July 11, 2025 • 14 mins
Military and medical science brought federal funding to campuses, but student tuition helped keep it there
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
How American universities became so vulnerable to Trump by Ellen Schrecker.
Alan Schrecker is an American historian and author who has
written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education. Her most
recent book is The Lost Promise American Universities in the
nineteen Sixties, read by Mara Finnerty. As Donald Trump's administration
(00:26):
slashes and burns its way across the nation's top campuses,
American higher education faces the most serious crisis in its existence.
During earlier episodes of political repression, such as McCarthyism, academia's
main casualties tended to be the careers of individual professors
whose political activities displease the powers that be. The institutions
(00:50):
that fired and blacklisted those faculty members emerged from the
witch hunt more or less intact. Now the entire academic
world is a target. Trump is even wielding the government's
most powerful weapon by threatening to withdraw federal funding from
the entire sector. No school is immune from community colleges
(01:12):
and for profit institutions to the Ivy League and the
Big Ten. The loss of Washington's dollars would decimate or
seriously damage most colleges and universities. Without that money, primarily
for scientific research and student aid, higher education would be
unlikely to survive in its current form. Even the Magga
(01:34):
Juggernaut's other weapons, like banning foreign students or withdrawing accreditation,
have financial consequences. This is both a testament to the
Trump administration's broader goal of eliminating all vestiges of liberal
democracy from the United States and to the evolution of
American universities themselves. Uncle Sam's footprint within higher education has
(01:57):
expanded so enormously since the mid twentieth century, and the
academic community has undergone so many transmographications that it is
now vulnerable to Trump's economic sanctions in ways it would
not have been before. In the beginning, the federal government
remained aloof from the nation's early colleges, mostly small religious institutions,
(02:19):
the trained ministers and elite young men for the colonies
and the New Republic. Washington's first venture into higher education
was the eighteen sixty two Morrill Act. It awarded each
state a parcel of federal land, while designating the proceeds
of its sale to the establishment of a college offering
instruction in agricultural and the mechanical arts plus military training.
(02:44):
As the u s industrialized in the late nineteenth century,
the modern university emerged fully secular in its mission. It
emphasized scientific research, professional scholarship, and graduate education alongside its
liberal arts undergraduate corps. While some of these universities grew
(03:04):
out of such pre existing institutions as Harvard and Columbia,
others like Stanford, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago
were brand new, established by the private wealth of the
Gilded Age. It was war that first brought the federal
government onto campuses. During World War One, the military recruited
(03:25):
university scientists to make weapons. It also converted more than
five hundred academic institutions into training centers for officers and technicians.
After the armistice, universities reverted to their pre war status
as havens for privileged youth and aspiring local elites, while
high schools provided the main educational route to social mobility,
(03:48):
and private foundations supplied whatever external funding academic scientists required.
During the depression, the National Youth Administration did offer work
study ground to unemployed college students, but that unprecedented extension
of financial aid was viewed as a temporary welfare measure,
not an educational program. World War II, however, made the
(04:13):
funding permanent. The main wartime contracts went to the nation's
leading research universities, establishing the prototype for the defense related
beak science that was to flourish on American campuses for
decades to come. The two largest awards went to the
University of California for the Manhattan Project and MIT for
(04:34):
inventing radar, while dozens of other institutions shared the bouty
chemists and physicists got most of the action, but the
government also recruited economists, historians, and other social scientists for
a variety of wartime agencies, including the Office of Special Services,
an intelligence operation that became the precursor of the CIA.
(04:57):
After the war, the federal government cont continued to bank
rule higher education in several forms. The GI Bill provided
tuition and living expenses to veterans, democratizing higher education by
opening it up to previously excluded middle and working class students.
Research funding from the Armed Forces and the Atomic Energy
(05:18):
Commission increased significantly after the Cold War heated up, and
the Defense Department ramped up its spending. During the Korean
War in nineteen fifty seven, the Soviet Union launched its
Sputnik satellite and seemingly revealed that the United States had
fallen behind its Cold War rival in science and technology. Suddenly,
(05:39):
the supposed failures of American higher education became a hot
button issue. Glenn Seborg, a Manhattan Project chemist, insisted that
academic science was of absolutely critical importance to the national
welfare and hence inescapably a responsibility of the federal government,
and Congress rushed through the National Defense Education Act of
(06:02):
nineteen fifty eight that offered graduate fellowships and loans for
college students, as well as beefing up programs in area
studies and critical languages. Thanks to Spotnik, the late nineteen
fifties and early sixties became what one scholar at the
time called the new Golden Age for academic science, a
shine that extended to the rest of higher education as well.
(06:25):
The States, which at that time were the main funders
of public higher education, upped their support. Enrollments doubled and tripled.
New campuses sprouted up, older ones expanded and upgraded their offerings.
At the same time, the combination of President John F.
Kennedy's New Frontier with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society brought celebrity
(06:48):
and even some power to leading scientists and other academics,
and the federal money poured in. In nineteen fifty eight,
Washington spent four hundred and fifty six million dollars on
campus research. In nineteen sixty four, it was one point
two eight billion dollars. Most of that federal largess went
(07:08):
to the defense related projects that not only generated the
era's main scientific and technological breakthroughs, but also transformed the
universities that produced them into centers of world class research
and local economic growth by developing an engineering program that
fit directly into the Defense Department's Cold War electronic scenario.
(07:30):
For example, Stanford's canny provost Frederick Turmann, turned his school
from an institution for California playboys into the powerhouse that
created Silicon Valley. But by the late nineteen sixties, the
luster of academic science had begun to fade. A populous
mood endorsed by President Johnson, questioned the academy's supposed elitism
(07:54):
and tempered the earlier enthusiasm for the kind of research
that seemed to have no concrete payoff. Although funding for
academic science continued to rise, it did so at a
slower pace. Meanwhile, as the Vietnam War intensified, anti war
students and professors sought to eject military projects from their schools.
(08:16):
Quite a few administrators acceded to those demands, recognizing that
keeping defense related research on their campuses was not worth
the aggravation, and the military establishment agreed. By then, the
Pentagon was pulling away from basic science anyway. It found
that funding the pure research of academic scientists did not
(08:38):
meet its needs, as well as the applied research of
the corporate sector's politically less volatile engineers and technicians. In
nineteen sixty nine, Congress banned Defense Department grants for research
that did not have military applications. The National Science Foundation
took up some of that slack, but so too, and
(08:58):
ultimately more consequently did the National Institutes of Health. The
discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and
James Watson in nineteen fifty three transformed the world of science.
Where theoretical physics produced the path breaking research of the
first half of the twentieth century, molecular biology did in
(09:21):
the second. As a result, most of the government's funding
for cutting edge science was to come from agencies like
the NIH rather than the Pentagon, and it went primarily
to medical schools, tying the welfare of research universities to
the fate of institutions whose health related mission extended far
beyond that of traditional higher education. Supporting medicine, however, was
(09:45):
not a hard sell. The NIH was so popular, in fact,
that Congress often allocated more money to its grantees than
they had requested. The other types of federal funding for
universities and colleges that expanded during the nineteen sixties were
the various programs that responded to the social movements of
the time by extending financial aid to students touted as
(10:09):
creating social mobility. The emphasis on higher education diverted attention
from the real economic problems of an increasingly inegalitarian society.
It would also burden the university with an unrealistic responsibility
for solving those problems. Still, the government's financial aid to
individual students did enable many to improve their lives, whether
(10:34):
through pelgrants authorized under the Higher Education Act of nineteen
sixty five or subsidized loans to middle class and working
class students. Academia's golden age came to an end in
the nineteen seventies, just as the United States, which was
facing foreign economic competition for the first time since World
War II, stumbled into an inflation fueled crisis and a
(10:57):
concurrent attack on government spending. The public turned against the
campus unrest of the nineteen sixties and retracted its previously
unstinting support for the academy. Congress tried to pull federal
fellowships back from student rebels, while ambitious politicians like Ronald
Reagan found electoral gold by campaigning against their universities. Most deleteriously,
(11:22):
the state legislatures that had traditionally been the main financial
supporters of the public colleges and universities that were educating
eighty percent of the nation's students, drastically reduced their appropriations.
From then on, the threat of austerity stocked the academy,
along with a cabal of right wing millionaires and ideologues
(11:43):
who mounted a lavishly funded, decades long campaign to undermine
the authority of academic knowledge. Academic administrators contended with these
new financial constraints by turning to every possible source of
income they could find. They heated fiercely for federal research
grants as well as donations from the newly minted millionaires
(12:05):
of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, But it was students
above all who kept most institutions afloat. Between the mid
seventies and the mid nineties, tuitions grew at ten times
the rate of family incomes. So too did the federal
loans that financed them and created the one point eight
trillion dollar debt burden that now blights the future of
(12:29):
several generations of present and former college students and keeps
others from even considering an academic degree. Today, as the
White House bully in chief seems intent on shattering America's
tottering system of higher education, the tangled legacy of financial
interconnections between the government and the university may well ensure
(12:52):
his success. Decimating research funding, as Trump has done by
canceling four hundred million dollars in grants and contracts to
Columbia and shrinking or eliminating student grants and loans will
make higher education both less productive and less accessible. Even
White House crackdowns in areas of higher education that seem
(13:14):
unrelated to funding can be devastating. Take accreditation. For example,
a bureaucratic procedure that requires every institution of higher education
to assess its operations once every ten years to remain
eligible for student loans. Imposing political criteria on the process,
which the President is currently considering, could demolish whatever remnants
(13:39):
of democratic pedagogy and service to the common good still remain. Similarly,
because many colleges have come to depend on wealthy foreign
students who can pay full freight, the state departments threat
to withhold their visas could also knock those institutions out
of business. If the academic community responds, as it so
(14:00):
often has, by acceding to the government's demands for ideological conformity,
we may also see the loss of our intellectual vitality.
Colleges and universities will seek safety in vocationalism, abandoning the
innovation and critical thinking that feeds a vigorous and responsible
public sphere. If we do not resist the imposition of ignorance,
(14:24):
our nation may well fall prey to an authoritarianism that
will be, in our dear leader's words, the likes of
which you've never seen
How American universities became so vulnerable to Trump by Ellen Schrecker.
Alan Schrecker is an American historian and author who has
written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education. Her most
recent book is The Lost Promise American Universities in the
nineteen Sixties, read by Mara Finnerty. As Donald Trump's administration
(00:26):
slashes and burns its way across the nation's top campuses,
American higher education faces the most serious crisis in its existence.
During earlier episodes of political repression, such as McCarthyism, academia's
main casualties tended to be the careers of individual professors
whose political activities displease the powers that be. The institutions
(00:50):
that fired and blacklisted those faculty members emerged from the
witch hunt more or less intact. Now the entire academic
world is a target. Trump is even wielding the government's
most powerful weapon by threatening to withdraw federal funding from
the entire sector. No school is immune from community colleges
(01:12):
and for profit institutions to the Ivy League and the
Big Ten. The loss of Washington's dollars would decimate or
seriously damage most colleges and universities. Without that money, primarily
for scientific research and student aid, higher education would be
unlikely to survive in its current form. Even the Magga
(01:34):
Juggernaut's other weapons, like banning foreign students or withdrawing accreditation,
have financial consequences. This is both a testament to the
Trump administration's broader goal of eliminating all vestiges of liberal
democracy from the United States and to the evolution of
American universities themselves. Uncle Sam's footprint within higher education has
(01:57):
expanded so enormously since the mid twentieth century, and the
academic community has undergone so many transmographications that it is
now vulnerable to Trump's economic sanctions in ways it would
not have been before. In the beginning, the federal government
remained aloof from the nation's early colleges, mostly small religious institutions,
(02:19):
the trained ministers and elite young men for the colonies
and the New Republic. Washington's first venture into higher education
was the eighteen sixty two Morrill Act. It awarded each
state a parcel of federal land, while designating the proceeds
of its sale to the establishment of a college offering
instruction in agricultural and the mechanical arts plus military training.
(02:44):
As the u s industrialized in the late nineteenth century,
the modern university emerged fully secular in its mission. It
emphasized scientific research, professional scholarship, and graduate education alongside its
liberal arts undergraduate corps. While some of these universities grew
(03:04):
out of such pre existing institutions as Harvard and Columbia,
others like Stanford, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago
were brand new, established by the private wealth of the
Gilded Age. It was war that first brought the federal
government onto campuses. During World War One, the military recruited
(03:25):
university scientists to make weapons. It also converted more than
five hundred academic institutions into training centers for officers and technicians.
After the armistice, universities reverted to their pre war status
as havens for privileged youth and aspiring local elites, while
high schools provided the main educational route to social mobility,
(03:48):
and private foundations supplied whatever external funding academic scientists required.
During the depression, the National Youth Administration did offer work
study ground to unemployed college students, but that unprecedented extension
of financial aid was viewed as a temporary welfare measure,
not an educational program. World War II, however, made the
(04:13):
funding permanent. The main wartime contracts went to the nation's
leading research universities, establishing the prototype for the defense related
beak science that was to flourish on American campuses for
decades to come. The two largest awards went to the
University of California for the Manhattan Project and MIT for
(04:34):
inventing radar, while dozens of other institutions shared the bouty
chemists and physicists got most of the action, but the
government also recruited economists, historians, and other social scientists for
a variety of wartime agencies, including the Office of Special Services,
an intelligence operation that became the precursor of the CIA.
(04:57):
After the war, the federal government cont continued to bank
rule higher education in several forms. The GI Bill provided
tuition and living expenses to veterans, democratizing higher education by
opening it up to previously excluded middle and working class students.
Research funding from the Armed Forces and the Atomic Energy
(05:18):
Commission increased significantly after the Cold War heated up, and
the Defense Department ramped up its spending. During the Korean
War in nineteen fifty seven, the Soviet Union launched its
Sputnik satellite and seemingly revealed that the United States had
fallen behind its Cold War rival in science and technology. Suddenly,
(05:39):
the supposed failures of American higher education became a hot
button issue. Glenn Seborg, a Manhattan Project chemist, insisted that
academic science was of absolutely critical importance to the national
welfare and hence inescapably a responsibility of the federal government,
and Congress rushed through the National Defense Education Act of
(06:02):
nineteen fifty eight that offered graduate fellowships and loans for
college students, as well as beefing up programs in area
studies and critical languages. Thanks to Spotnik, the late nineteen
fifties and early sixties became what one scholar at the
time called the new Golden Age for academic science, a
shine that extended to the rest of higher education as well.
(06:25):
The States, which at that time were the main funders
of public higher education, upped their support. Enrollments doubled and tripled.
New campuses sprouted up, older ones expanded and upgraded their offerings.
At the same time, the combination of President John F.
Kennedy's New Frontier with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society brought celebrity
(06:48):
and even some power to leading scientists and other academics,
and the federal money poured in. In nineteen fifty eight,
Washington spent four hundred and fifty six million dollars on
campus research. In nineteen sixty four, it was one point
two eight billion dollars. Most of that federal largess went
(07:08):
to the defense related projects that not only generated the
era's main scientific and technological breakthroughs, but also transformed the
universities that produced them into centers of world class research
and local economic growth by developing an engineering program that
fit directly into the Defense Department's Cold War electronic scenario.
(07:30):
For example, Stanford's canny provost Frederick Turmann, turned his school
from an institution for California playboys into the powerhouse that
created Silicon Valley. But by the late nineteen sixties, the
luster of academic science had begun to fade. A populous
mood endorsed by President Johnson, questioned the academy's supposed elitism
(07:54):
and tempered the earlier enthusiasm for the kind of research
that seemed to have no concrete payoff. Although funding for
academic science continued to rise, it did so at a
slower pace. Meanwhile, as the Vietnam War intensified, anti war
students and professors sought to eject military projects from their schools.
(08:16):
Quite a few administrators acceded to those demands, recognizing that
keeping defense related research on their campuses was not worth
the aggravation, and the military establishment agreed. By then, the
Pentagon was pulling away from basic science anyway. It found
that funding the pure research of academic scientists did not
(08:38):
meet its needs, as well as the applied research of
the corporate sector's politically less volatile engineers and technicians. In
nineteen sixty nine, Congress banned Defense Department grants for research
that did not have military applications. The National Science Foundation
took up some of that slack, but so too, and
(08:58):
ultimately more consequently did the National Institutes of Health. The
discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and
James Watson in nineteen fifty three transformed the world of science.
Where theoretical physics produced the path breaking research of the
first half of the twentieth century, molecular biology did in
(09:21):
the second. As a result, most of the government's funding
for cutting edge science was to come from agencies like
the NIH rather than the Pentagon, and it went primarily
to medical schools, tying the welfare of research universities to
the fate of institutions whose health related mission extended far
beyond that of traditional higher education. Supporting medicine, however, was
(09:45):
not a hard sell. The NIH was so popular, in fact,
that Congress often allocated more money to its grantees than
they had requested. The other types of federal funding for
universities and colleges that expanded during the nineteen sixties were
the various programs that responded to the social movements of
the time by extending financial aid to students touted as
(10:09):
creating social mobility. The emphasis on higher education diverted attention
from the real economic problems of an increasingly inegalitarian society.
It would also burden the university with an unrealistic responsibility
for solving those problems. Still, the government's financial aid to
individual students did enable many to improve their lives, whether
(10:34):
through pelgrants authorized under the Higher Education Act of nineteen
sixty five or subsidized loans to middle class and working
class students. Academia's golden age came to an end in
the nineteen seventies, just as the United States, which was
facing foreign economic competition for the first time since World
War II, stumbled into an inflation fueled crisis and a
(10:57):
concurrent attack on government spending. The public turned against the
campus unrest of the nineteen sixties and retracted its previously
unstinting support for the academy. Congress tried to pull federal
fellowships back from student rebels, while ambitious politicians like Ronald
Reagan found electoral gold by campaigning against their universities. Most deleteriously,
(11:22):
the state legislatures that had traditionally been the main financial
supporters of the public colleges and universities that were educating
eighty percent of the nation's students, drastically reduced their appropriations.
From then on, the threat of austerity stocked the academy,
along with a cabal of right wing millionaires and ideologues
(11:43):
who mounted a lavishly funded, decades long campaign to undermine
the authority of academic knowledge. Academic administrators contended with these
new financial constraints by turning to every possible source of
income they could find. They heated fiercely for federal research
grants as well as donations from the newly minted millionaires
(12:05):
of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, But it was students
above all who kept most institutions afloat. Between the mid
seventies and the mid nineties, tuitions grew at ten times
the rate of family incomes. So too did the federal
loans that financed them and created the one point eight
trillion dollar debt burden that now blights the future of
(12:29):
several generations of present and former college students and keeps
others from even considering an academic degree. Today, as the
White House bully in chief seems intent on shattering America's
tottering system of higher education, the tangled legacy of financial
interconnections between the government and the university may well ensure
(12:52):
his success. Decimating research funding, as Trump has done by
canceling four hundred million dollars in grants and contracts to
Columbia and shrinking or eliminating student grants and loans will
make higher education both less productive and less accessible. Even
White House crackdowns in areas of higher education that seem
(13:14):
unrelated to funding can be devastating. Take accreditation. For example,
a bureaucratic procedure that requires every institution of higher education
to assess its operations once every ten years to remain
eligible for student loans. Imposing political criteria on the process,
which the President is currently considering, could demolish whatever remnants
(13:39):
of democratic pedagogy and service to the common good still remain. Similarly,
because many colleges have come to depend on wealthy foreign
students who can pay full freight, the state departments threat
to withhold their visas could also knock those institutions out
of business. If the academic community responds, as it so
(14:00):
often has, by acceding to the government's demands for ideological conformity,
we may also see the loss of our intellectual vitality.
Colleges and universities will seek safety in vocationalism, abandoning the
innovation and critical thinking that feeds a vigorous and responsible
public sphere. If we do not resist the imposition of ignorance,
(14:24):
our nation may well fall prey to an authoritarianism that
will be, in our dear leader's words, the likes of
which you've never seen
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