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A reign of terror is raging through the world of American higher education. The Donald Trump administration is as determined as it is vindictive against what it sees as the political, intellectual and administrative transgression of the liberal conscience of this world. It has been chillingly strategic about dismantling programmes in its arch enemy – measures in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The loudest has been the recent fall of Columbia University in New York, which has essentially given in to all of the government’s demands, from suppressing cultures of protest on campus to placing its reputed department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies in the administrative uncertainty of a five-year receivership. On Friday, the university announced that its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, was stepping down.
More universities are keeling over. We are looking at an era where the US government may have significant control in the life of universities, which have, for the longest time, remained islands of liberal intellect in oceans of intolerant anti-intellectualism.
The Ides of March got my social media timelines flooded with posts articulating shock, anger and outrage at the arrest of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, his sudden separation from his pregnant wife, and the threat of deportation hanging over him overriding his status as a lawful permanent resident of the US. Elon Musk’s DOGE, the newly-fashioned Department of Government Efficiency, has laid off half of the staff of the federal Department of Education, and Donald Trump has finally signed the executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, though it remains to be seen whether this will be approved by the federal legislature.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for universities such as Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and Penn have been cancelled as a punishment for the Gaza protests that took place on their campuses, and we now know how the universities are catapulting to federal demands.
The National Institute of Health has cancelled all funding for research on transgender people, informing institutions that it considers such research “unscientific” and simply the work of “gender ideology extremism”. And that is just seems to be the most outlandishly ideological of millions and millions of dollars already cut in the funding of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, the two key bodies for the funding of scientific research in the US.
Just a couple of days back, major universities in the US, including wealthy ones like Harvard, Stanford and MIT, announced hiring freezes for indefinite periods in response to the drastic cuts in federal funding.
One could go on. It’s impossible to pretend otherwise – this onslaught is not stopping anytime soon. This is all the unbearable weight, bite, and burn of the real. But in spite of everything, I remain an optimist. As someone who has studied and taught in the US for many years, I believe in the integrity and the robustness of its institutions, particularly that of its judiciary.
These are the early days of the Trump administration. Perhaps this blitzkrieg of shock and burn will slow down. Institutions, including the universities, will push back. They will negotiate with the government, relent to some unthinkable claims, deceive and dissemble wherever they can – such as playing around with trouble-giving terminology on their statements and websites. I want to believe that these days of intense destruction and helplessness, too, will pass.
But on the same note, it feels impossible to believe that the world of American higher education and research will ever be the same. It just doesn’t feel realistic to imagine that we’ll see any more of the great American century of global leadership in academic excellence and innovative research.
What does this mean? Reality burns and scorches in the US now, and it pushes me to step back and look another way for the long answer – to the meteoric rise and expansion of research in China, particularly in science and technology. Let’s take the most obvious and the most widely discussed innovation of our times – Artificial Intelligence.
Reading the deeply personal account of Fei-Fei Li, the 1976-born AI pioneer and founder of the dataset Imagenet, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, I get the picture of a happy family in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province who decided to migrate to the US right around the end of Communist Europe in 1989. What follows is the moving account of a teenager from China to the challenges of austere immigrant life in New Jersey, through an elite education at Princeton and CalTech to the endowed Sequoia Capital Professorship that she now holds in Stanford’s Computer Science department, heading the university’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
Particularly known for her work on the ethical use of AI for the welfare of humanity, she was a board member of Twitter, before – note this – that this board was disbanded by its new owner, Elon Musk, who renamed it X and declared himself as its sole director.
What I find particularly instructive next to the career of Fei-Fei Li is that of Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, which has, for experts and the public alike, surpassed ChatGPT to establish itself as the world’s AI leader, both in cost and efficiency. The 1985-born Wenfeng, who grew up in Wuchuan in China’s Guandong province, got his Bachelors and Masters in Engineering at Zhejiang University.
It is not coincidental that Zheijiang is located in Hangzhou, home to many tech companies such as Alibaba. The Greater Bay Area, Brian Penprase points out in a recent article in Forbes, aspires to be China’s Silicon Valley, combining its regional density of innovative tech companies “with an unmatched supplier and manufacturing capacity for rapidly converting ideas into hardware”,
But what is most important is that this area is also a major educational hub. Hong Kong alone hosts five universities in the global top 100 QS World Ranking – which is almost half of China’s high-ranked universities.
In China, the most prestigious universities are public and state-funded. As Penprase points out, in Shenzhen alone, the city government has committed to investing $23 billion to build 20 new universities. It is well-known that China’s public university system is not only expanding in size but is also rising sharply in quality to top many global rankings including QS and Times Higher Education. Chinese universities included 13 of the top 200 in the THE global rankings in 2023, with Tsinghua University and Peking University ranking 12th and 14th place respectively.
AI has been a strategic priority for the Chinese government, and it has already far exceeded the US in the training and qualification of AI scientists. Seen in this light, DeepSeek’s outperformance of OpenAI and ChatGPT was inevitable – and given the global excitement and apprehension around AI, is the best-publicised instance of Chinese science and tech outshining its US counterpart.
True, a comparison of the careers of Fei-Fei Lee and Liang Wenfeng is uneven. One is an academic scientist, albeit involved in many commercial and policy ventures (as is customary with Stanford computer science professors), and the other is an entrepreneur. It makes more sense to compare Wenfeng with the founders of OpenAI, which includes Sam Altman, Bret Taylor, Elon Musk, and others who made up the founding team.
And yet, between them, Lee and Wenfeng seem to tell the stories of two Chinas – one shaped by post-Soviet immigration to the US and the achievement of great scientific and public distinction there, and the other of a homegrown technological and entrepreneurial confidence deeply invested in China’s answer to the great academia-industry collaborations in California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s I-128 corridor.
Confidence actually seems to be the keyword. As Penprase quotes in his article, Wenfeng identified that the major shortcoming in Chinese tech companies “isn’t capital but confidence and the ability to organize high-caliber talent for effective innovation.”
Equally crucial is the fact that China’s excellence in research and higher education are driven by its government – a government that we know is far from being a democracy and certainly not anything like a democracy in the modern Western sense of the term. Democracy in America – as with many other parts of the world, including India – has now been distorted by populist dictatorship. Such a dictatorship draws its power from a large section of its people, and more pointedly, from a clever manipulation of this population by an oligarchy of business forces primarily shaped by what Yanis Varoufakis has recently described as the “techno-feudalists”.
But what is easily missed today is that populism was a founding force behind the American university. Given the polarising politics of the last few decades, it has been particularly easy to miss in a country where universities now feel like tiny islands of intellectual aspiration and liberal politics in an ocean of anti-intellectual resentment. But the history of the American university, and of its heydays in the mid-20th century, tells a whole other story.
The unique success of the American research university hides the strange history of the development of a deeply contradictory set of forces. Education historian David Labaree classifies these forces as the practical, the populist, and the elite. He points out that the origins of the American university system were humble, parochial, and deeply local, unlike the universal and cosmopolitan ambitions of the European university.
A college, which often promoted the Christian faith, was also a solid claim for a sleepy country town to get on the map so that it could demand a railway stop, the county seat, or even the state capital, and in turn, to raise the value of local real estate. If you’ve ever wondered why just about every small town in Ohio has a college or even a university, there’s your answer.
Indeed, they are scattered nationwide. Their founding history continues to live in their deep community engagement – manifested most strikingly through their commitment to collegiate sports and local alumni support – that remains hard to match anywhere else in the world.
Behind the global brand of US universities, it is easy to forget, what played a key role is this powerful parochial support, which bolstered most of them, from small community colleges all the way to those in the Ivy League. Locally realised practical functions historically salvaged the colleges from potential accusations of elitism. As Larabee wrote, the message could now be: “This is your college, working for you. We produce the engineers who design your bridges, the teachers who teach your children, and the farmers who produce your food.”
Clark Kerr, the legendary president of the University of California, identified the three institutions which converged to make the modern American university: The British undergraduate college, the German research university, and the American land-grant college. If the land-grant college embodied the institution’s practical value to the local community, the undergraduate college experience provided its populist element through fraternities, Greek life, football, and pastoral care-driven pedagogy and residential life. The advent of the German research university model in the US in the 1880s provided the final element – the elite value of high scientific and philosophical research. The parochial, locally-sponsored institution finally attained a cosmopolitan stature and a global reputation.
Through the 20th century and particularly since the Second World War, it was the elite appeal of fundamental research coming out of the American university that drove its global reputation, pushing it up the ranking charts worldwide. Far less conspicuous to the world was its powerful network of populist and parochial support that retained it as a venue of civic pride and deep-rooted community support.
Emerging as local, community-supported institutions at a time when the State was weak and the market strong, the American university survived a harsh world, lacking the lavish State support that bolstered its European counterparts and which now drives China’s rising leadership in research and higher education. The Darwinian tale of the survival of the American university shaped a formidable combination of contradictory strengths for nearly a century – the populist, the practical, and the elite, that kept one another in check as well as fortified the system collectively.
Over the last couple of decades, an unlikely consortium of forces has destroyed this enabling nexus between the populist, the practical and the elite that upheld the American university as the world leader in higher education and research throughout the 20th century. Skyrocketing tuition has come to erode the practical value of college, justifying only the preparation of a handful of lucrative professions to the exclusion of the whole range of disciplines.
The rising costs have been traced both to the withdrawal of government support as well as the increasing corporatisation of the university through the appointment of managers and vice presidents and the corresponding adjunctification of faculty. Popular support, particularly from the alumni, has rapidly declined in a drastically polarised nation, and most intensively since the breakout of Gaza protests on university campuses.
The resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay was largely spearheaded by a campaign by powerful conservative alumni, such as the influential social media action by conservative activist Christopher Rufo. And all of this has been happening against the larger backdrop of a large section of the American public’s loss of faith in the power of college to achieve social mobility, to get a job, or to improve their lives in any way. In the absence of the popular and the practical, the elite has only come to alienate people.
We cannot lose sight of the fact that as president, Donald Trump has inherited this climate of pervasive mistrust and disenchantment with institutions of higher education that has been both deep and wide across the United States for some time now. Of course, he has manipulated and exploited it in a way only a powerful populist dictator can – but this mistrust and disenchantment had started to take shape long before his ascendancy.
The optimist in me refuses to give up the hope that America’s institutions will push back, and the nation will survive this initial phase of shock, shackle and burn that this new government has unleashed on its universities. The cynic in me worries that the larger climate of disenchantment with college that has helped to legitimise Trump’s chainsaw massacre will not change even if and when this initial onslaught is over.
The most terrifying fact is that this is probably the worst time in history to lose faith in higher education. Not that there was ever a good time for this loss. But as a wide variety of jobs and skills become irrelevant with the invasion of machine intelligence in the coming years, a sizeable section of the workforce will need ways to retrain and re-educate themselves. AI will do a lot of things for us, and massive wealth will be produced for a tiny number of oligarchs, whose core is occupied by the techno-feudalists.
But just the way digital culture and social medial created a false sense of mass empowerment while turning the masses into unsuspecting markets for the techno-feudalists, we now know that AI will eventually perfect this exploitation where the immense economic benefits of machine intelligence will be sucked up by a tiny minority of cloud capitalists.
Nothing feels more ominously ironical in the face of this reality than the drastic cuts to the US Department of Education engineered by Elon Musk’s DOGE. The decimation of the federal umbrella over education carried out by the arch cloud-capitalist of our time is meant to leave education and related funding to the whim of the states, which is exactly a far-right fantasy. In that reality, how committed the Red states and federal granting bodies will remain to the cause of research and higher education will be a grim guessing game.
The obsolescence of higher education, in the popular American mind, while rooted in several substantial historical factors, looks all set to be finally catalysed by a phenomenon we now know well in our post-Truth world – the crafty stimulation of mass anger by multi-billionaire oligarchs. In reality, for the vast majority of people, urgent questions about life, skills, and employability will depend on constant and innovative re-education.
But the clever stimulation of popular resentment against the perceived elitism of higher education only leaves the masses to the mercy of oligarchs who have aced the populism game. In the inhuman world of patterns and algorithms trained only to maximise profits for the techno-feudalists, there is no mercy for humanity.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the PostcolonyHe is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University and has taught previously at Stanford University.
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