Trump’s Assault on Higher Education Has Hit a Snag

Almost immediately after Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House and the Department of Education launched a shock-and-awe assault against its perceived foes in higher education, announcing a new investigation or seizure of funding seemingly every week. Their targets appeared overwhelmed by the speed and severity of the offensive. By the end of November, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern had all made deals with the administration to stop the onslaught. Harvard was rumored to be close to reaching a deal as well.

But the aggressive pace that won the administration so many early victories eventually proved to be its great weakness. The government could move so quickly only by skipping almost all of the procedural steps required by federal law. Once universities and their allies recovered from their shock and challenged the Trump administration, they were able to block many, if not most, of the White House’s moves in court. Trump has certainly left his mark on America’s universities. But he has not broken them.  

So much has happened during Trump’s second term that it can be hard to remember just how focused the administration once was on persecuting universities. In February 2025, Trump’s Education Department ordered colleges to end DEI trainings, stop awarding scholarships reserved for nonwhite students, and shut down any other programs, including affinity-group housing, that distinguished students by race or ethnicity. In a letter outlining its interpretation of legal precedent, the department argued that even race-neutral efforts to increase diversity could be illegal. And just as the Education Department was launching its anti-DEI offensive, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies began announcing that they would cap so-called indirect costs for university research—which help pay for research facilities and administrative expenses—at 15 percent, down from individually negotiated rates that could be as high as 70 percent. This represented a huge financial blow to universities that received federal research funding.

In March, the administration canceled $400 million of Columbia’s grants and contracts, ostensibly as punishment for the university’s failures to address anti-Semitism. It followed that up by freezing or canceling billions of dollars more in funding for research at Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and UCLA. (To restore funding, several of these schools later reached settlements with the administration either to pay the government or to fund local workforce development.) Last spring, Trump banned international students from dozens of countries, paused visa interviews for several weeks, revoked thousands of students’ legal immigration status, and detained several international students for activism against Israel. By June, he had banned Harvard from hosting any international students.

[Franklin Foer: Columbia protected its funding and sacrificed its freedom]

For a time, the threat to higher ed seemed existential and unstoppable. Contributing to this impression was the fact that most university leaders avoided speaking up for fear of incurring Trump’s wrath. In reality, however, the administration’s defeat had already been set in motion; the legal system just moves slowly. Faculty unions including the American Association of University Professors, supported by advocacy groups such as Democracy Forward and the ACLU, filed dozens of lawsuits, as did professors and students. “What the Trump administration is doing in cutting off funds to universities is clearly illegal,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School, who served as co-counsel on a case to restore some of the University of California system’s research funding, told me. The administration, he explained, hadn’t followed any of the procedures spelled out by federal law to revoke funds: “The response needs to be to go to court and challenge them.”

The American Council on Education, the sector’s largest trade group, joined with other trade groups and universities to sue the administration over its attempt to cap indirect research costs. This was only the second time in the group’s 107-year history that it had ever been a plaintiff in a lawsuit, ACE’s general counsel, Peter McDonough, told me. The government announced the policy change on a Friday night, and said it would go into effect the following week. “By Monday, we were in court,” McDonough said. The lawsuit argued both that the executive branch had skipped the necessary administrative procedures and that only Congress had the power to authorize an across-the-board change to the indirect-cost policy. The trade groups ended up filing four separate cases against different federal agencies.

By the summer, a pattern was emerging: Universities were steamrolling the administration in court. In June, a judge temporarily blocked the administration from revoking grants from the University of California researchers whom Chemerinsky represents. (The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is considering the government’s appeal of that decision.) The administration initially canceled or froze 1,600 grants; courts have restored all but 400, a UC spokesperson told me. The courts also preliminarily stopped the Education Department from enforcing its anti-DEI guidance, finding that the administration had likely bypassed proper procedures and risked unlawfully restricting speech. (Earlier this year, the administration said that it would not appeal the ruling.) Judges have ordered the Trump administration to restore the funding it withheld from Harvard, and they temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to prevent the university from enrolling international students. (A Harvard spokesperson confirmed that the university had received most of the funding.) And ACE won early judgments in the four lawsuits it was part of; the courts have stopped federal agencies from capping the indirect-cost rate. A number of judges have sided with international students who sued to reinstate their active immigration status, and in response, the administration said it would end its policy of unilaterally changing students’ immigration status until it found a lawful way to do so. Judges have ordered the Trump administration to release students detained for anti-Israel activism, including Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk. (Khalil is still subject to a deportation order, which he is challenging.)

In some cases, the courts found the administration’s policies unconstitutional. More commonly, judges have objected not to the policies themselves but to the manner in which the administration went about enacting them. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, told me that Trump could have achieved some of his aims legally. For example, universities that are found to have violated Title VI, which prohibits discrimination, can have some federal funds revoked after a lengthy fact-finding process. Instead, the administration simply asserted that schools had violated Jewish students’ rights and announced that it was revoking funds. According to Feldman, a serious investigation might have turned up real evidence of discrimination. “If they had been at all interested in following the law, that might have enabled them to cause legally serious problems for universities,” he said. “But they consistently have chosen not to deploy the law the way it’s written.”

In its haste, the administration also failed to bring Congress along. In May, the White House released a proposed budget calling on legislators to cut basic-science funding by nearly one-third. But after months of lobbying by university officials, Congress passed a budget that ignored Trump’s request and kept science funding stable. And it enacted an 8 percent tax on wealthy universities’ endowment investment income, far less than the 21 percent that some hard-line Republicans had proposed.

[Alexander Furnas and Dashun Wang: The Republicans made peace with science]

That’s not to say that Trump’s blows have all missed. “There is real harm,” Jon Fansmith, ACE’s head of government relations, told me. The administration has lost most of the higher-ed lawsuits against it, but not all of them. For example, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to cut nearly $4 billion in funding to USAID. This caused Johns Hopkins University, a major USAID partner, to lose more than $800 million in grants and lay off 2,200 employees. The UC system has lost $170 million in grants that are still suspended or terminated, a spokesperson told me. And even in cases where universities prevailed against the administration, the damage couldn’t be undone. Some researchers who temporarily lost funding were forced to pause clinical trials they had spent decades on, rendering the work unusable. And although Congress kept the federal research budget largely stable, the NIH has been much slower to disburse the money than under previous administrations. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, for example, has issued only one new award this fiscal year, compared with about 300 over the same period in prior years. “If a foreign power did this to American higher education, it would be considered an act of war,” Arthur Levine, the president of Brandeis University, told me. And the administration is still challenging many of its court losses. It could very well win in the conservative Supreme Court, Eugene Volokh, a UCLA Law School professor, told me.

Still, at least for now, the damage is far less than university officials feared last spring. “It was assault on all sides, and people’s heads were reeling,” Fansmith told me. “But I do think you sit here now and look back and say, What was actually accomplished?” Levine said that because of the successful lawsuits, the administration’s “rhetoric has been worse than the action.”

Moving forward, universities seem to be benefiting from Trump’s notoriously short attention span. When he addressed Congress last year, the president railed against transgender athletes in women’s sports and DEI in education. In the State of the Union last month, he didn’t mention higher ed at all, save for one proclamation that his administration had “ended DEI.” The days of Trump personally directing a vengeance campaign against the Ivy League seem to be over. Colleges have less reason to fear seemingly random and extralegal attacks. The possibility remains, however, that what comes next will be even worse. The Trump administration still has a Department of Education led by people full of contempt for elite universities. If they manage to get organized, they might yet figure out how to weaken higher education in a way that no judge can block.