Trump’s looming attack on higher education

Episode Summary

The second term of Donald Trump has officially begun, but despite all the things he’s unveiled in the past several weeks, we don’t know fully what his policies are going to be over the next four years.

That is in part because Trump himself is a very erratic figure who says things that are nonsensical, even by his own standards. While there are documents such as Project 2025 which were created by Trump's ideological allies in the reactionary movement, that document itself is not particularly detailed in a number of ways.

But one thing we can be sure is going to happen in the second Trump administration is that he will conduct a full-scale assault on America's colleges and universities. As a candidate, he promised repeatedly to create taxes on private university endowments. And he also talked about removing the funding for universities that don't bow to his various censorship demands, which are already being imposed on federal government agencies such as the National Institute of Health.

Unlike a number of other Trumpian boasts and threats, he is very likely to follow through on his promised attacks on higher education because Republicans in a number of states and localities have enacted many of the policies that Trump talked about on the campaign trail.

Joining me today to talk about all this is Nils Gilman, a friend of the show who is the chief operating officer at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank in Southern California that publishes Noema Magazine. He is also the former associate chancellor at the University of California-Berkeley, where he saw first-hand just what the [00:02:00] Republican vision for education in the United States is. He’s also the co-author of a new book called Children of a Modest Star, which we discuss at the end of the episode.

The video of our December 18, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full

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