared Kushner — aren’t salivating at what they could build on that land? In a recent interview, Kushner commented on Gaza's potential, stating that its "waterfront property could be very valuable," prompting unease among many in Washington about the blending of personal profit motives with foreign policy.
If a group of Jewish students organized a march in support of Israel, yelling out ant-Palestinian chants, or if a cluster of clean-cut WASP kids staged a sit-in against gender-neutral bathrooms, does anyone believe Trump would be threatening to yank federal funding? Of course not.
It’s not about simple dissent. It’s about establishing the theology of the hard-right as deeply as possible into college campuses Dissent that challenges that theology isn’t just discouraged, it’s treated as treason.
Look, I’m no Ivy League snob, though God knows I’ve met a few of them in my journalism career. I didn’t go to college. Circumstance pushed me into the job market early, and I’ve been clawing my way forward ever since.
But I’ve come to respect over time what deep education can offer. I’ve seen it in the clarity of the arguments by young reporters I work with, the rigor in their research, the historical memory that shows up in their writing. I’ve always believed I could hold my own with the best of them, particularly in my writing and my gut feel for news, and often I have. And, really, we all know that attending college isn’t for everyone, no matter what job they aspire to.
But the best of these young minds offer a kind of intellectual seriousness that this country can’t afford to lose. They offer the ability to look beyond the basics, challenge every-day assumptions and uncover deeper, hidden truths. That’s what makes this assault on knowledge so dangerous. It’s not just a war on facts. It’s a war on future fact-finders.
If you control who gets in the room, you control who writes the rules. And make no mistake about it: Trump’s allies aren’t just trying to dominate the present. They’re engineering a future where the pipeline of diverse, dissenting, and disruptive thinkers is choked off before it ever begins.