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Elite networks

Trump’s larger attack on higher education is not a mere use of Leftist methodology. It weaponises a larger American lack of faith in college that is widespread across the political spectrum

Saikat Majumdar Published 12.03.25, 07:19 AM
Harvard campus with brilliant fall foliage.

Harvard campus with brilliant fall foliage. Representational image.

The 21st-century populist Right has turned out shiningly savvy at deploying Leftist critiques to its own goals. The philosopher, Bruno Latour, pointed to this clever sleight-of-hand two decades ago by describing the argument of certain Republicans in the United States of America that global warming is just a social construct. Postmodernist scepticism of objective reality, traditionally adapted by the Left for the dismantling of ideologies behind race and gender, became an unlikely rhetorical tool used to discredit scientific arguments about the reality of environmental degradation. Last week, the irony came full circle as the Donald Trump administration cancelled the National Institute of Health’s grants on research on trans-identity on the grounds of such research being “unscientific”, fuelled by “gender ideology extremism”. These days, whether something is science or ideology depends on who’s in power.

Going by the position of the US president, Donald Trump, on environment and sustainability, the degrading state of the planet might as well be a Left-liberal fiction. But his administration’s larger attack on higher education is not a mere use of Leftist methodology. It weaponises a larger American lack of faith in college, particularly its power to shape social mobility, that is widespread across the political spectrum for a range of conflicting reasons. And in its decision to tax the endowments of wealthy private universities, this administration has done something with which the Left will have real trouble disagreeing.

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No observer of higher education in the US can deny that upward social mobility — that great American dream — has been poorly served by the established network of wealthy private universities. Elite private universities have always prided themselves on being exclusive rather than inclusive, with their goal of combining social inclusivity with intellectual exclusivity historically muddied. It is well-known that the great burden of upward social mobility, the fulfilment of working class, minoritised, and immigrant dreams are carried out on a real scale by the vast network of community colleges and second and third tier State universities across the US.

While State-supported education has increasingly withered under Republican assaults, Trump’s call to tax wealthy private universities that have enjoyed non-profit status has brought the wheel full circle. We now have the complete mirror to the pervasive phenomenon of popular decline in faith in higher education to secure social mobility or even to get a job. The forces behind this erosion of faith range far and wide, from practical ones like astronomical tuition to ideological ones such as the perceived ‘wokeness’ of universities — forces from the entire range of the political spectrum. But anyone who is familiar with the way the leading Ivy League colleges have multiplied their endowments in the last few decades through the sophisticated nexus among their alumni network, boards of trustees, and Wall Street (most famously illustrated by the wealth-management of Yale’s legendary endowment manager, David Swensen), may have trouble negotiating it with the non-profit status of these endowments.

This is an open-ended ethical debate. The Ivy League principle of devoting colossal resources to a tiny group of people is the academic embodiment of capitalism. But this academic realisation of high capitalism also created, in the 20th century, what is possibly history’s most magnificent university system, with research that reshaped life and thought and moulded equally impressive student trajectories, albeit carved with inherited privilege. The American private university system has exactly the same merits and flaws that inhere in capitalism at large.

Whatever the consortium of causes — whatever unlikely coalition of Left and Right peeves — the bad news is that a large segment of American people have now lost their faith in the power of higher education, and certainly their willingness to pay a hefty price for it. For State schools, the tags grow heftier with eroding support from federal and state governments — something that is certain to accelerate if the federal
government ends up dismantling the Department of Education. This deepens a vicious cycle where low government support and high tuition increasingly catalyse each other. The net result is that the faith in an overpriced college education continues to drop, and this is where the populist Right embodied by Trump finds favourable political weather for its own dismissal of the needs of higher education, particularly of its inclusive versions.

If Trump’s decision to tax large endowments of increasingly corporatised private universities comes across as aligned with Left critiques of elite higher-ed, the Republican withdrawal of tax dollars from public universities remains an aggressive right-wing measure. It so happens that the latter has also been the Right’s major method of erosion of the efficacy and credibility of higher education in the predominantly socialist landscape of India — not just through attrition of funds but by incessant political interference and with convenient finger-pointing at student activism that has repeatedly accentuated the “anti-national” tag.

The most terrifying fact is that this is probably the worst time in history to lose faith in higher education. Not that there was ever a good time for this loss. But as a wide variety of jobs and skills become irrelevant with the invasion of machine intelligence in the coming years, a sizeable section of the workforce will need ways to retrain and re-educate themselves. AI will do a lot of things for us, and massive wealth will be produced for a tiny number of oligarchs whom experts have started calling the techno-feudalists. But just the way digital culture and social media created a false sense of mass empowerment while turning the masses into unsuspecting markets for the techno-feudalists, we now know that AI will eventually perfect this exploitation where the immense economic benefits of machine intelligence will be sucked up by a tiny minority of cloud capitalists. For the vast majority, urgent questions about life, skills,
and employability will depend on constant and innovative re-education. But the clever stimulation of mass anger against the perceived elitism of higher education only leaves the masses at the mercy of oligarchs who have aced the populism game. In the inhuman world of patterns and algorithms trained only to maximise profits for the techno-feudalists, there is no mercy for humanity.

Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony

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