New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg predicted that President Donald Trump will use his time in office to crack down on leftists and liberals in academia.
“Many Americans, including plenty of people who didn’t vote for Trump, won’t mourn the end of tedious corporate D.E.I. trainings and have little sympathy for radical student protesters,” Goldberg wrote in an article headlined, “Trump’s plan to crush the academic left.”
However, the journalist lamented that a “climate of liberal resignation” will only make things more “ominous.” She continued, “Under the cover of rolling back unpopular left-wing excesses, Trump’s team is trying to assert political control over American higher education, and it seems to be pushing on an open door.”
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Goldberg argued that some of Trump’s “coming crackdown” on liberal academia will be disguised as “a reaction to campus antisemitism,” which has become an increasingly divisive issue on college campuses following the Israel-Hamas war.
The columnist also pointed to Trump’s focus on education with one of his first executive orders while taking office, including setting up “sweeping investigations into D.E.I. in the private sector, instructing federal agencies to identify up to nine investigative targets among major institutions, including colleges and universities ‘with endowments over $1 billion,’ a category that includes all the Ivies.”
“Another executive order lays the groundwork for deporting foreign students and professors who engage in anti-Israel activism, something Trump promised during his campaign,” Goldberg wrote. “It calls for ensuring that aliens otherwise already present in the United States” aren’t hostile to its citizens, culture, government or institutions, and “do not advocate for, aid or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.’”
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Goldberg summarized Trump’s early executive orders and rhetoric against DEI and other leftist policies in higher education as the “opening salvos in a campaign to crush the academic left.”
“There’s kind of a multifront threat right now as to whether or not you can express views that are unpopular with the folks in the White House and executive agencies and continue to enjoy the protections of the First Amendment on academic freedom,” legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Will Creeley, told Goldberg.
Trump signed an executive order upon entering office that rescinded one that President Biden signed on his first day in office, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
Trump has also signaled legal moves against DEI in the federal government, including in a second anti-DEI executive order, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”
