Trump’s Campus Crackdown Is Long Overdue

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to talk a little bit today about the universities in general and specifically the antisemitic protests that have been transpiring and continuing and the Trump reaction to them.

The larger landscape was that when the Trump administration came into power, they said, “My gosh, these universities are bastions, supposedly, of civil discourse, civil rights. But they’re abusing these privileges. And we’re not going to fund Columbia University, to take one example, with $400 million unless they concede to certain protections of their own students.”

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And some of them extended to recommendations or rules not to wear masks or not disrupt lectures, etc., etc. This week you’ve seen student protesters still wearing masks. So, those were, apparently, not enforced.

The interim president at Columbia resigned because she was saying one thing to the faculty and another thing to the Trump officials.

But at Princeton University this week a former prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, was speaking and then a throng of Princeton students—maybe 90% of them, apparently, were students—outside the hall tried to shout him down. And some disrupted the lecture inside the hall. And Jewish students reported they were subject to antisemitic, anti-Jewish slurs and taunts. And the university knew that the speech was scheduled and, apparently, did not make any extra efforts to ensure the integrity of the lecture.

Which all brings up my point. And that is, I don’t think the American universities understand where they are right now.

If you look at polls of the American people who used to poll, survey 60%, 70% in favor to the idea of higher education, the juggernaut of the American economy, that’s gone. It’s been gone the last half-century. These are hotbeds, especially, at the elite campuses of indoctrination. And they’re polling about 35% of the approval rate of the American people.

With 90% to 95% of their law or their humanities faculty openly Democratic and left-wing, there is no diversity. They have separate graduations predicated on race, separate spaces, separate dormitories.

What am I getting at? The Trump administration wants to call them to account. And they have a lot of levers that the universities, apparently—like Princeton or Columbia—don’t seem to take seriously.

They’re dependent on millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money. Why? I don’t know because they have multibillion-dollar endowments. But nonetheless, they’ve predicated their budgets on federal monies.

But the Trump administration says, “You’re not obeying the First or the Fourth or Fifth or Sixth Amendments. You’re not guaranteeing the Bill of Rights to your own students. You’re allowing antisemitism in the year 2025 as if it’s the 19th century or something. What are you doing?”

And the universities seem to ignore it.

“Well, we’ll stop people wearing masks.” They don’t. “We’ll stop antisemitism.” They don’t. Why? They seem, first of all, to be indebted to foreign students. We have about 300,000 Chinese students and maybe a quarter million from the Middle East that pay full tuition. And they’re a powerful block on campus.

In addition, we have billions of dollars from Mideast sheikdoms, like Qatar, but also China, that endow professorships. And you give a billion dollars, you can get a hundred or more, 150 fully endowed professors for a Middle East student department that can be very influential, training this country’s next generation of diplomats and civil servants and politicians.

But the university should be very careful. They have a lot of exposure. Already, the National Institutes of Health says, “We know what you’re doing. You’re on individual grants from the government. You’re charging 50%, 60%. That’s not gonna happen. Fifteen percent tops.” That’s gonna cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of their budget.

Now, the Congress is saying, “We know what you’re doing. You’re not nonpartisan. You’re not nonideological. You’re going to pay a tax—an income tax—on your huge endowment income.” That could be a $100-$150 million, in some cases.

Now, the administration says, “You’re not defenders of civil rights. You are offenders. And we are going to cut back grants to you because you don’t follow the Bill of Rights. You do not guarantee freedom of speech. You do not follow civil rights statutes and make race and gender and sexual orientation incidental rather than essential to these students’ personas. And you give them preferences based on their superficial appearance.”

In other words, what I’m getting at is they are violating the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. They think they’re too big to fail. They think they’re immune. They think there will be a liberal administration back.

But they should be very careful because they’re in violation of a number of statutes. And the administration has a number of levers to pull, whether it’s taxing the endowment, getting out of the student loan business and letting the universities use their own endowment to guarantee their loans, cutting back the surcharges on individual grants, and suing them in federal courts to open up their admissions policies in a transparent and meritocratic fashion.

So, my advice to Columbia University and especially to the president of Princeton: Either protect the civil rights of Jewish students and students in general or expect a backlash from the federal government, the magnitude of which you really have not recognized and you should fear.

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