MAGA’s Orban-esque plan to control what universities teach

By Francis Wilkinson

While Republicans have long complained about the academy, Donald Trump, JD Vance and their MAGA followers appear determined to do something about it. Indeed, they have signaled their intent to upend US higher education soon after they take control of the federal government in January.

With characteristic factual precision, President-elect Trump has declared that universities are rife with “Marxist maniacs” who must be uprooted. Vice President-elect Vance has lauded the authoritarian crackdown of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who successfully coerced universities into serving Fidesz, his political party, which holds much of Hungarian civic life in a stranglehold.

“The closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orban’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said earlier this year. “I think his way has to be the model for us — not to eliminate universities, but to give the choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”

The stakes are enormous. The American Century was in no small measure the higher-education century, when the US rose to unprecedented heights in both the quality and accessibility of its colleges and universities, and the nation’s educational dominance led to economic and technical dominance. By 1920, the number of US college students surpassed that of all the universities of Europe combined. Harvard University supplied much of the New Deal brain trust of President Franklin Roosevelt; the Manhattan Project took shape beneath a stadium at the University of Chicago; Silicon Valley’s stratospheric valuations were forged in the intellectual furnaces of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Together, such institutions have produced trillions in economic value. Despite the serious flaws of admissions gamesmanship, higher education has also been a democratizing force. In 1940, only 6 per cent of Americans had a bachelor’s degree. Today, almost 4 in 10 do.

While it’s comforting to hear that Vance doesn’t want to eliminate this engine of American success, you can see a preview of MAGA’s “less biased” approach to academics in Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis flamboyantly trashed what had been one of the state’s more successful academic institutions, New College of Florida.

Through 2010, New College had produced more Fulbright winners per capita than Harvard or Yale. After DeSantis handed the school’s board of trustees, and curriculum, over to conservative activists, student test scores declined and faculty fled while athletic recruiting soared and hundreds of books on politically disfavored subjects were thrown in a dumpster. “Putting gender studies books in the garbage? Great job, @NewCollegeofFL,” DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern applauded on social media.

Attacking gender studies is only one iteration of an opportunistic campaign. Previous attacks on “critical race theory” — like “woke,” a vague but evocative phrase that propagandists repurposed for their own uses — evolved into attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, which soon took a back seat to attacks on anti-Semitism in response to campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. The specific ammunition of the moment is irrelevant. Forcing colleges and universities to submit to right-wing desires is the goal.

The authoritarian parallels extend beyond Orban’s Hungary. During China’s cultural revolution, professors were forced to wear dunce caps and were shipped off to farms to do grueling manual labor. Some contemporary Chinese professors face punishment for “improper speech,” which seems to be more what MAGA has in mind. Texas has forced institutions to close their diversity offices and to remove words such as “race,” “gender” and “equity” from course names and descriptions. Proposals for similar educational gag orders have been introduced in dozens of states. All this is accompanied by Republican attacks on liberal campuses for allegedly inhibiting free speech.

Isaac Kamola, an associate professor at Trinity College and director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said the perpetually shifting complaints — whether targeting phantom “Marxists” or genuine instances of anti-Semitic speech — are designed to facilitate a “crackdown on faculty and subjects that the political right would prefer that faculty not teach. I think the ways in which the right weaponized allegations of anti-Semitism this past year are going to intensify, using the apparatuses of the federal government.”

Project 2025, a blueprint for far-right governance, which Trump no longer bothers to disavow, offers a number of suggestions for using federal power to punish non-MAGA thought in higher education. One proposal would enable state governments to usurp the powers of nongovernmental accreditation boards. In turn, Congress could pass rules directing accreditors to prioritize legislators’ ideological preferences or partisan antipathies. Trump has evidently been briefed on the plan; he has cited accreditation as a “secret weapon” in the war on higher education.

Another proposal is to hold federal research grants hostage. In 2024, Harvard received $686 million in federal funds. A sum that large can presumably influence a lot of thoughts.

Vance, who rode his Yale Law School connections to wealth and power, has called universities the “enemy.” But it’s Trump who succinctly explains why. College graduates vote in higher numbers for Democrats. Those with advanced degrees are even more heavily Democratic. The Republican Party’s vigorous embrace of anti-reality cranks and authoritarian lies has only widened that gap.

“I love the poorly educated,” Trump said in his first campaign. He and his MAGA allies intend to create many more of them.