Trump vs. Higher Education: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Trump vs. Higher Education: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Our [Music] main story tonight concerns universities. They brought us friendships, staggering, unrelenting debt, royalty comedies where the protagonists engage in antics we now recognize as sexual assault, and amazing research studies like this. I see this childlike curiosity when people see these rats driving. I’m surprised at the extent, but I know that we’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, and every person who’s has seen it. They just they’re they’re surprised. They seem to be intrigued by this. Yeah, of course they are. It’s a rat driving a car. What is not to be intrigued by? Unfortunately though, tonight’s show is not going to be about rats driving cars. I mean, it can be. You can just play the last 30 seconds over and over again. I certainly would. Instead, it’s going to be about Trump’s ongoing war with higher education. In his last presidential campaign, Trump promised to target universities, especially those that he said were engaging in racial discrimination, suggesting the universities become increasingly hostile to white students. And as protests against the war in Gaza broke out across campuses, his campaign rhetoric escalated. To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately. Vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students who want a safe place from which to learn. Okay. I pledge to take back our campuses for all the normal students. Might be one of the most lots to unpack there of all the theirs we’ve ever unpacked. And with all due disrespect, what the does Donald Trump know about being normal? Vanquish the radicals is the weirdest possible way to say anything. It is a super villain phrase right up there with guards seize them or let’s round up all the. And for the record, college isn’t the place to be normal. It’s the place to eat like a complete monster. Get weirdly into posters for the one and only time in your life and audition different personalities. It’s for reinvention. It’s the first time that you won’t be around the people who’ve known you forever. So you can change your hair, clothes, everything. Were you stuffy Patrick in high school? Well, in college, you can be Pat or if you can pull it off. Trick. Ooh, you’re not Patrick. Who’s that? He sounds like a kid who cried on the bus in fourth grade because it looked like he peed his pants even though it was just sweat, but no one believed him and they never let him forget about it even in high school. Patrick sounds like a real square. But that can never be you because you’re Trick now. Trick. Yeah, Trick’s chill. Trick vapes. Trick can take the train by himself. I heard Trick’s last name was nasty. Not figuratively. Literally. Trick. Nasty. Trick didn’t bring a special note to school excusing him from changing in front of the other boys in gym class. That was Patrick. And he’s dead now cuz you’re Trick. And Trick’s good at taking his pants off. Trick knows what he wants at the restaurant. And Trick’s phone is always charged. When Trick tells people that that wet spot on his car goes his sweat, everyone believes him. Nice sweat, Trick. Trick’s not sus. Trick lowkey rips. Trick, and this is true, Anyway, the point is Trump has long held a grudge against higher education and now that he’s in power, he is acting on it. Among other things, he’s targeting the billions of dollars that flow to universities for things like scientific research in order to bend them to his will. He’s done this to schools all over the country, including Harvard, which is justified like this. Harvard’s got to behave themselves. Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves. You know, I’m looking I’m looking out for the country and and for Harvard. I want Harvard to do well. I want Harvard to be great again probably. I do love that he felt the need to tack on a probably at the end there. like his brain has a tiny overworked factchecking department that is so overwhelmed it can only throw a qualifier on one out of every 700 obvious lies and things have only escalated since then. So given that and with schools starting their full semester right now, it felt like tonight might be a good time to take a look at Trump’s war on higher education, the history of right-wing attacks on what they research and teach and what this current fight could cost us. And let’s start with the fact that conservatives distrust of education is nothing new. Nixon famously said, “The professors are the enemy.” And historically, their attacks have fallen into a few key categories. One big one has been that universities are wasting taxpayer money on things like frivolous scientific research. Fox has been talking about one example in particular for literally years now. $53,000 to watch shrimp on a treadmill. There goes a little guy. This thing cost over a number of years $3 million, they say, in taxpayer money. Remember when the federal government spent 3 billion of your tax dollars over a decade to study shrimp on a treadmill? Remember when our government spent thousands to put a shrimp on a treadmill? Do you remember that? Hard to forget. I mean, yeah, it is hard to forget. Partly because you won’t shut the up about it and partly because it’s inherently great TV. Honestly, the only way that would be made better is if it had its own theme song. You go, Shrimp. You go. Prove that you’re not just some bum. Prove that you’ve got heart. Specifically, one single tape of heart that you keep in your head cuz you’re a script. God damn it. You go. The point is that story won’t go away. Just this year, Joanie Ernst complained, “We put shrimp on a treadmill to see how fast they run.” A complaint Elon Musk then tweeted out with the caption, “Insane wasting of taxpayer money.” But there’s a few things you should know. First, that video was from 2006. meaning that shrimp’s been running since the Bush presidency. Second, that research was actually useful. A marine biologist and his colleagues were studying how changes in the oceans could potentially affect the ability of marine organisms to fight infections, which is relevant given that that impacts how much bacteria could wind up on a plate of seafood in front of you. And for what it’s worth, the treadmill in that video actually cost less than $50 and was paid for out of the researcher’s own pocket. So to recap, some guy used his own money to build a shrimp gym for the cost of seven Subway cold cut combos all to try and keep shrimp and joys from getting poisoned. And somehow that is academia run a mock. Now the other common attack on colleges is that they are havens of liberal indoctrination. For years now, Fox has sought out stories on so-called campus craziness where something as minor as climate activists delayed the Harvard Yale game gets a lengthy unpacking on the five. They live for this petty And you know who cracked this code early on? Steven Miller. Because back in 2007 as a student, he made it onto Fox and Friends with a story about how several school newspapers had refused to run this ad directing people to a website that featured claims like Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbors. And they lapped it up. Right now, a lot of kids on college campuses, they’re only getting one half of the story. And when we’re in a situation where you have nuclear threats and radiological threats and biological threats, and we’re in a really a dangerous time in history, you want everyone in America to have a key understanding of what it is that we’re facing. And I’m frankly sad to say right now that’s not the case. Are you a college kid? Yeah, I’m a I’m a senior at Duke University. Well, you are smart. Yeah. Uh Steve Miller, you I watch Fox and Friends almost every morning, so that probably has something to do with it. Oh, I want you to be I want you to be boring and explain why it might be smart. I got to say, I’m guessing, are you a college kid is a question Steven Miller got a lot back then, though. That was probably less to do with his smarts and more to do with the fact that people just assumed he was a 45-year-old undercover knock trying to do an unsanctioned 21 jump street on them. But it’s worth noting that for all his talk there about censorship in college newspapers, as a Duke undergraduate, Miller had a newspaper column where he routinely aired conservative grievances like Christmas is being banned, which as you all remember happened. He also called affirmative action misguided and devastating and said Duke’s women’s studies department was an effort to indoctrinate students in radical feminism, saying a proper women’s studies program would study women from all angles, not one. A pretty weird choice of words coming from this guy who I think most women will prefer to be studied by from exactly zero angles. And the very fact that Miller had a regular column does suggest that as hard as it may be to believe, there was representation at Duke University for Republican points of view. And the more you listen to some Republicans complain about what goes on on campuses, the clearer it becomes. They don’t want diversity of thought. They want one specific type of thought. JD Vance has repeatedly made that clear over the years with complaints like we are giving our children over to our enemies when we send them to college. And in a podcast appearance he advocated for doing what Victor Orban has done in Hungary to schools which was for the record to consolidate power over what gets taught in universities. And that wasn’t all that Vance said. We should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. Right? We need we need like a debathification program. Uh but like a dewokation program. Basically my strategy is like deinstitutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right. It is very hard. It will require men of incredible men and women of incredible courage. But I don’t see another way out. Okay. First, if you are not familiar, debathification was the process of purging the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein’s bath party. Something not universally considered as something we should do to our own citizens. And second, you aren’t having a stroke. JD Vance is doing an interview with someone who looks like they went to the barber and asked for the Airdale Terrier. The point is, conservatives have long sought to orient universities sharply to the right. And in recent years, they’ve seized upon a new justification for doing this, specifically to combat anti-semitism in the wake of student protests over Gaza. And look, we’ve talked about those protests before and it would take more time than we have to fully litigate them now. But very quickly, multiple things can be true. You can think some critics of the protests were conflating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and that some were pointing out actual instances of anti-semitism. You can also acknowledge that some Jewish students did feel unsafe because of the actions of some protesters and that some protesters were made unsafe by universities calling the police on them. You can also argue that many universities did themselves no favors by failing to figure out a coherent consistent response. But none of that nuance has been present in the White House’s response, which has been to suggest the wholesale destruction of certain universities. Soon after taking office, Trump formed a task force to combat anti-semitism backed by Steven Miller. And here is the head of it laying out their strategy. We are suing every one of these universities guilty of anti-semitism under title six. We’re taking away their money. Mark, we’re going to bankrupt these universities. We’re going to take away every single federal dollar. Wow. He is he is coming in pretty hot there. And for the record, I actually agree with that screaming madman in that it would obviously be great to get rid of anti-semitism in college and everywhere else hold for applause. And look, if colleges were spending all their federal money on inventing a big automatic anti-semitism generator, then yeah, it would make sense to take their money away. But the thing is, they’re not doing that. Partly because it seems to be Elon Musk’s project. Instead, the money being taken away is largely going to research studies, and cutting those has nothing to do with ending anti-semitism. As many university heads like the president of Wesian have pointed out, when Jewish students are intimidated or afraid to practice their religion on campus or or are yelled at or it’s is horrible. But at at Wesian and in many schools, the percentage of Jews protesting for Palestinians was roughly the same as the percentage of Jews on the campus generally. The the idea that you are attacking anti-semitism by attacking universities, I think it’s a complete charade. It’s just an excuse for getting the universities to conform, right? It’s obviously The very idea that Trump’s actions are part of some great effort to defend the Jewish people is, as charades go, slightly less convincing than a toddler playing hideand seek. Wow. Where’s Brian? All I see is a chair and then most of Brian. What an illusion has been cast here. And there are some telltale signs that this isn’t really about anti-semitism concerns, which with perhaps the biggest one being that all of this is coming from a president who deep breath reportedly kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed, dined with a Holocaust denier, brought people into his administration with records of advancing anti-semitic tropes and conspiracy theories, including a spokeswoman at the Pentagon, apparently said during his first term that Hitler did a lot of good things and asked his generals to be more loyal, saying, “Why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals?” posted an image using the shape of a star of David to accuse Hillary Clinton of being corrupted by money. Was endorsed in his first election by both David Duke and the KKK and also just two months ago told a rally crowd that thanks to him they wouldn’t have to deal with bankers who are quote shillocks. Hearing that Trump is suddenly waging war against anti-semmites, it’s like hearing Billy Joel is waging war against dads from Long Island. Are you really doing that? cuz you always seem so very close. And yet that is how Trump is justifying his current assault on higher education. And it is worth looking at exactly what he’s doing because it’s pretty grim. And let’s start with one of his first major targets, Colombia. It was a prominent scene of protests over Gaza. And at the beginning of March, it was notified by Trump’s anti-semitism task force, you know, this guy’s team, that his grants were under review. And while those sorts of Title Six investigations typically take months and sometimes years, just 4 days later, it announced its conclusions and the administration, citing Colombia’s continued failure to end the persistent harassment of Jewish students, canceled $400 million in contracts and grants. Just a week later, it sent Colombia a letter giving them seven days to comply with a new list of demands which were extensive, including calling for the university to deliver a plan of comprehensive admissions reform and install new oversight of the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department. It was an extreme degree of government intrusion, which is what made it so dispiriting when this happened. Just in the last few minutes, we are learning that Columbia University will give in to demands from the Trump administration in order to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. It appears that in some way, shape, or form, Colombia has agreed to pretty much all of the president’s demands. Yeah, they caved in about 5 seconds, officially solidifying Columbia’s reputation as the little university rather than what it was known for before being the place that Timothy Shalomé went to for 5 minutes before realizing he didn’t need it. But here is the thing. That capitulation didn’t put an end to it because the administration just kept escalating things further, freezing all of Colombia’s remaining NIH funding, amounting to about $700 million in total and even threatening Colombia’s accreditation. And there is no guarantee the administration is going to stop making demands from Colombia. And why would they when they keep getting met? It’s a situation that understandably has had a chilling effect on campus. As this professor explains, nobody wants to express a controversial opinion about anything anymore. Michael Thaddius teaches at Colombia and is a member of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization now suing the Trump administration. I’m a math professor and math is a wonderfully aolitical topic. Math, in fact, has flourished under all kinds of authoritarian regimes. But my colleagues who teach uh history, political science, you know, regional studies, they’re terrified. Okay, setting aside the breezy, historically we mathematicians have done great under dictators. It is not entirely fair to call math apolitical because if you know how to listen, much of math has a lot to say and some of it is very political. For instance, if you add 100 senators and 435 representatives, you get 535. And if you multiply that by 538, the number of electoral college votes, you get 287,830. Now, here is where it gets interesting. The zip code for the White House is 2050. If you add those numbers, you get that’s right, 308,330. Now, add to that the number 4,494, which is of course the corresponding number for the Ensuring Faith in Our Elections Act. Do we all see where this is going? Do we see it, guys? You get 312,824. And that is already pretty exciting. But if you multiply that by 17, the age of course George Washington was the very first time he held office of any kind, you arrive at 5,318,08. And if you take that number and turn it upside down, pretty cool, right? Oh, right. One of our one of our writers spent an entire afternoon writing that joke, and I don’t know if I should fire them or let them host this show from now on. Now, Colombia has since agreed to pay a $200 million fine to restore its frozen research funding, a move that its president has claimed safeguards our independence. But that is a pretty bold take from someone who was just successfully shaken down twice. Well, that was certainly unpleasant. But at least the moody president who hates honoring deals and loves winning fights will never try that again. Now, some universities did take a slightly different tack from Colombia because when the administration sent a similar list of demands to Harvard, even throwing in some new ones, like demanding an audit of the political ideology of the student body and faculty to determine viewpoint diversity, Harvard refused to back down. and instead it sued the government in federal court and in retaliation the administration froze or terminated more than $3 billion in research grants and contracts with Harvard. The administration’s also among other things launched multiple investigations into whether Harvard was discriminating against white men. One investigation for instance noted an increase among faculty of color, women and those identifying as non-binary as well as a decrease in white men in tenure track jobs. Now, Harvard actually secured a victory this week when a federal judge ruled the Trump administration had illegally canceled its funding, which is what makes it so frustrating that some think Harvard might try and reach a settlement anyway, as the government can still appeal or mire the university in costly and time-conuming investigations. And I will say the government going after big universities first is a smart strategy. For one, it is easy to hate Harvard and people who went there. And if you’re not sure if you’ve met someone who went to Harvard, believe me, you haven’t, cuz they would have brought it up within the first five seconds of meeting you. But as this academic points out, if Harvard ultimately caves, that’ll send a terrible signal. Harvard has more wealth, more power, and more institutional strength than almost any other sort of organization in America. If they can break Harvard, then they are sending a sign that they can do it to anybody. And that is the message that’s that this is trying to convey. He’s right. Fred Armson is just completely right because this goes much further than Harvard and Colombia. The administration’s frozen billions of federal research funds at all these other schools and slash studies at public institutions across the country. Even universities who tried pre-capitulating have found themselves out of luck. Northwestern tried to get ahead of things by releasing a list of steps it had taken to combat anti-semitism that closely tracked with a list of demands the Trump administration had given to Colombia, but it was targeted anyway several days later with more than $790 million of their grants frozen. Those funds still have not been unfrozen, even though on Thursday the university’s president resigned. And there is an irony in him being pushed out to fight anti-semitism on campus given that he is a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors. And that is the thing here. For all the talk about how the government’s current assault is a direct response to the Gaza protests, here is JD Vance back in 2021 spelling out the whole playbook. We go to the universities. We use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to them as leverage and we say unless you stop indoctrinating our children, unless you stop indoctrinating our entire society, you don’t get another dime of our money. That will stop it very quickly. But we’ve got to have the willpower to go and actually do it. Right? And that is the exact same plan as now, just hastily remodeled to be about fighting anti-semitism and expecting no one to notice. It’s basically the rhetorical equivalent of when a random business clearly used to be a Pizza Hut. Oh, tax accounting my ass. You’re not fooling anyone. The place still stinks of stuffed crust. And at this point, it’s worth talking about what we are losing here because the administration has been slashing grants all over the place. Sometimes, as at Colombia and Harvard as a form of ransom, but other times, as with the cuts directed by Doge, to send a clear message about what sort of work is no longer in favor. Internal documents have revealed many of these specific grants targeted were singled out because they dealt with things like gender identity, DEI in the scientific workforce and environmental justice. And the end result of all this is, as one researcher put it, the science in this country is going to be destroyed. Disruptions in NIH grants have already affected things uh of research on things like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and substance use. And the thing is, even if Trump’s cuts get reversed, you can’t always start and stop studies whenever you like. Some involve clinical trials and human patients who will now find themselves suddenly without treatment. As this cancer researcher explains, we’re very worried because what’s happening is that um one day we hear our our grants are cut and the next day we have to say to a patient, sorry, no more money’s coming in, so we can’t treat you on this trial anymore. And could that patient die as a result? Absolutely. Because these these patients are on clinical trials because they have no other options. Look, I feel terrible for patients in that situation, but also for the doctors. Because that is a tough conversation to try to navigate. Bad news. You can’t have medicine anymore. Oh, okay. Why? Cuz the president doesn’t like anti-semitism. Really? No, not really. He just cares a lot about ideological diversity at colleges. Really? No, not really. His brain is functionally pudding now, but the people around him told him to do it, and he said, “Fine.” Okay, but I’m sorry. What does any of that have to do with me? Oh, absolutely nothing. Got it. Thanks so much for explaining things dies. And while the costs there are obvious, even science with less immediate practical impact can wind up being incredibly useful. Remember that shrimp on a treadmill was ultimately about keeping bacteria out of seafood. Drugs like a Zmpic are based on a hormone identified in an NIH funded study of Heila Monster Venom. A study of how bees optimize their nectar foraging led to an algorithm that now powers the $130 billion web hosting industry. Even that study of rats in a car discovered that certain stress hormones in the rat’s poop changed as they learn to drive. A finding which may now inform future behavioral treatments for mental health. The point is somewhere out there is a weird little tree frog that jizzes the cure for cancer. And some scientist probably working at a university is going to discover that because she had a healthy curiosity about frog come. And honestly that theory kind of makes sense. I’m just saying this pig is over 50 years old. Most pigs don’t live that long. What does she do that most pigs don’t? This guy right here. All I’m saying is maybe there’s a fountain of youth and it’s located between two green spindly legs. Sometimes science involves asking weird questions and getting unexpected answers. And the thing is, if we lose this vital university research, there’s no real replacement for it. Private industry isn’t going to pick up the slack here because these studies don’t often have a clear immediate return on investment. As the head of Arizona State points out, when we invest in research, that actually helps the private sector, which is probably something we should talk about a lot more often. I left my iPhone out because everybody thinks that this iPhone 16 is the product of the genius, and he was a genius, of Steve Jobs. Hardly. There were probably, by my estimation, 5,000 academic research groups through the decades that had something to do with the technology I’m holding in my hand. Nobody even knows they exist. Nobody knows the hundreds of patents that are in here and the thousands of articles that back up the patents that are in here. There’s not one aspect of this iPhone 16 which has not been deeply empowered and enabled by at one point or another some academic research activity, some academic technological development. And no one knows any of that exactly. Every iPhone ever made contained the work of thousands of academic research papers which we never talk about. They may have occasionally also contained a meaningful part of a child laborer’s finger, but we don’t talk about that for different reasons. The point is publicly funded research is among other things good for the economy. One report found that every dollar of medical research funded by the NIH delivers $2.56 in economic activity. So even if you are someone who hates learning and loves money and yes I am talking to one guy in particular here. Publicly funding research is just a no-brainer. But obviously that is not what this is really about. This is about the right being willing to sacrifice everything up to and including a generation’s worth of scientific progress to get what it wants. And it is not hard to see what that is. Because when the administration is launching investigations like why aren’t there more white men teaching at Harvard, you know what they’re up to. Just like you know what the plan was when they suddenly canceled diversity grants awarded to PhD students who were members of certain racial or ethnic groups, disabled or from disadvantaged backgrounds. And don’t just take this from me. In June, a federal judge appointed by Reagan, by the way, ordered hundreds of terminated research projects reinstated. And when issuing his ruling, he stated, “I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” And I asked myself, how can this be? And while I appreciate him being willing to call this what it is, I should note the Supreme Court decided last month 5 to 4 to block that judge’s order allowing the administration to pause paying out grants to researchers as the case proceeds in lower court. So where do things go from here? Well, I don’t really know and I’m not sure that this administration does either. Even if there is not a fixed destination, there is a clear direction. And that is that they want to turn back a clock that quite honestly had taken way too long to move forward and restore the role of academia to being a training ground for those looking to uphold systems of power instead of questioning them. And look, you can have problems with academia. You can think it’s too cloistered or too liberal. You can think it’s becoming too expensive or that its resources are misallocated. But the notion of the state suddenly executing a sweeping takeover of higher education to this degree is chilling. And if this administration’s actions have taught us one thing so far, it’s that no capitulation will be enough. And they will never stop demanding more. So given that, I’d argue that to the extent they can, these institutions need to stop yielding, stand firm, and fight back. Because while I do get the appeal of thinking just one more concession, one more payoff might safeguard your independence or let you live to fight another day, it’s worth asking at what point have you compromised so much that the thing you’re supposed to be defending is gone. And if institutions need some inspiration in facing that challenge, maybe I can remind them of one plucky little guy who would not stop, no matter the odds, no matter the forces that try to push him backwards. But I guess what I’m saying is universities, you need to act like that shrimp. Get your head down and pump your 20 legs like your life depends on it. Get out there and show people who you are. Go, go, go.

John Oliver discusses Donald Trump’s war on higher education, the history of right-wing attacks on what universities research and teach, and how a weird little tree frog might – might! – just save us all.

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