President Donald Trump is in a standoff with some of America's top universities.
Two weeks ago the administration froze $2 .3 billion in federal grants to Harvard. That's because the university refused to comply with demands to overhaul its admissions and DEI policies.
Then this week, U .S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon told the school it shouldn't father applying for future government grants.
This is Swamp Notes the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all the things happening in US politics.
I'm Mark Filippino. And this week we're asking, why should we care about Trump's fight with elite universities?
Here with me to discuss is Andrew Jack.
He's the FT's global education editor.
Hi Andrew. Hi there.
Good to be here. And we've also got Miles McCormack, the FT's acting Washington correspondent.
He's here right next to me.
Hey, Miles. Hey, Mark.
Good to be back on the show.
So Miles, Harvard's not the only university losing government funding.
Columbia lost around $400 million before it complied to the administration's demands.
Cornell has lost some funding, and there are others, too.
But Harvard is, by far, the hardest hit.
Why is that? What happened there?
Well, in a nutshell, because Harvard's hit back, hit back the strongest. I mean if we back up a bit that there's been this all out assault from this administration on what it sees as kind of elite quote unquote woke universities and it sought to freeze funding and reign in universities from Harvard to Penn to Columbia in what it describes as an effort to clamp down on anti -Semitism on campus, but also because it takes issue with what it sees as the left -wing leanings of some of these universities.
And while some of them have complied with some of the demands of the administration, Colombia being a prime example there, when the administration sought to freeze $400 million in funding it agreed to overhaul some of its policies.
Harvard has kicked back and when the administration sought to freeze 2 .3 billion in research funding to Harvard, Harvard sued it and said what it was doing is illegal and that's just triggered a kind of an intensification of the standoff where the administration has doubled down on its attack on Harvard. Yeah I'd agree with Miles.
I mean we have to go back to the Trump election campaign and of course then with the Gaza protests in 2023, suddenly a number of universities were in the sights of the MAGA activists, if you like, and alleged anti -Semitism or the failures of universities to respond to allegations of anti -Semitism were really something that became a real important fuel actually in the election campaign.
And Harvard, Penn and Columbia were perhaps top of the list. It's about the elite universities because clearly there's a sense of frustration, resistance to these ivory towers, offering lots of opportunities to their graduates that perhaps aren't available in the heartland of the US.
And of course the other factor at work is that all three of them are in large cities.
Many of their graduates actually went onto Wall Street or into successful banking and finance careers and have leveraged a lot of their power and influence as donors and as public voices to really sort of stoke up this debate.
JS Right. And we saw hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who went to Harvard, basically trashed the university.
Andrew, help me understand what does a university like Harvard use that money for anyway?
Well, the initial funds that have been frozen at Harvard, at Columbia and elsewhere are largely federal research funding, so from the National Institutes of Health for medical work, for example, but also National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, a full range of government funding that really, since the Second World War, has been fundamentally important for research and development and innovation, and in many ways for the success of the US economy.
It's a significant share of income for those and many other universities.
Although of course alongside it there's income from tuition fees, from donations, and of course in a number of cases notably Harvard also, interest earned on their endowments.
I'm glad you brought up the endowment.
That endowment is actually quite large.
It's actually the the biggest endowment of any American university.
It's $53 billion. 53, 53 billion, that's right.
Kind of easily the largest really in the world.
So can it just dip into that pot of money to keep things running?
Well, I think in the short term it and a number of other universities are looking to do that.
It clearly does provide some reserves and certainly there have been periods in the past for example, during COVID when obviously was a big financial crisis of students not turning up or not paying, to sort of smooth over some of the additional costs.
So, sometimes it can be viewed in exceptional periods as a rainy day fund.
But, of course, like anything, like indeed our own personal pensions, if you take money out now you're going to have much less income in the future.
So, that's one pushback.
A second that you often hear from those managing the endowments is most of them are so -called restricted in other words they're generated from donors and donors give that money to be spent in particular ways.
And actually a lot of the surplus revenue that's generated each year from endowments that isn't reinvested to grow the pot is actually used for financial aid so ironically efforts to tap into those endowments now mean that fewer students from lower income backgrounds disadvantage backgrounds will be able to gain access to these elite institutions?
I would say that the scale of the Endowment is probably one of the things that makes this kind of attack on the University so politically expedient.
I mean, in the letter that Linda McMahon, the former world wrestling executive that's now head of the Department of Education, sent this week to Harvard, she made the point explicitly that Harvard should just dip into its quote -unquote, massive endowment fund and get support from its rich alumni.
And that's the kind of thing that is going to play well in the kinda Republican heartlands that the Trump administration is courting the vote of or was voted into office by.
And often people won't necessarily have an appreciation of the kinda nuances of the supports that money provides that Andrew just outlined there.
So there's a huge political expediency argument there.
You guys both describe the administration's argument about anti -semitism running rampant on these campuses.
What are universities saying about these allegations of anti -semitism?
I think there's definitely an element of reflection and partly legitimate recognition that there have been concerns on campus.
I think not just simply anti -semitism, but frankly views and attitudes that could be taken as aggressive in all sorts of directions, including anti -Muslim sentiment, and I think that partly comes out instantly of the pandemic and a period when people in that key moment of adolescence and their early twenties were in isolation and have got used to this sort of performative quite aggressive form of expression on social media and disengaged from frankly ordinary human interaction and sensitivity.
So there are legitimate concerns that a lot of the universities have said they do take any attempts at sort of threatening of sensitivities to individual's behaviour and feelings very seriously, but they also think there are limits and there are appropriate policies in place that can be used to address them and that legal attacks or funding withdrawals and demands for heavy US administration supervision or intervention are not the best way forward. Yeah I mean one thing I found interesting reading Secretary McMahon's letter to Harvard this week was that the emphasis on alleged anti -Semitism seemed
to have shifted. It was kind of only mentioned in a tangential way and the focus was I think really getting down to what the kind of underlying driver for the administration is, which is the idea that it's just a liberal institution whose kind of values and politics are at odds with the kind of MAGA philosophy of this current administration, driven in large part by the President's Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller.
So that the letter which was kind of a three -page tirade, and spoke in depth about plagiarism, about alleged unlawfulness, about the DEI factors, but yeah it kind of moved away from this kind of anti -semitism argument which was at the core before kind of suggesting that at the heart of it it's just kind of this fundamental disagreement on the parts of the administration with everything that kind of Harvard stands for or that it sees Harvard as standing for.
I mean, of course, one of the ironies of this attack on elite institutions is certain of the country's current leadership, not least Donald Trump himself, who was at Wharton in Penn or indeed J .G.
Vance, who was at Yale or others, including Elise Stefanik, who is leading the charge on the hill in the last couple of years, who was at Harvard. These are all people who've benefited from these elite institutions.
So I think there's a big danger economically and politically in a certain degree.
frankly, of hypocrisy in what we're seeing.
Kind of, kind of the idea of pulling up the ladder behind them.
Andrew, you mentioned the research programs that have been targeted at Harvard and elsewhere.
How likely is it that this will all have an effect on the broader economy?
Like, are we going to stop seeing work orders at labs?
Is that going to impact specific industries?
And could it even affect innovation more broadly?
Yeah, I mean, I've been doing quite a lot of discussions with people about that recently.
I think there can be some huge effects and, of course, interestingly, not least in a lot of red states, where very often, the university is the glue at the center of the regional economy.
It's very often reaching out to rural parts of the different states.
It's a huge contributor in employment and in funding for different sorts of activities and sometimes for taxes and so on.
So, even in the short term, I think there's a real danger, you know, you get a lot of US cities where so -called EDs and MEDs i .e. the university and the medical or hospital center around it, contribute very significantly to the local economy.
So, any reduction, either in funding directly, as we're seeing at the moment, or the parallel trend we haven't yet talked about, the anti -immigration push which is affecting the appetite of international students to come in and those students often provide significant tuition revenues to universities across the country not just to the elites is quite dangerous and then the longer -term implications are also fundamental.
If we look just at the National Institutes of Health and Medical Research for example a lot of clinical trials have been suspended or cancelled but in parallel to those targeted attacks, we've seen across the board demands to cut the so -called indirect element of grants that's given to universities.
That's something like four billion dollars a year across the country.
And as those overheads, including, you know, supporting auxiliary staff, laboratories, big technical equipment get cut, universities are having to respond by trimming costs, letting people go, not renewing contracts.
and also not perhaps creating and funding opportunities for the next generation, whether it's of scientists or indeed clinicians.
So I think there are, you know, this is part of a whole wider ranging attack which also touches, for example, on the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control and beyond.
All of that with big repercussions, not just for early stage research, which tends to be the real specialism of the university.
but what that leads to, whether it's in terms of patents and technology, and the possibilities, ultimately, for commercialization, but also the whole infrastructure of academia, of the training of future doctors and researchers.
So, some big long -term consequences of what we're seeing.
So, Miles, just out of curiosity, where do we see this going?
You know, I noticed this week that there was a hearing in the House Education Committee that included the presidents of colleges that have much lower profiles than Harvard. You know, we're talking Haverford College in Pennsylvania, DePaul University in Chicago.
Are the Republicans expanding their campaign against colleges to include other universities besides the Ivies?
— Yeah, I think so.
And I think that was always kind of the idea of this project.
Yeah, there's been headlines about Harvard and about Penn and about Columbia because of the scale of those universities, and as we were saying earlier, the kind of scale of their wealth.
But there is kind of a wider philosophical project that's been pushed here by elements of the administration that see universities, liberal universities, as the enemy, as kind of a hotbed of liberalism, of wokism, And they've got big plans to kind of try and suffocate some of their funding and dial them back, rain them in, and make life as difficult as possible for them, unless they kind of change their tune and become more palatable to the MAGA rite.
Alright guys, on that note, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to do Out of the Swamp.
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We are back with Out of the Swamp, where we ask our guests about a story they've been watching outside of Washington politics.
Andrew, what do you have for us?
Well, one thing I just can't resist, and of course Donald Trump in some ways reflects anything even well outside Washington, but of course is this extraordinary story of the selection of the new Pope, no doubt partly sort of risen in the public imagination through, of course, the Oscar -winning conclave. I mean, a fascinating result.
First of all, extraordinarily rapid compared to what the movie showed and what, over many decades and centuries even, has often been a very protracted process.
So very quickly to see the white smoke rising was quite exciting.
So that's on one thing.
The other thing I have to add in...
I've been reading a lot at the moment about the downsides of technology, including AI, how it's sort of providing a distraction, limiting attention spans, kind of people almost outsourcing all of their thinking and cognition.
And of course, amongst other things in my role, I engage a lot with high schools and there's just a huge level of concern I think about how to get students reading and engaging with, dare I say it, high quality media, engaging with what's going on in the world, thinking about high quality fact based reporting, which is something that we amongst others through our own program offering free access to the FT into high schools are very keen to encourage.
All right, Miles, what about you?
What are you watching this week?
Well, mine is slightly more left field.
Um, what I've been watching is an ongoing debate in Ireland around And what's known as skorts.
Okay, what is skorts?
Glad you asked. What is skorts?
What are skorts? So key question.
Skorts are effectively what they sound like.
They're a mix between shorts and a skirt and they are compulsory attire in a Gaelic sport known as Komogi, which is another another concept for you here.
So, camogie is the women's version of hurling, another Irish sport, which is effectively kind of somewhere between lacrosse and hockey, but much older, much faster, much more Irish.
So we've got hurling, camogie and sports.
Just making sure that we have all the vocab down.
All the vocab. So multiple new concepts for our for listeners to familiarise themselves with.
What's the controversy, then?
So the controversy is in Komogi, the compulsory attire the players have to wear are skorts and because they're kind of, I don't know, an archaic piece of clothing, there's been an increasingly heated debate over whether players should wear them or whether they can just wear shorts and there was push to change the rules in the Gaelic Athletic Association last year that didn't come off, so there's been an increasing level of protests where women lying out to play would wear shorts and there have been games that have been kind of on the brink of being called off, they've been told to go back and get
into sports. And now it seems like the protest is kind of having an effect.
There has been games recently where they've just got a reprimand but the game has been allowed to go ahead with them playing in shorts and now it looks like there will be another vote coming up in the not too distant future to change the rules so that women playing kamogi can wear shorts and because it's the 21st century.
This is, OK, so this is very interesting.
I'm glad that you brought this up.
I think I finally follow.
This is basically for Americans listening out there.
This is field hockey kind of and and and the attire that field hockey players wear in here in the U .S. effectively.
So it's I mean, it's kamogi.
So it's a different sport.
But it's it's it's close to field hockey.
OK. Well, I think that's the closest I'm going to get in terms of comprehension.
But I appreciate all the learning that you brought to the program today, Miles.
They're really sports, closed language, and a very, very rich mix we have here at the FT. I want to thank our guests, Miles McCormick, he's the FT's acting Washington correspondent.
Thanks, Miles. Thanks, Mark.
And Andrew Jack, he's our global education editor.
Thanks, Andrew. Thank you.
If you wanna sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we've got a link to that in the show notes.
Our show is mixed by Sam Giavenko and produced by Katya K tooltip.
Special thanks this week to Sonia Hudson and as always Pierre Nicholson.
I'm your host Mark Filippino. Our acting Co -Head of audio is Topher Forehace, original music by Hannis Brown.
Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.
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