By the 1960s, in the wake of Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, America was seized by a national fervor for scientific and technological education. Federal R & D funding skyrocketed, supporting not just engineering and military projects but also the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Universities became hubs of government-backed knowledge production. In 1957, funding from the National Science Foundation stood at $40 million; by 1968, it had climbed to nearly $500 million. These investments fueled space exploration, medical research, literary magazines and global diplomacy. Knowledge in this era was not partisan; it was a national asset.
Yet this arrangement also carried contradictions with it. While the university thrived on public funding, the presence of left-wing voices among its students and faculty members made it a target for conservatives, who, as evidenced by the Red Scare, were already profoundly distrustful of left-leaning academics. Ronald Reagan targeted Berkeley’s free speech movement in his campaign to become governor of California. In the late 1960s, President Richard Nixon’s administration debated cutting university funding over Vietnam War protests on campuses. Though it never followed through, more than 100 people without tenure were fired for their political activities, and states considered bills to criminalize participation in campus protests. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush attacked “political correctness” for restricting “enterprise, speech and spirit” and leading to “bullying.” But on a broader level there seemed to be a tacit sense on the right that for all of its problems, the modern research university was of real value — even a great strength of America, a reason people come here, an instrument of soft power and, indeed, a branding tool. As Nixon himself originally put it, when he rejected House-proposed legislation to end federal funding to universities that allowed campus protests of the war, doing so would be “cutting off our nose to spite our face.” The responsibility, he insisted, “should be on the college administrators.”
Not now. What is distinctive about what is happening is that the very concept of the research university as an autonomous institution is under direct attack. The shift is stark. If, during the Cold War, the government funded universities as a way of strengthening America, Mr. Trump’s second administration treats them as a threat to be dismantled. The real question driving their “reforms” is not whether federal support for universities should continue but whether universities deserve to exist in their current form at all.
If the university has always been politicized one way or another, why should conservatives care about protecting the intellectual freedom currently housed in what are predominantly liberal institutions? The answer is earnest and aspirational: because the serious, reflective work of scholarship benefits us all. Because academic freedom makes it possible to critique institutionality from within at a time when institutions rule our lives. Because it permits intellectuals and scientists to question realities we have become complacent about. Because it creates space for values that live outside the capitalist marketplace. Because it houses art and artists. Yes, the university can be, like any community anywhere, divisive, censorious, sometimes too ideologically homogeneous. But when it works, it trains people to think critically, powerfully and unflinchingly. The strongest critiques of the National Institutes of Health I’ve heard, for instance, have been voiced not by Mr. Trump or Elon Musk but by academics who understand its workings and have the theoretical framework to imagine how to reform it.
The Trump administration’s orders arrive at a precarious moment in America — a moment of transformative technologies, escalating climate crises and global instability. It’s a moment that demands more from universities, not less. “The core mission of the humanities is more important than ever,” Robin Kelsey, a former dean of arts and humanities at Harvard, told me. As he explained, the humanities as we know them emerged in response to the violence of the two world wars, precisely because those conflicts revealed that scientific progress does not guarantee moral progress. A humanist education teaches us to question dominant narratives, to recognize how certain ways of thinking rise to prominence while others fade from view.
