The Grand Strategy Behind Trump’s Crackdown on Academia

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Episode: The Grand Strategy Behind Trump’s Crackdown on Academia
Date: September 25, 2025
Host: Ross Douthat
Guest: Mae Mailman (Trump administration point person on higher ed)

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Overview

This episode examines the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to reshaping American higher education. Ross Douthat interviews Mae Mailman, the architect of Trump’s higher education strategy, about the ideological, cultural, and legal motivations behind efforts to pressure elite universities. The discussion covers why conservatives believe universities have gone astray, what’s being demanded from academic institutions, the logic and risks of federal intervention, and the vision for the future of higher ed.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Diagnosing the Problem with Universities

• Culture of Victimhood:

  • Mailman argues elite universities perpetuate a "glorification of victimhood," which undermines both Western civilization and American excellence. She frames this as rewarding identity or suffering over merit, referring to it as “Meghan Markle syndrome.”
    • “The biggest one for me is a culture of victimhood, a glorification of victimhood that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country.” – Mae Mailman (02:22)
  • Victim status is incentivized in admissions and hiring, supplanting academic ability.

• Meritocracy vs. Diversity:

  • Mailman distinguishes between valuing adversity as experience and using adversity as the sole credential:
    • “Are you celebrating the fact that this is somebody with nothing, or are you celebrating the fact that this is someone who has shown that with nothing, they can be somebody?” – Mae Mailman (06:05)

2. Shifts in Campus Culture and the Mid-2010s Pivot

• From Longstanding Complaints to Crisis:

  • Douthat notes that while complaints about campus liberalism are decades-old, both liberals and conservatives agree something major shifted in the mid-2010s.
  • Mailman identifies the rise of social media, smartphones, online shaming, and the narrowing of permissible speech as critical factors.

• Protest Culture’s Evolution:

  • Post-Ferguson and post-George Floyd activism cemented protest as a form of campus community, but also as a source of physical and ideological intimidation, especially for Jewish students during debates on Israel-Gaza.
    • “As people get lonelier, they want to find groups … protests seem very attractive.” – Mae Mailman (15:14)

3. University Failures & Institutional Responsibility

• Failure to Ensure Safety:
  • Mailman contends universities were too slow to protect students (e.g., after October 7 protests) out of fear of backlash or harming international students’ visa statuses.
• Lack of Community Grounded in Excellence:
  • Without sustained cultivation of community and excellence, negativity, intimidation, and harassment fill the void.

4. The Trump Administration’s Strategy

• Legal Levers: Title VI & Anti-Discrimination:

  • Executive Orders direct the Department of Education to investigate and pressure federally funded schools not to discriminate on race or national origin—used against both “antisemitic” behavior and DEI practices.
    • "If you're gonna be federally funded, then we're gonna make sure that you don't discriminate on the basis of race." – Mae Mailman (19:25)

• Focus on the Ivy League as Exemplars:

  • The administration targets elite universities (esp. Ivy League) both for efficiency and symbolic impact, assuming changes there will ripple throughout academia.

• Planned Principles for Universities:

  • Formal set of merit-based principles for schools to ascribe to (not yet public). Criteria include merit-based admissions and hiring, attention to foreign student numbers/funding, and surveillance of “importing radicalism.”

• Regulation of Foreign Students:

  • Concern about the high proportion of foreign students crowding out Americans and forming siloed communities, undermining the intended “exchange” of cultural values.

• Federal Funding as Leverage:

  • Harvard/Columbia fined about 1% of their endowments as symbolic punishments—meant to attract attention and incentivize compliance.
  • Potential defunding of grants if schools resist policy changes, with the view that the government can attach reasonable strings to taxpayer-funded research.

5. Intellectual Diversity, Micromanagement, and Affirmative Action for Conservatives

• Push for Intellectual Diversity:

  • Administration seeks “department-by-department” audits of political viewpoint diversity but recognizes the limits (and dangers) of federal micromanaging.
    • “We don't want the next administration … to say, well, actually, this is the mix that I think is the best.” – Mae Mailman (39:32)
  • Conservative pipeline issues compared to past affirmative action debates; possible incremental gains through adjuncts and programs like the Federalist Society.

• Cultural vs. Legal Change:

  • Both Douthat and Mailman express skepticism that government policy alone can overcome campus conformism. Larger cultural competition, proliferation of alternatives to elite higher ed, and organizing (e.g., Turning Point, Federalist Society) are also necessary.

6. Speech, Antisemitism, and Definitional Challenges

• Navigating the Line:

  • Trump administration allegedly demanded strong restrictions on anti-Israel speech, but final Columbia settlement affirms free speech and First Amendment protections.

• Legal Gray Areas:

  • Administration criticized for preemptively suspending funding before due process; defends practice as legitimate discretion over federal money.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “The biggest one for me is a culture of victimhood ... that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country.” – Mae Mailman (02:22)
• “Are you celebrating the fact that this is somebody with nothing, or are you celebrating the fact that this is someone who has shown that with nothing, they can be somebody.” – Mae Mailman (06:05)
• “The shutting down of speech, what we used to call political correctness and now call wokeism.” – Mae Mailman (12:05)
• “Universities will return to a merit mission … the mission will not be diversity, it won’t be equity, but they will be excellence.” – Mae Mailman (55:37)
• “It’s not a forced change. It is actually just that there’s a portion, not even all … of Harvard’s grants that we just decide should go to somewhere else, maybe another university.” – Mae Mailman (53:17)
• “You want leadership, but leadership in the right direction. … If you get signals from the heights of the leaders in academia that we're making these changes, then yes, that's obviously hugely influential.” – Mae Mailman (22:16)

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Important Timestamps (MM:SS)

• 00:31 – Douthat introduces the theme and guest
• 02:14 – 06:42 – Diagnosis of “victimhood culture” and failures in meritocracy
• 07:45 – 10:58 – Mailman’s student experiences at University of Kansas and Harvard
• 12:05 – 16:44 – 2010s shift in protest culture, social media, campus speech
• 19:25 – Trump administration’s use of Title VI
• 22:03 – 24:29 – Focus on Ivy League, setting example
• 26:46 – Limits and challenges in genuinely assessing compliance
• 31:57 – Use of settlements and fines
• 33:54 – Should giant endowments be limited?
• 37:03 – 42:45 – Demands for intellectual viewpoint diversity, perils of micromanagement
• 44:05 – 45:21 – Affirmative action for conservatives and conservative faculty pipelines
• 46:28 – 48:43 – Free speech, antisemitism, and the Columbia deal
• 51:33 – 53:17 – Legality and timing of funding cuts, administration’s defense
• 55:37 – 58:16 – Vision for 2030: merit, excellence, and cultural change
• 58:16 – 61:20 – Will competition, organizing, and alternatives reshape academic culture?

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Memorable Moments

• “Meghan Markle syndrome”: Mailman facetiously labels the desire for victimhood as a status symbol.
• Harvard “flag waving” and retreat: Discussion of how elite universities publicly tout diversity stats, then hurriedly scrub them when challenged.
• Turning Point, Federalist Society as organizing models: Mailman credits right-wing campus organizing with breaking the taboo of conservative student solidarity.
• “If you don’t want the money, just be Hillsdale.” The “opt-out” logic for schools resisting federal strings.

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Final Takeaways

• The Trump administration’s approach represents both a legal strategy to reshape university policies and an ideological campaign to push elite institutions away from identity-based admissions/practices and back toward a vision of “merit” and “excellence.”
• There are inherent risks in using federal power to enforce viewpoint diversity or certain definitions of safety and discrimination; both legal challenges and cultural limitations restrict what policy can achieve.
• Mailman argues the ultimate hope is for a cultural shift in university values and for greater genuine intellectual variety, but admits this will take more than executive orders—requiring organization, alternative models, and healthy competition between institutions.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In:
This episode features a rigorous insider account of right-wing ambitions in higher education, engaging with the legal, philosophical, and practical limits of attempting to remake academia from Washington. It explores the dangers of government overreach—even in pursuit of intellectual diversity—and the complex interplay between federal power and campus culture.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

From New York Times opinion. I'm Ross Douthit, and this is Interesting Times. Right now, people are arguing about whether Cancel Culture is back and this time coming from the right. And it certainly looks like the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and other controversies do represent a kind of conservative revenge for the great woke cancellations of 2020 and 2021. But I really think that you need to understand the conservative cultural strategy right now much more in terms of institutions than celebrity individuals. Long before the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Trump White House saw a once in a generation opportunity to try and push America's cultural institutions, movie studios, TV networks, meaningfully to the right. This week, I want to talk about the most significant of these efforts, more important even than the late night TV wars. And that's the administration's attempts to change elite academia, to change the way big universities admit students and faculty, to change the way they handle free speech debates, and much more. And my guest, Mae Mailman is the perfect person to discuss the Trump administration's strategy because she's been in charge of it. So, Mae Mailman, welcome to Interesting Times.

[C]

Thanks for having me.

[B]

So I want to start with a very, very big picture question. Tell me what is wrong with the American university?

[C]

Yeah, And I don't think it's every university, but I would say in general, you've got a lot of different problems. And the biggest one that comes for me is a culture of victimhood, a glorification of victimhood that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country. And I think you can notice it in little pieces like when Justice Kavanaugh was going through his confirmation hearings, the need for grievance sessions, the need for coloring books, the amount of emotional support people needed to suffer through Trump's electoral victory. And I think that there's this culture that universities have been perpetuating, maybe I call it Meghan Markle syndrome as well, where like the greatest good, the greatest height that you can be is a victim. So I think that's one thing. And I think then pieces of it trickle down to racism in admissions, racism in hiring. You're hiring people to do things based on their identity rather than their ability. But I think at the end of the Day. It kind of all boils down to a glorification of victimhood.

[B]

What do you think universities are teaching their students that they are victims of?

[C]

Yeah. And so it's not necessarily that they are victims, but that they should be victims. That it's good to be a victim. That in admissions, what is it better to be? It's better to be in a minority class, whether that's a sexual minority class, whether that's a racial minority class, there's something better to being underrepresented, to being somehow downtrodden that should be treated as preferential or better. That type of behavior is not only like, illegal. Right. Which is you can't treat people differently on the basis of their race, but. But it's harmful for so many reasons. Beyond that, you just want the best people, no matter what they look like, the type of students that you want. You obviously want diversity. And I think Justice Thomas, when he's talking about this, he's in favor of diversity. Not aesthetics, but the whole idea of treating people differently based on whether they are oppressed or oppressors. And if it's seen as Meghan Markle, why does she want to appear like a victim? Because then she's special. You know, there's something good about the Queen not liking you because you can then be a victim. And that.

[B]

I'm not sure it's worked out actually that well for her.

[C]

She has a TV show.

[B]

She does. She does have a TV show.

[C]

I don't have a TV show.

[B]

Not yet. But then you mentioned that it's reasonable for universities to want diversity. And so I think an argument, a sort of obvious argument that a university might make in thinking about how these issues impact admissions is to say, well, obviously if you're trying to have a diverse student body, you do to some extent want to look at the actual experiences people have. And if someone has been victimized in some way by some set of forces in their life, material, financial, familial, whatever, racism included, let's call it adversity. Can you rule out adversity entirely as a reason to maybe give someone a kind of preference?

[C]

Right. So I think experience is obviously relevant. Maybe a 3, 8 student body president is a better applicant than a 40 video game basement dweller. That seems perfectly fine to take into account experience. And it does create a much better student body than if it was just totally blind based on your SAT score. But I think the question is what you're celebrating. Are you celebrating the fact that this is somebody with nothing, or are you celebrating the fact that this is someone who has shown that with nothing, they can be somebody.

[B]

So you're effectively saying that what universities are failing to do is adequately reward merit, whether, whether in their applicant pool or in who they're hiring to get on the tenure track, do research and so on.

[C]

Right. And in many ways fail to reward merit in ways that are illegal and violate our civil rights laws. So the failure to reward merit is, I think, not only just a problem with the universities, but it is then therefore relevant to. For its relationship with the federal government.

[B]

And you said at the start that it's not every American university that has these problems. Talk a little bit about your own experience. So you went to a red or reddish. You know, Kansas is sometimes politically complicated, but a reddish state flagship university for undergrad. And then you went to a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of some note for law school. So you had two kind of distinct experiences of different forms of elite education in America. I'm curious both whether you saw the problems that you think the Trump administration is fighting at work in, in those places, and also if you felt like there was a big difference between Kansas and Harvard.

[C]

Yeah. So my experience at the University of Kansas, I felt more like a diverse student. Kansas is not a very. It's a white state.

[B]

It's a fairly white state.

[C]

Yes, I think we can say that.

[B]

I've noticed that on my visits. Yes.

[C]

And so I participated on the multicultural board my freshman year, which is this. Anybody can come and talk about your experiences and what needs to change and everything. My sorority that I was a part of, sororities and fraternities pair with each other for all these events. And. And I wanted to pair with the black fraternity associations rather than just the traditional IFC fraternities. So I really, I think, identified or felt like I was, I don't know, a diverse person. And I really wanted to think about those issues and pay attention to them in ways not like victimhood necessarily, but like cohesiveness and bringing everybody together. And then I did Teach for America.

[B]

Just to locate up roughly when were you an undergrad?

[C]

So I graduated in 2010, before some of the larger racial issues with. I think for me, things started to change my third year. So my last year in law school, which was the Ferguson, Missouri, and you had hands up, don't shoot rights all the way around the country. And I went to a few of the Ferguson sort of die ins just to walk around, see what people were doing. And it was a bunch of professors and it was a bunch of students, and nobody did anything crazy. They just went to the middle of a road and, you know, laid down. And there was a community feeling to it. And there was something about chanting with all of your friends the same thing. No justice, no peace, no racist police. That felt communal. And maybe you weren't achieving anything, but you were doing it with your friends. And I, as the president of the Federal Society at Harvard, I felt a little bit of pressure, I think, to have a position on what I thought about all these things going on in the country.

[B]

And did you think of yourself as a political conservative or a Republican through all this when you were in college and afterward?

[C]

Yeah, I definitely saw myself as a conservative, which I think made me way more attracted to the Trump movement than I did a traditional Republican. And I don't exactly know why that is. I think it's just growing up in the middle of nowhere. You don't. There's no.

[B]

Where did you grow up?

[C]

On the Kansas, Colorado border is a small town called Goodland that is, in.

[B]

Fact, the middle of nowhere.

[C]

It actually is.

[B]

I'm not, you know, no judgment, but it is.

[C]

It is, actually. Yes. Definition.

[B]

Statistically, yes.

[C]

Yeah, it was definitely conservative, but kind of weighing in on societal issues, especially on some of these really tough ones, was a tough spot for me, because why can't we all just get along?

[B]

As a wise man once said? Yeah, I'm interested in this because we're going to get into the actual things that the Trump administration is asking of universities in just a second. But one thing that's striking about the argument about universities is, in a way, it's one that's been going on since William F. Buckley first emerged on the political scene and wrote God and Man at Yale. The conservative argument that campuses are too liberal, too ideologically conformist, that they reward victimhood over merit, that they use affirmative action in discriminatory ways. These are arguments that are decades and decades old. But there's a clear sense, both among conservatives and some liberals, that something substantially changed in the middle of the 2010s that took all of these existing things that conservatives complained about and just made them much worse. And it seems like that's what you think. I'm curious why you think that happened and how much worse it got.

[C]

Yeah, the why. And maybe everyone was already this liberal. And I think people, smarter people than me, have blamed social media and the iPhone. You know, you found your community in Facebook groups over campus groups, and you were able to retreat and hold your positions more closely. I buy into that. And I think the shutting down of speech. So, you know, what we used to call political correctness and now call wokeism. And I felt that. So this was Obergefell decision was right after my third year of law school.

[B]

And this was the same sex marriage decision.

[C]

The same sex marriage decision. And most people, you know, that are young and educated are in favor of gay marriage in some way, shape or form. But you could always talk about it in some way, you know, what about this and that and talking, you know, And I felt like the speech element where all of a sudden now, oh, I'm sorry, you said traditional marriage. What do you mean by that? What does that mean? And as the speech got more constrained, then the ideas had to be pushed aside a little bit. And actually, people at Harvard will say currently that some of that had to do also with the rise of social media, because you could be shamed a little bit. Eas. So I got in trouble one day at Harvard because I had an event with Chick Fil? A sandwiches. And the Chick Fil? A people left their sort of hot bag that you put all the sandwiches in. And so I threw it in a room with all of the student group's lockers. And somehow this bag was in front of the gay student group's locker. And so there was a group chat going around saying that the federal Society is trying to basically threaten the gay student group because there was this Chick Fil? A bag. No, that didn't happen. But the same type of discourse that might have previously happened or benefit of the doubt or conversation now is much easier for them to go to their group and say, I've been discriminated against, than actually have a conversation. And that got cleared up. But I do think this shift, which involved both a curtailing of speech and retreat to groups online, does have a lot to do with iPhone, social media, and the way that we communicate.

[B]

And what about protest culture? You clearly had in the mid 2010s, the rise of a general new atmosphere of protest culture on campuses. And part of the argument from the Trump administration has been that this led to a culture of overt physical intimidation for Jewish students in particular, when the protests were around, issues related to Israel and Gaza and so on. But just I think generally that protest became a means of intimidating speech.

[C]

So I somewhat attribute the rise of this protest culture, which I will agree did occur around then, to the same actually underlying cause that I just mentioned of people retreating online. As people get lonelier, they want to find groups. So the George Floyd protest, when everybody was locked down and no one could do anything, and you couldn't see anything. And here's this community. I mean, it was a community. It's your buddies, like, it's your friends. And I can't actually fault that feeling. That's a very human feeling that you wanna be a part of. And then especially if you lose a friend group and you lose some of the things that you otherwise would have done, then, yeah, protests seem very attractive.

[B]

So I wanna be concrete because we're gonna talk about the universities as institutions, because that is obviously where law and policy come in. What you're des is a cultural shift. How is it the responsibility, or to what extent is it the responsibility of universities as institutions to have some kind of reaction? It's not the university's fault that all their students were on iPhones. Right. And it's not the university's fault that students started protesting and so on. What did the institutions themselves, in your view, do wrong in. In response to this shift towards political conformism, protest culture and so on?

[C]

Yeah. So I think the universities were too late on just basic safety issues. So let's just take the post October 7th, antisemitic violent episodes breaking out across college campuses. If you're letting tent cities fester on your campus. And then we've heard a lot from Harvard specifically that they were concerned about shutting some of those down or citing students. Because you can't just say, hey, leave. The students aren't gonna leave. There has to be leave or I'm gonna suspend you or I'm gonna write you up or there's gonna be some consequences here. But if you've got a bunch of international students and such a thing might threaten their visa, then you're not going to do that. So I think there was fear.

[B]

Discipline. Discipline would threaten their visa.

[C]

Discipline.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. So I think there was too much fear from university officials that by taking basic safety, that somehow that would reflect badly on them. And they were scared because they didn't wanna be criticized. And I think there has been some learning on that of like, no, we're gonna protect our students. And I think universally, people learned some lessons after October 7, and university presidents were fired and replaced, including at Harvard, at Penn, Columbia. But in general, what should they be doing about this? I think it's just buying into the notion that there has to be some community aspect that's continually fostered around a culture of excellence. Otherwise you will let a culture of victimhood and intimidation and harassment and negativity thrive. And I think recognizing that there was a problem, which I don't think they still have done, but that's an opportunity that just has not been seized.

[B]

Yeah. So just for maximal clarity, so then you have a problem that is in part about a set of ideas having to do with the value of victimhood that undermine the academic and professional mission of the universities. You have that, and then you have concrete failures to provide basic public safety. Is that a fair. That's a. That's a fair distillation, yes. Okay, good. So now let's talk about what the Trump administration is trying to do about it. So why don't you describe for me, from your perspective as the point person for this strategy, how the Trump administration has thought about its conflicts with universities and its attempts to sort of attack both of those problems.

[C]

Yeah. So I think day one or day two is an executive order that discusses universities. Specifically, Title VI says that for any federally funded educational institution, they can't discriminate on the basis of race or national origin. And so this has been used both on the antisemitism front, which is national origin and race, and then also on what I people broadly describe as DEI front. And so if you're gonna be federally funded, then we're gonna make sure that you don't discriminate on the basis of race. So it started with investigations, sending letters, and then I think some people just changed their policies at the beginning.

[B]

So pause there for a moment. So, first of all, how did you pick which schools you sent letters to?

[C]

So I think the Department of Education we primarily relied on to pick what they either knew based on complaints that had been received. And you had house investigations. So a lot of this information was public here, and there was in government databases. Some of them are just very out loud, like the UC system. So I think there was some flag waving by certain universities, and then I.

[B]

Think where they would basically say, we're primarily hiring minorities for these positions.

[C]

Exactly right.

[B]

That kind of thing.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Just give me. Give me an example.

[C]

So let's just take Harvard, for example. Harvard has since taken down its statistics, but they used to have a big comparison chart of what their new hires used to look like and what their hires looked like. I don't know, three years ago, something like that. And it used to be, like, pretty heavily white male, and then now it's not. And so. And then they deleted that website. So you have sort of all of the pieces where it's like an overt focus on this, where we want. We absolutely want to lower our white males. And then there's an embarrassment piece of it where they then took the thing down. So that's what I would consider flag waving.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So the Trump administration has lots of data and you can't do everything all at once. And so there is a prioritization issue. And I think people have picked up that the Ivy League has sort of been prioritized, which they're not the only ones. But when you're thinking about what the consequences are if you are violating Title 6 or just otherwise have bad policies, the federal government doesn't have to give you grants.

[B]

But is there also a sense in which, you know, the Ivy League sets the tone for elite education, and if you effectively make an example of these schools, you would assume that other schools will sort of fall into line? Is that part of it too?

[C]

Yeah. So you want leadership, but leadership in the right direction. So I think that's actually something that Harvard would agree with. If you were to ask Harvard, like, what makes Harvard, Harvard, why is it special? Why don't you just shut Harvard down? Not have it, but you can have all the rest of the Ivies and will the world be the same? And Harvard would say, no, the world will not be the same. We must have Harvard. Why is that? Because they're leaders. They.

[B]

I mean, also, the federal government doesn't actually have the power to shut down Harvard University.

[C]

No, no, no, that's. But I would just, you know, in theory, defund.

[B]

You can defund Harvard.

[C]

What's Harvard's special thing? Right, right. And it is that it's, in theory, a leader. And the question is, a leader in what direction? And so if you get signals from the heights of the leaders in academia that were making these changes, then, yes, that's obviously hugely influential for the rest of the country.

[B]

So what are schools supposed to do to prove to the Trump administration that they are being good examples for the rest of higher education?

[C]

So we actually do plan to have a formal way that universities can say we're doing the right things. So we. I think the Trump administration does not want to be all whack a mole or all negative, but these are the principles that universities and the Trump administration, and frankly, private donors can ascribe to, to say this makes a great university. So those have not been public yet, but they will be public. And I think we're going to have a lot of great universities signing up as the forerunners and saying we affirm these things, but nothing will be shocking. It will be things like merit based admissions, merit based hiring. I think we'd also like to see some attention to the cost of admissions. So things that are gonna just very directly benefit students some. Look at what your foreign student base looks like. Are you importing radicalism, and how are you assessing that? So a commitment to cleaning that up.

[B]

Foreign funding, is that primarily about the ideology of students admitted, or is it a problem with the numbers? Like, does the Trump administration have a problem with how many foreign students elite universities admit?

[C]

So I think there's a fairness issue that the president has talked about with the numbers. These are universities that have huge amounts of federal funding and are supposed to serve American students, and instead they've taken on, I think Columbia's numbers were close to 50%. Harvard's are around 30% of foreign students. And that's not to say anything bad about foreign students. It's about what are the opportunities remaining for American students. So, yes, I think there will be some focus on what's the right sizing there. And as a university, are you relying on foreign students for money, or is your number calculated to having a good student experience? And what I think about with the foreign exchange program is that this was supposed to be a program where students come. It's an exchange program. You come to the United States, you learn about the United States, you learn about the US Culture, and then you take everything that you've learned about how great our country is, and you go back to your home country and you spread those ideas. And instead, if you have so large of a number, then you don't get that because the percentages have grown so much that you can actually just end up having your own, a sort of siloed culture.

[B]

How qualified is the federal government, whether it be the White House, the Education Department, and any other unit to assess some of these things. Right. So I think you would concede that it is already tricky to some degree. Right. To assess how fully in compliance a university is. Just with the Supreme Court's admissions decision just a minute ago, you said, well, we wouldn't want universities to just use SAT scores to admit kids. But it seems like if you wanted to have a system where you could rigorously assess racial discrimination at admissions, aren't there just endless gray areas where it's just gonna be really hard to say who's complying and who's not?

[C]

So definitely. And I think nobody in the Trump administration is trying to run a university. It is too taxing.

[B]

Nobody. Nobod actually wants to run a university.

[C]

Nobody ever. Yes. So I think there's a line of, how do you ensure compliance with civil rights and that your taxpayer money is going To a good place versus a bad place, which is broader than a civil rights question. So you need some level of control, but at the end of the day, you want independent entities. Like, on one hand, there's just the Hillsdale model, right? Like, if you're going to take the money, then, yeah, there's going to be strings attached, but you don't have to take the money. And if your research was Hillsdale College.

[B]

Just so listeners know, is the conservative liberal arts school in Michigan one of a few schools that doesn't take federal funding.

[C]

Right. And so that's always an option. Like, if anybody thinks that any of this is too burdensome, especially very well funded universities, then just do none of it. Just be Hillsdale. And it's funny because for research, I mean, people don't really understand the massive amount of money that goes to research. Billions and billions. Harvard right now, I think, has something like $7 billion of promised grants. These are huge, huge numbers. But if all of the research was good, something that was gonna cure cancer, then a donor would love to fund that. I mean, to be the person that cured cancer. And so.

[B]

Well, wait, wait a minute, though. I mean, everybody wants to cure cancer, but donors have finite resources. One of the assumptions behind public funding of universities is that there are certain goods, including medical research and research for all kinds of different diseases, that, you know, you can't just rely on donor funding for. That has been the theory behind public private partnerships in American life going. Going back decades. Do you think that's good? Like, do you think that. Do you think the federal government should be funding cancer research?

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

Okay, so it's not just like donors will pick up the slack. There is good research that we want the government funding.

[C]

There is good research. But your same question of how closely can you actually monitor a university's ability to just do a good job, be merit based, not be importing radicalism? Like, these are difficult questions. How are you gonna assess that? It's the same question, frankly, for all these grants. How are you actually gonna monitor where this is being used? What the types of research are, how great the overhead? When you do have the overhead, is it going to the sports stadium or is it. Is it going to salaries? If it's going to salaries, These get to be difficult questions. And so I think the problem is not whether the government should or shouldn't be funding cancer research. It absolutely should, but the unwieldiness of it has led to basically an unchecked situation. And so I think it is actually proper to have a right Sizing where universities are relying on the federal government to a certain extent, where these are things that are maybe not close to a breakthrough, and that there is an opportunity for the private sector to spend money in ways that are beneficial to society. And to the extent people have problems with billionaires buying an extra jet or an extra yacht, what are we doing to incentivize people to actually spend on beneficial causes?

[B]

So in effect here, you're saying basically that Harvard is very good at getting billionaires to give it money. And you're saying if some of Harvard's research funding is threatened, then it's not a bad thing at all. If Harvard calls up its billionaire donors and says, hey, we don't like what the federal government is asking of us, we want you to fund this cancer research instead, you'd say, that's fine.

[C]

Wealthy people funding universities, funding science funding our future is something that has history in this country.

[B]

It's absolutely a good thing. But the reason I'm asking about the difficulty of assessing these things is not because you have to have a perfect system in order to have a federal relationship to universities. It's more just that you guys are involved in negotiations, specific negotiations with universities that have concrete asks. And so I'm just trying to understand how you get to the concrete ask. One aspect of this is that the Trump administration has been asking and in some cases has successfully induced elite schools to pay pretty big settlements, fines, effectively, to the federal government. How does that fit into the picture? Is this just punishment? Is it revenue for the federal government? What is the purpose of those kind of settlements?

[C]

Yeah, so these are large numbers, so not to minimize that, but the Brown settlement and the Columbia settlement each represented 1% of the endowment. So these are things that the universities can afford. And in a sense, it's giving back a very, very small percentage of money that goes to these schools every year. So I think there's a, you know, there's a recognition, of course, there's no recognition of fault. These are settlements. But by paying some of this back, I think there is a somewhat for the public sense of acknowledgement of wrongdoing, not a legal sense, but a sort of a moral sense of we've taken all this money and we did it in ways that were not merit based or they weren't safe for our students. And so we're paying a small amount of it back. But then I think also having that dollar figure, it actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention. So if you've got see a Headline and It's Columbia spends $200 million to the TRE and $21 million largest ever EEOC religious discrimination case. Actually, when you see numbers like that, then you pay attention and you look and then you're able to learn a little bit more. So maybe you wouldn't normally learn.

[B]

And are the people paying attention, not just the public, but other college presidents?

[C]

Yeah, you want to get in early, before the fines are too large. But I think in general, a settlement on its own without a fine might not be taken as seriously by the public or by other universities as when there is a fine, which, like I said, these are small dollar figures compared to the amounts that they are getting every year from the federal government and from their donors. But I think it provides a seriousness and a focus on these in ways that a sort of promises only wouldn't.

[B]

Do you think the biggest schools are just too rich? The federal government, now under the first Trump administration, passed a very modest endowment tax. Do you think generally it would be better for America if the biggest schools had smaller endowments?

[C]

So I think it's not necessarily the size of the endowment, it's the application of them. So are you putting your endowment to some sort of positive use, or is this just generating capital so that later you can have a bigger building? You know, there's no problem with being wealthy. There's no problem with universities being wealthy wealthy. But what are you using your wealth for? I think you can judge on that. And so if you're saying, I need all this money for this research, where am I going to find it? Where am I going? Well, I did find some of it. And then if you were using some of that money to fund research that would generate a patent that would be very valuable, then that would be beneficial for everybody because you have put that money then to good and productive use.

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[B]

I want to ask how ideology and ideological diversity enter into this because in one of the the publicized letters that the administration sent to Harvard, there was a specific focus on the idea that Harvard should be looking for intellectual diversity in hiring, considering seriously why there are so few conservative and Republican faculty. Right. And trying to do something about that. And the letter took this quite far. It specifically said that Harvard should consider that each department, field or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. I'm quoting from the letter here. And that there should be a audit that goes on a, quote, department by department, field by field, or teaching unit, by teaching unit basis, as appropriate. End quote. And I should stress this is an area that I, as a conservative with a lot of experience of higher education, take very seriously as a big problem for elite academia that it isn't intellectually diverse. But it does seem like in this ask you can see the problem with the federal government trying to micromanage this because it just seems like you get very quickly into an absurd situation where someone in Washington, D.C. is scrutinizing Harvard's geology department. I don't even know if Harvard has a geology department. But you take my point to see if it has enough Trump supporters.

[C]

This is, I think, the most difficult question because the answer is on one hand, obviously I think conservatives want universities to a prepare their students and students are going to be in the real world confronted with all sorts of thoughts and they should be prepared for that. So a good university would have some level of intellectual diversity and and not only that, but to the extent you have universities that are just hotbeds of radicalism, that's not good for the student, that's not good for the culture, that's not good for the campus, that's bad for the country. So that is all true. And I think the administration believes that intellectual diversity is a key factor to a good university, that we would send our kids too. But at the same time, I think we all acknowledge that the federal government's role in policing that is necessarily limited in the sense that we don't want the next administration to come in and say, well, actually, this is the mix that I think is the best.

[B]

So in meaning a Democratic administration coming in and calling up University of Kansas and saying, why haven't you hired 17 more leftists for X Department? Exactly.

[C]

And it's sort of a ridiculous thing to think through, because how many more leftists can you possibly hire if you're this saturated already?

[B]

But, well, but it is. I think, that that particular example would not happen, but I think. Think we saw in the Obama administration and to some degree in the Biden administration. Democratic administrations were very comfortable using some of the same levers the Trump administration is using to push college campuses in particular directions on how to handle sexual assault and how to handle transgender issues and so on. And I think one of the critiques, from a sort of libertarian perspective of what the Trump administration is doing is that you are sort of taking that model and turbocharging it. And a Democratic administration could say, hey, all these Catholic hospitals seem to be getting a lot of public health care funding, and yet they won't perform gender reassignment surgeries. Let's do something about that. Right. That there's sort of an endless escalatory spiral once the federal government is sort of providing private institutions that get public money with marching orders. I think that's a reasonable concern.

[C]

So civil rights, I think, is easy, sort of meritocracy is good. And the hope actually, is that if you are actually treating people on the basis of their merit and whether that's test scores or whether that's personal successes or whatever, you do tend to handle the intellectual diversity piece by accident, because it's not gonna be the case that every excellent person thinks the same thing. So there's that. But then also, I think that's why it's important that this process come underway where there's a conversation with universities and with donors and with the Trump administration altogether, about what it actually means to be a great university and to have buy in. Because I actually think one of the reasons why some of these universities have made changes without provocation from the Trump administration or in the case of Columbia, even though there was provocation and even though it was a deal, it's because they wanted to. They wanted to, and they thought that this was a good thing, and they were tired of being held hostage by their left wing. And actually, they want intellectual diversity. They don't want another person who's just going to have the same, like, we got another Climate change person, you know, we've got another gender studies. I think they want it. And so giving the universities the permission to do this sometimes requires a strong statement from the government. That's almost like a scapegoat.

[B]

But, yeah, I think, I think that's right. Just based on my own experience living in a college town and speaking to people who work in higher education, that there is some degree first to which the Trump administration is pushing on an open door, and also some degree to which leaders of universities are happy to say, oh, we didn't want to do this, but the Trump administration made us do it. But in fact, it's something that they themselves want to do. At the same time, though, I do think that there is some tension between saying we want schools to hire just based on merit and we want schools to have a lot more intellectual diversity. Because the reality is, and this is where I think the traditional left wing argument around affirmative action always made a certain sense. Right. Like you have to create pipelines. Right. I think it was reasonable in the 1960s to say there just aren't good pipelines for getting a lot of African American kids into elite colleges. I think it's reasonable for conservatives today to say there aren't good pipelines for getting people who aren't left wing into certain academic departments. But I just think you, you aren't gonna get there by saying merit alone. You would have to say, no. Universities have to do proactive things that are, yeah, gonna be in tension a little bit. Right.

[C]

The affirmative action for the conservative is. It's an actual reality. So when I was in Harvard, we had maybe one and a half conservative professors, and I think the university, surely.

[B]

Adrian Vermeule counts for at least like 3.7.

[C]

That is true. But the pipelines thing I think is different than actual affirmative action and looking at your criteria too. So if what you are prioritizing is how many times you've been published in some leftist magazine, then of course a conservative is not gonna compete there. But I think other universities have found successes in having some adjunct programs. You're not a professor, you're not gonna be able to compete on those. But we're gonna bring you in and you can teach a January course, or you can have a clinic or something like that. So I think this problem starts incrementally solving itself in a way that doesn't ultimately require affirmative action. And then groups like the Federalist Society, they try and identify people who they think would be good professors and try and teach them how to do that.

[B]

Right. No, no, I don't think there's any problem with the pipeline in law schools, but I think the Federalist Society is a fairly distinctive case. And let me throw out another seeming tension here, which is around issues about anti Semitism. So, like, clearly, there are certain things that universities have tolerated or allowed in protests in the last few years, just overt harassment and intimidation of Jewish students. Right. And I think there it's very straightforward what the administration is asking for. But then there's a larger, very blurry zone of critiques of the policies of the state of Israel, critiques of Zionism, where administration has seemed to ask in some cases for something that again, looks more like micromanaging of particular departments, saying, well, we're not going to have radical critics of Israel here and there and so on. Right. And that, again, seems like a kind of thumb on the scale in intellectual debates.

[C]

So when you say the Trump administration has asked for them, I acknowledge that there are some letters that were sent by the Antisemitism Task Force in some way that either incorporated the IHRA definition or otherwise were perceived to have been sort of speech codes.

[B]

These are. Right. These are strong definitions of antisemitism that at least some people on the left would say rule out what should be legitimate critiques.

[C]

Right. But when you look at what President Trump and at the senior level, what has actually happened, it's not that. So the Columbia deal, and I think everyone would acknowledge that Colombia had a major antisemitism problem, but the Columbia deal in no way creates any speech code, whether it be on Israel or anything else. It specifically says that this is not intended to create any First Amendment conflict or otherwise govern speech on Columbia's campus. So there's a concern, and I think there are people in the administration who probably are more in favor of speech constraints and then people who are less in favor of speech constraints. And. And that's just the way the Trump administration works, where people have different views of kind of where that line is. And I think it's a difficult conversation of what's the line between harassment and being unable to actually function on campus versus fair criticism that people, even if they don't like it, should hear. That's not a definable line. That is a difficult line. And I think in sussing that out, at the end of the day, where the Trump administration landed is on the more free speech side of things, which is evident in the final terms of the Columbia deal.

[A]

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[B]

Okay, let's talk for a minute about the legality of the approach the Trump administration has taken, because I think you have have conceded to some degree that in all of these zones there are gray areas and blurry lines. Right. However, the administration has also moved sort of preemptively to cut funding, to say it is sort of, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is what has happened repeatedly is critiques have been lodged, investigations have been opened, and then funding has been cut before the investigation is complete. And this is where the Trump administration has been rebuked in court, most recently in a case involving Harvard itself for this. Right. That you are essentially assuming the violation before the negotiation is actually finished. Is that a fair critique?

[C]

So that is certainly what Harvard says.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And I think it's different than that, though. So, yes, Title six, which says you can't discriminate on the basis of race, is a bar on funding. So if you are found to violate Title vi, that's not grants that are at issue. That's your student loans, that's Pell grants. I mean, that's a big deal.

[B]

If you are found, if you are violated. Right.

[C]

Now, what the Trump administration has done is not find a Title 6 violation prior to the process. I mean, the Title 6 violation was found. HHS did find them in violation of Title VI and referred that case over to DOJ to litigate and informed the accreditor for Harvard. But this is an entity that doesn't share the values, basically, of the administration. And there are various statutes and various regulations that give the administration that sort of discretion over how it can spend. Spend its own money. And so the lawsuit basically was an argument that, oh, well, they're just saying that. But what they're actually doing is short circuiting the Title 6 process.

[B]

Well, not the title. I mean, it does seem, in fairness, Right. From our entire conversation that the goal of the Trump administration's strategy is not to micromanage how Harvard does cancer research or whatever it is to change university policy on hiring and discrimination and anti Semitism. Right. So doesn't it seem like that's true that you are picking these grants as a lever to affect something unrelated to them?

[C]

So having Harvard change its policies would be great, but at the same time, if they don't, that's fine. We're just not gonna fund it. And so it's not like it's taking over Harvard. It's not, you know, they sued us, we didn't sue them. It's not a forced change. It is actually just that there's a portion, not even all. There is a portion of Harvard's grants that we just decide should go to somewhere else, maybe another university, maybe Brown, maybe Princeton, maybe Yale.

[B]

I'm just going to express some skepticism that the Trump administration has sat down and said, we really think that the University of Kansas's cancer research program is just way better than Harvard's and we're just going to cut that funding. It seems like the administration is going after the areas where Harvard is, by general agreement, most effective and successful, because that seems like a useful lever to change other areas of administration policy.

[C]

Yeah, but at the end of the.

[B]

Day, isn't that a naive reading? A simple reading. Right.

[C]

It's not a full comparison of all universities across the nation, but at the end of the day, Harvard reacted to a letter that asked for a few simple changes with a lawsuit. But Harvard basically said, instead of us showing any amount of good faith effort to commit ourselves to the policies that are important to the United States, we're going to instead say, we refuse to even answer you. These are billions of federal dollars, and I think that the funder of that can ask for a basic relationship.

[B]

All right, well, let's end by looking at the future. Right. Imagine it is 2030, and I guess we, well, we can imagine it's either a Democratic or Republican administration. Give me a definition of success in higher ed policy in five years, in seven years or eight years. What does the landscape look like if your negotiations with and pressure on universities are successful?

[C]

Yeah. So I think universities will return to a merit mission. And that'll be in admissions, that'll be in hiring, that'll be in research. And so that'll be with its relationship to the federal government, that the federal government will be funding institutions that can be perceived as excellent. And maybe they're not today excellent, maybe they're these institutions that are trying to be excellent, but that the mission of universities will not be diversity. The mission of universities won't be equity, but they will be excellence. And that will be rewarded with a tighter, closer and better federal relationship. And so that's with regard to the federal government, I think policy's larger than that. Policy's like, what's its effect in the world and how does it change our culture? And my hope is that the people who are graduating from our universities carry values that will uplift Western civilization and our country. And so that that installation of values is obviously not something that the federal government can necessarily micromanage, but it's something that the university itself can recommit itself to in determining how can we prepare our student body to be true leaders and to advance our country in ways that'll be better for everybody.

[B]

And to the extent that universities don't act collaboratively with this change. Right. Do you imagine a landscape where there really is a kind of shift in prestige and where students go, let's say from the Northeast to the south or Southwest. Right. Like, would you imagine a kind of shaken up US News and World Report rankings or something as a possible outcome of all of this?

[C]

Yeah. So I do think that as universities decide that they don't want a merit seeking mission, that's not attractive for parents, that's not attractive for students, and it's not attractive for the federal government. It's also not attractive for donors. And they'll have to be more out loud about that. So I think that's the goal, is you can choose who you want to be. You want to make no changes, you want to commit yourself to victimhood, you want to oppose the idea of merit, say it out loud so that students, parents, donors and the government can know and that each can dedicate their resources to those universities that are making our country Better.

[B]

Last question, then. From my perspective, you can probably sense this from some of the questions I've asked. The core weakness to me of university culture is a kind of stifling intellectual conformism. But that also seems to me just from watching the Trump administration and its battles with universities, the hardest for government policy to address without either falling afoul of the First Amendment or getting into impossible micromanaging. And it seems to me that a really shrewd federal strategy could take you from a world where 2% of the Harvard faculty are conservatives to a world where 4% are conservative and could get you some slightly more meaningful intellectual diversity. But to get beyond that, you need, as you just suggested, some kind of larger cultural shift. Universities did not become liberal because the federal government told them to become liberal. They became liberal because academic culture moves substantially to the left in a kind of organic way. Right. And the same with student culture. Can you imagine a shift in the culture that would create greater intellectual diversity on college campuses?

[C]

So if we're talking about federal and non federal levers, I think a couple of things. So, one, I think the same change that the federal society has brought for law schools could be focused on, and I wanna take a moment for Charlie Kirk in Turning Point, because the, the quiet loserness of the Republican Party when I was in college doesn't exist now. I think people are braver now and they have community now. And so you can see a Turning Point type organization, try and figure out then how to make professors, how to bring that energy into leadership levels. So I think you could do some sort of conservative organizing around already successful groups. And then I think just competition. So President Trump said he wanted to take Harvard's money and give it to trade schools. And obviously you're not gonna take NIH research money and give it to the local cosmetology school. But I think the general idea there is you can have a robust intellectual environment in a lot of different places, and it doesn't have to be the traditional university model. So if you just wanna learn about AI or if you want to do something different, and it's maybe not your traditional liberal arts, but you could like having more options and universities wanting to still attract those people, that type of competition, I think will increase the amount of intellectual diversity that universities have to offer. So continuing to find ways to provide competition, I think is also important.

[B]

All right, Mae Mailman, thank you so much for joining me.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Raina Raskin and Victoria Chamberlain. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amen Sahota and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Sophia Lynn Landman. Audience strategy by Shannon Basta and Christina Samulewski. And our director of Opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.