This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Swamp Notes — Trump takes on higher ed’
Marc Filippino
President Donald Trump is in a stand-off with some of America’s top universities. Two weeks ago, the administration froze $2.3bn 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, US secretary of education Linda McMahon told the school it shouldn’t bother applying for future government grants.
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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 Marc 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.
Andrew Jack
Hi there, good to be here.
Marc Filippino
And we’ve also got Myles McCormick, the FT’s acting Washington correspondent. He’s here right next to me. Hey, Miles.
Myles McCormick
Hey, Marc. Good to be back in the show.
Marc Filippino
So Myles, Harvard’s not the only university losing government funding. Columbia lost around $400mn before it complied to the administration’s demands. Cornell has lost some funding and there are, you know, others too. But Harvard is by far the hardest hit. Why is that? What happened there?
Myles McCormick
Well, in a nutshell, because Harvard’s hit back — or hit back the strongest . . . I mean, if we back up a bit, 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 rein in universities from Harvard to Penn to Columbia in what it describes as an effort to clamp down on antisemitism on campus — but also because it takes issue at 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 — Columbia being a prime example there, when the administration sought to freeze $400mn in funding — it agreed to overhaul some of its policies. Harvard has kicked back. And when the administration sought to freeze $2.3bn 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 stand-off, where the administration has doubled down on its attack on Harvard.
Andrew Jack
Yeah, I’d agree with Myles. 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 antisemitism, or the failures of universities to respond to allegations of antisemitism, 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 on to 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.
Marc Filippino
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?
Andrew Jack
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 for 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.
Marc Filippino
I’m glad you brought up the endowment, that endowment is actually quite large. It’s actually the biggest endowment in any American university. It’s $53bn.
Andrew Jack
$53bn, that’s right, kind of easily the largest really in the world.
Marc Filippino
So, can it just dip into that pot of money to keep things running?
Andrew Jack
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 there 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 gonna 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, disadvantaged backgrounds, will be able to gain access to these elite institutions.
Myles McCormick
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 kind of 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 kind of nuances of the supports that money provides, that Andrew just outlined there. So, there’s a huge political expediency argument there.
Marc Filippino
You guys both described the administration’s argument about antisemitism running rampant on these campuses. What are universities saying about these allegations of antisemitism?
Andrew Jack
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 antisemitism, 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 20s, 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 there. A lot of the universities have said they do take any attempts at sort of threatening of sensitivities to individuals’ 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.
Myles McCormick
Yeah, I mean, one thing I found interesting reading secretary McMahon’s letter to Harvard this week was that the emphasis on alleged antisemitism 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, the letter, which was kind of a three-page tirade, spoke in depth about plagiarism, about alleged unlawfulness, about the DEI factors. But yeah, it kind of moved away from this kind of antisemitism 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 is standing for.
Andrew Jack
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, JD Vance, who is at Yale, or others, including Elise Stefanik, who was 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.
Marc Filippino
Yeah, kind of the idea of pulling up the ladder behind them. Andrew, you mentioned the research programmes 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 gonna stop seeing work orders at labs? Is that going to impact specific industries? And could it even affect innovation more broadly?
Andrew Jack
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 universities is the glue at the centre 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 ends and meds, ie the university and the medical or hospital centre 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 $4bn 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, you know, this is part of a whole wide-ranging attack which also touches, for example, on the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 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 commercialisation — 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.
Marc Filippino
So Myles, 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?
Myles McCormick
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, 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 wokeism. And they’ve got big plans to kind of try and suffocate some of their funding, dial them back, rein 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 right.
Marc Filippino
All right guys, on that note, we’re gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re gonna do Out of the Swamp.
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Marc Filippino
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?
Andrew Jack
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 there’s this extraordinary story of the selection of the new pope.
Marc Filippino
Ah.
Andrew Jack
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 programme, offering free access to the FT into high schools, are very keen to encourage.
Marc Filippino
All right, Myles, what about you? What are you watching this week?
Myles McCormick
Well, mine is slightly more left field and what I’ve been watching is an ongoing debate in Ireland around what’s known as skorts.
Marc Filippino
OK. What is skorts?
(Laughter)
Myles McCormick
Glad you asked. Glad you asked, Marc.
Marc Filippino
What are skorts?
Myles McCormick
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 camogie, which is . . .
Marc Filippino
OK. What is camogie?
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Myles McCormick
Another new concept for you here. So camogie is the women’s version of hurling and another Irish sport, which is effectively kind of somewhere between lacrosse and hockey, but much older, much faster, much more Irish.
Marc Filippino
So we’ve got hurling, camogie and skorts, just making sure that we have all the vocab down.
Myles McCormick
All the vocab. So yeah, multiple new concepts for listeners to familiarise themselves with.
Marc Filippino
What’s the controversy though?
Myles McCormick
So, the controversy is, in camogie, the compulsory attire that 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 a 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 lining out to play would wear shorts.
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 skorts. 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 camogie can wear shorts, because it’s the 21st century.
Marc Filippino
This is . . . OK, 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.
Myles McCormick
Yup, yup.
Marc Filippino
And the attire that field hockey players wear in here in the US.
Myles McCormick
Effectively, so it’s . . . I mean, it’s camogie, so it’s a different sport, but it’s close to field hockey.
Marc Filippino
Well, I think that’s the closest I’m gonna get in terms of comprehension.
Myles McCormick
That’s fair. That’s fair.
Marc Filippino
But I appreciate all the learning that you brought to the programme today, Myles.
(Laughter)
Andrew Jack
Yeah, really sports, clothes, language, having a very rich mix we have here at the FT (laughs).
Marc Filippino
I wanna thank our guests, Myles McCormick, he’s the FT’s acting Washington correspondent. Thanks, Myles.
Myles McCormick
Thanks, Marc.
Marc Filippino
And Andrew Jack, he is our global education editor. Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew Jack
Thank you.
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Marc Filippino
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. 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 Giovinco and produced by Katya Kumkova. Special thanks this week to Sonja Hutson and as always, Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Marc Filippino. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forhecz, original music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.
