Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts

[Zorro]

In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large. Comparing universities to the sci-fi totalitarianism of “The Matrix,” in which parasitic machines have seized control of reality itself, he said, “So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country is fundamentally determined by, supported by and reinforced by the universities.” Why, he asked, have conservatives consented to such intellectual tyranny?

Vance, then a Senate candidate, described being at a donor event and talking to a supporter about the absurdity of encouraging kids to take on debt to go to colleges that will brainwash them. The supporter asked, “What’s the alternative? I don’t want my kid to become an HVAC specialist,” installing and repairing heating and air-conditioning systems. With that attitude, said Vance, “we’re going to continue to empower the colleges and the universities that make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.”

Put aside, for a moment, the hypocrisy of this message coming from a man catapulted into the highest strata of American society by Yale Law School. The striking thing about Vance’s speech was its deep hostility to the entire academic enterprise, not just the so-called woke parts. He wasn’t talking about making more room for right-wing ideas in universities or even dreaming of taking them over. He wanted to destroy it all.

And now he’s part of a government taking steps to do just that. I’ve written about Donald Trump’s plan to crush the academic left, but it increasingly looks as though he and his allies are targeting academia more broadly, including the hard sciences that have long enjoyed bipartisan support. “I think the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities however possible,” Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at New America, a public policy think tank, told me. “It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/trump-college-academia-woke.html

Ignorance is strength.