Writes of Murph

Since taking power in January of 2025, the Trump Administration launched three major offensives against institutions of higher education: 1) the disruption of federal funding to academics under the false premise of reducing waste, 2) the stifling of free speech on university campuses using intimidation tactics, and 3) the eradication of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs on the basis that they violate civil rights law. These assaults are an extension of years of misleading messaging whose narrative has insisted that American universities are epicenters of wasteful spending, racist DEI ideology, and intolerance.

 

These seemingly different attacks are part of a deliberate political strategy to disarm the influence of universities in the US, which are currently viewed as propagators of progressive ideology. But one cannot successfully attack an institution that has a net positive impact on society without first damaging public confidence in it.

 

“DEI”, in addition to nondescript brandings of “wokeness” that have been trafficked in popular media for years, served as the trojan horse of this larger war. They were a mechanism that eroded the public’s confidence in the university and paved the way for its widespread dismantling. To this end, the weaponization of “wokeness”, an intellectually vague and seldomly defined critique, has been incredibly effective at garnering anti-university sentiment from all political affiliations.

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This was evidenced as the Trump Administration encountered surprisingly minimal resistance when they mischaracterized NIH-funded studies and lauded them as examples of wasted taxpayer money; or cancelled ongoing federal grants that did not align with their political priorities; or instructed masked officers to detain green-card holding students who authored dissenting op-eds; or revoked the legal status of international students for unspecified reasons; or in the name of colorblindness gutted DEI programs that assisted the upward mobility of vulnerable populations. This perception of “wokeness” at universities cultivated a climate where these overreaching and in some cases illegal actions were largely tolerated by the public.

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But close inspection of recent attacks on DEI reveals the duplicitous intentions of those who carry them out. Consider the Administration’s insincere advocacy for colorblind policies as an example. Those who publicly decry DEI will invoke the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to make a disingenuous point about colorblindness. They will do so without any sense of irony that Dr. King advocated tirelessly for policies that were color conscious. He argued for the use of equity to achieve equality. But to a public that shows general admiration for Dr. King, the battle of nuance is not won by the university that employs equitable, statistically backed, long-term scholarship and admissions initiatives in the pursuit of equality. Rather, it is won by those who present these efforts out of context to the public and frame them as unfair. It is these insincere motivations that have partly enabled the most effective attacks on the university system in over a century.

 

A common theme from pundits on both sides of the aisle is that “wokeness” must be driven from universities. To this point, the movement that followed #MeToo and Black Lives Matter deserves criticism, as it “cancelled” many public figures without a fair fact-finding process and put a severe strain on open dialog at a time when compassion was needed to change minds as opposed to condemnation. But these faults aside, this culture has all but fizzled out. What remains is a great irony – the “wokeness” that is the focal point of many attacks on universities is a central governing mechanism for the second Trump Administration.

 

This hypocrisy is evident when analyzing the scale of violence left by “woke” movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which are commonly demonized as destructive to our nation. With scale in mind, consider that supporters of President Trump did quantitatively more damage when they rioted past Capitol police on January 6th and disrupted the peaceful transition of power for the first time in our nation’s history. In total >140 Capitol and Metropolitan police were injured, 1,270 rioters were convicted of crimes, of which 320 were charged with felonies and 170 did so using a deadly weapon. Five police officers died or committed suicide in the aftermath of the Trump-fueled riots. Nearly all of the criminals were pardoned by President Trump, while the 14 from far-right extremist groups convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted. In just a few hours this group of Trump supporters committed more destruction than the worst pro-Palestine campus protests, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations combined. Yet the President leads a relentless campaign to brand universities – where pursuit of fact and voracious debate is the norm – as fertile ground for anti-American ideology. He does this all while releasing anti-democratic criminals back into society and illegally deporting people to foreign prisons.

 

The Trump Administration continues to push the narrative that universities are places of rampant unfairness, where “DEI hires” have degraded the integrity of our once precious institutions. This claim is made as they use the threat of billionaire-backed primary challenges to shut down opposition in their own party, as they withhold federal dollars to silence those who disagree with them in academia, or as they chastise DEI movements for ignoring merit while they simultaneously nominate a friend and former wrestling CEO to run the Department of Education, and a man with no background in science to run Health and Human Services. It can be argued “wokeness” has found a new commander.

 

The assault on higher education, a tragically precedented occurrence in the history of failing democratic nations, has forced on academics a rapidly closing window for reflection and corrective action. The ‘sit back quietly and hope for the best’ strategy will not convince the public that universities are essential incubators of free expression whose output drives economic and cultural growth.

 

Let this moment in history show that academics will not be among the first to fall to an aspiring authoritarian. This fork in the road of a 250 year-strong democracy that our grandparents and great-grandparents protected from dictatorship on two fronts must continue to bend toward due process and justice, toward the right to debate, and the right to disagree without fear of punishment or deportation. Universities are the backbone of these core American values.

 

Academics, including professors, students, and staff have limited time to correct the false narrative that is dominating the public square. The public must be convinced that universities in the US are the nucleus of these values. No local newspaper is too small to publish an op-Ed that defends the university as an essential component to a thriving economy. No online forum is too insignificant to combat the false narrative that campuses host an intolerant, homologous ideology. No conversation in the public square is too tiring to engage in meaningful discussion about how universities can better serve their community.  

 

And as academics make their case to a public who understandably has a general distrust for higher education, they should be sure to make the point that “woke” universities have resulted in the deaths of zero police officers in the pursuit of making America great.