The Trump vs Universities stand-off: Impact on institutes
Mr. Trump himself has accused universities of pushing antisemitic, anti-American, Marxist and “radical left” ideologies, and threatened to take away federal funding, along with signing a plethora of executive orders that directly or indirectly impact American higher education.
Some of these actions are being undertaken citing federal civil rights statutes such as Title VI and a Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in university admissions. There have been demands to reshape academic governance and scrap all DEI measures, the restriction of research and cutting of grants, arrests of students participating in anti-Gaza war protests, and revocation of the visas of international students.
Universities meanwhile, are concerned that these moves seek to clamp down on academic freedom. Harvard said it viewed the threats to cut federal funding as “attempts to coerce and control.” In an article, Professor Alexander Kitroeff highlighted that there was “considerable government intervention” in a sector which till now had enjoyed autonomy equal to that in other democratic countries.
Who is involved
The Department of Education (DOE) has historically taken the lead on holding colleges accountable, leveraging institutions’ eligibility for student aid programmes to force compliance. But the present crackdown involves at least four other departments: Justice, Defense, Energy and Health and Human Services. Each of these departments has cut down on scientific research grants. Further, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as the Department of Energy have both sought to bring in caps for reimbursement for any costs indirectly related to research. Meanwhile, the DOE has launched or actively pursued at least 97 investigations related to DEI programmes and allegations of anti-Semitism.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was recently revealed to be defunct, also cut several University-related contracts and grants during its tenure.It is unclear if these have been reinstated.
Leading the charge is Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, along with the expert guidance of May Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, who served as White House senior policy strategist and, post stepping down, continues leading negotiations with universities as a senior adviser for special projects.
Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), is spearheading civil rights investigations based on allegations of discrimination due to DEI practices and anti-Semitism. Earlier the DOJ , in conjunction with the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, engaged in initiatives such as pushing for a ban on seclusion and isolation of school children, desegregation, racial discrimination and sexual harassment. Now, however, the focus has shifted.
Meanwhile, the DOE has Lindsey McMahon, former executive at World Wrestling Entertainment, at its helm as the Secretary of Education, with Nicholas Kent as Undersecretary of Education. President Donald Trump has also issued executive orders which seek to influence University decisions, and has ordered the dismantling of the DOE.
Potential overhaul of accreditation
One of the Trump administration’s priorities has been accreditation. The White House has issued a couple of executive orders dealing with accreditation of higher education institutes, and giving rise to the spectre of the accreditation system being used to force compliance by universities. A bureaucratic procedure, accreditation by a recognized agency is required for students to be eligible for federal financial aid. Every ten years, institutes are required to assess their operations to maintain their eligibility for federal loans to their students.
Project 2025 had made several proposals pertaining to this matter, and the Trump administration is moving to implement them. The executive order notes the repudiation of “disparate impact theory” and announced that accreditors violating civil rights law would be investigated.
According to a Bloomberg report, Mr. Kent, the undersecretary of education, chose to give his first public address in his new role at a September 2025 meeting of accrediting agencies, where he declared, “Everyone should expect a dramatic overhaul of the accreditation system as it currently exists within the next year.”
The DOE’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity met in December, after postponing its meeting from the summer. The delays have raised concerns about plans for the accreditors of Columbia (Middle States Commission on Higher Education) and Harvard (New England Commission of Higher Education), which are scheduled to face a compliance review. Decertifying major accreditors may prove disruptive; seven accreditors are responsible for around 3000 colleges across the country, with just two (MSCHE and NECHE) overseeing about 700 institutions.
This is not without precedent. In 2022, the Biden administration terminated recognition for an agency responsible for the accreditation for-profit and trade schools; this move was due to a failure to keep up with the required educational standard.
Furthering this goal, the DOE released a statement highlighting two areas of “national need” for accreditation reform. The first, The Supporting Institutions in Changing Accrediting Agencies priority, supports college and university efforts to change their current accrediting agency which are blocked by high costs. The second, The Supporting the Creation of New Accrediting Agencies priority will aid the development and launch of new accrediting agencies to “introduce much-needed competition.”
In January 2026, the DOE announced a negotiated rulemaking committee called the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) committee to brainstorm new regulations and make the path easier for new accreditors.
Allegations of civil rights discrimination and gutting of DEI offices
A major impact on universities has resulted from the Trump administration targetting efforts pertaining to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), claiming that they violate civil rights and the decision of the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard/UNC.
Professor Jonathan Feingold of the Boston University School of Law, however notes that this decision “did not question the legitimacy of diversity as a worthy goal,” although it “limited some of the tools universities can employ in the interest of diversity.”
“To the contrary, the Supreme Court decision is best read as support universities’ right to pursue a racially diverse, equitable and inclusion institution through means that do not distinguish between individual students on the basis of their individual racial identity,” he says. Notably not all states have DEI policies in effect; for example, voters in Washington approved an affirmative action ban in 1998.
However, the Trump administration has targeted universities with civil rights discrimination investigations under Title VI and Title IX, and DEI measures have been scrapped following executive orders pinpointing the same.While Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin, Title IX prohibits such discrimination on the basis of sex.
Universities across the board have faced impacts. The University of Michigan and University of Virginia cut their DEI offices. Meanwhile, Duke University is facing two federal civil rights probes for allegations of racial discrimination against students and employees by the university’s law journal and medical school.
Universities have “scrubbed websites of references to DEI initiatives,” says Jacqueline Stevens, Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the Deportation Research Clinic at Northwestern University. “My own department had its website turned back a few years to avoid reference to a Democracy and Diversity research project, rendering the information on the web pages dated and inaccurate.” she said.
Liberal attitudes about sexuality and gender have also come under fire. The Trump administration formed a Title IX Special Investigations Team to look into instances of transgender women playing in women’s sports teams, reversing course from the Biden administration, which had revised Title IX to include discrimination on the basis of sexuality and gender. In July 2025, the University of Pennsylvania entered into an agreement with the DOE to comply with Title IX, after the Department’s Office of Civil Rights said it was in violation for allowing a biological male to compete in female athletic programmes and use female-only facilities.
The other major chunk of the Trump administration’s action against universities has referenced the proliferation of anti-semitism on college campus. In February 2025, the government launched a federal antisemitism task force, overseen by Attorney General Pam Bondi and including Ms. McMahon and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some investigations were undertaken earlier by the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce, too, has called university leaders to testify before it about accusations of anti-semitism. Some allegations stem from the administration; others have emerged from conservative organisations such as Campus Reform, headed by Dr. Zachary Marschall.
Particular focus has been on ten universities: Columbia, George Washington, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, New York University, Northwestern, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Minnesota, and University of Southern California. Critics have noted that these schools are in States that voted Blue in 2024. Along with these, sixty other universities were warned about potential enforcement action.
On June 30, 2025, the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism found that Harvard had violated Title VI by “acting with deliberate indifference toward discrimination and harassment against Jewish and Israeli students” on its campus from October 7, 2023 onwards.
Universities have taken measures to avoid the crackdown on anti-Semitism. For example, Yale University has revoked its recognition of groups which engaged in pro-Palestine demonstrations. Columbia has issued warnings over protest encampments, while the University of California has sent out a letter to its campuses reminding leaders and student governments they cannot boycott Israel. Northwestern University released a lists of steps it had taken to combat antisemitism that closely tracked with a list of demands the Trump administration had given to Columbia University, one of the first to be examined for campus protests supporting Palestine. Northwestern was nonetheless targeted several days later: its funds were frozen and its president, Michael Schill, a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, was compelled to step down.
Most universities are being hit by multiple investigations, citing any or a combination of the above reasons. In August 2025, the federal government froze $339M in UCLA grants to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), accusing it of violating civil rights. This followed soon after UCLA settled a lawsuit about anti-Semitic discrimination during protests in 2024, shelling out around $6.5 million.
Changes in governance and syllabus
In negotiations with universities, the federal government has made research funding contingent on changes in the governance and admission structure.
For Harvard, expected changes for unfreezing federal funds included reform of its governance structure, changes in admission policies for students/faculty which were based on their political views, placing of programmes in academic receivership and the reviewing of course content. Other demands were for the use of an outsider “to audit those programmes and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.” The government also wanted Harvard to place limits on the exercise of power by faculty.
On April 14, 2025, Harvard rejected these proposals from the federal government, which had been outline in a letter. The Trump administration later said that the letter had been sent in error, even questioning Harvard for taking it seriously.
Columbia was subject to similar demands. It did not place the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department into “academic receivership” for a minimum of five years, as demanded by the Trump administration, but it did appoint a new senior vice provost to oversee programmes pertaining to Asia, including the Middle East. Among the departments included are the Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; and the Middle East Institute.
Threatening tax-exempt status
Mr. Trump threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status for failing to tackle anti-Semitism. This is not without precedent; however the conditions have been different. In 1976, the IRS revoked the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University, a private Christian college in South Carolina, for its anti-miscegenation policy (barring its students from interracial dating or marriage), which was in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Red States: Dual attacks from State and Centre
Reports have noted that for universities located in Republican-led States, there are challenges from both the federal government as well as from State legislatures and governors.
Even before Mr. Trump was re-elected, Republican-controlled States, including Florida, Texas, Iowa and Utah, had drawn up blueprints for attacking diversity initiatives and academic freedom at State universities. In 2023, Texas lawmakers banned DEI offices at public universities, arguing they had become ineffective bureaucracies that undermined merit, imposed political litmus tests on new hires, and gave exclusionary benefits to certain demographic groups.
Some universities have taken a stance. The Guardian reported that the faculty senate at Indiana University, Bloomington, voted in favor of a defence compact right before the State enacted a legislation reworking the school’s governance. Similarly, faculty at Miami University in Ohio and the University of Arizona voted for a compact between colleges. Georgia’s Kennesaw State University reportedly joined a pact after the State did away with an initiative incentivising college education for Black men.
However, other universities have folded over DEI concerns. The University of Kentucky cancelled separate commencement celebrations for affinity groups after a State law was introduced banning DEI in 2025. The University of Alabama shut down two magazines, one focused on women’s issues (Alice) and the other on Black issues (Nineteen Fifty Six), citing DEI concerns.
Cuts to endowments
University endowments, which are usually subject to conditions imposed by donors, are usually used by institutes to fund whatever operations they deem beneficial. However, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by Trump on July 4 , 2025, has imposed an excise tax on colleges in a tiered manner, justifying it as a way to prevent universities from “[abusing] generous benefits provided through the tax code.”
Universities have been divided into tiers, with taxes from 1.4% to 8% based on the amount of endowment per student. At $2 million or more per student, universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT and Stanford will see a tax of 8%. Harvard, one of the key targets of Mr. Trump’s ire, has the largest endowment of all American universities, at $53 billion.
Universities with endowments ranging from $750,000 to $2 million per student — such as Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, Dartmouth, John Hopkins, Duke and University of Chicago— will see a tax of 4%, while all other universities will continue at an endowment tax of 1.4%. Congress had already instituted a tax for universities with endowment equal to or greater than $500,000 at 1.4% in 2017.
While high, the OBBBA provision is still lower than Vice-President J.D Vance’s earlier proposal of 35%, or the Bill’s initial proposal of 21%.
Investigation into foreign funding
The administration has targeted what it believes to be undue foreign influence at American universities. Since January 20, 2025, it has initiated four investigations into Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley citing reports of inaccurate and untimely foreign funding disclosures. According to the Higher Education Act of 1965, gifts and contracts from foreign sources with a value of $250,000 or more must be disclosed to the DOE.
In July 2025, the DOE launched a foreign funding investigation into University of Michigan, saying that a review had revealed inaccurate and incomplete disclosures of “tens of millions of dollars” in foreign funding, with some funders affiliated with foreign governments being mischaracterised as nongovernmental entities. The investigative counsel Paul Moore said its labs were susceptible to sabotage, including “potential agroterrorism” by Chinese nationals associated with the university. Earlier, in January 2025, the University ended a two-decade long partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, after the Chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party raised concerns about the venture.
Similar investigations led to the University of California at Berkeley and Georgia Tech ending partnerships with the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute and the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute at different points in the year.
Now, the DOE has announced the launch of a new foreign funding portal on January 2, 2026.
Investigations into campus safety
DOE opened an investigation into safety at UCalBerkeley after a protest at a Turning Point USA event on November 10, 2025. checking whether the action amounts to a violation of the Clery Act, which requires higher education institutions receiving federal funding to collect, report, and disseminate crime data to the public, support victims of violence, and publicly outline their policies and systems for improving campus safety. There was reportedly a fistfight over an attempted robbery and someone hit by a thrown object
An investigation under the Clery Act was, perhaps more fittingly, opened into Brown University after at least two people died in a campus shooting in December 2025.
Increased reporting requirements
In August 2025, the administration introduced a requirement for colleges to submit six years worth of application and admissions data, disaggregated by student race and sex, to the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as part of the next reporting cycle (2025-26). Thus, universities will need to submit information dating back to the 2020-21 academic year. In November 2025, DOE announced that only four-year institutions would be subject to these requirements, leaving two-year colleges and open-enrollment institutions that only award aid based on financial need out of their ambit.
Schools are seeking more time to comply with the data request, asking that it be withdrawn or that they be given an extension to 2026-27. Some institutes have said that they are too understaffed to process the data, but don’t have the funds to hire more. Comments for changes have submitted for both the changes to the IPEDS data collection process and the request for authorization to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
(Note: This article is current as of January 30, 2026.)
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