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A couple of years ago, the conservative writer Christopher Rufo did a fellowship in Budapest, where, upon his arrival, János Csák, Hungary’s then–minister of culture and innovation, “greeted me with a strong handshake,” Rufo later wrote in an essay about the trip. Hungary’s population is not quite 10 million, and the country is among the poorest in the EU, yet Rufo believed that it had something to teach the U.S. The two countries, according to Rufo, were beset by the same diseases: “the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.” But unlike the U.S., Hungary had a plan. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was using “muscular state policy” to turn the culture back around. Among his major targets were Hungarian universities.
In this episode, Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin talks with the education writer Adam Harris, who believes that Rufo’s essay can help explain the Trump administration’s current attack on universities. Since Donald Trump has taken office, he has threatened to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding from universities, and compiled lists of places that might not be in compliance, for various reasons: They failed to protect Jews on campus. They failed to protect women’s sports. They use “racial preferences and stereotypes” in their programs. The administration’s aim, Harris suggests, is much the same as Orbán’s—not just to dismantle the intellectual elite but also to build a new conservative one that better reflects its cultural values.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: Universities are all of a sudden breaking news.
Last week, a video went around showing a man in a navy hoodie approaching a woman in a long, white down coat. It was still pretty cold when the video was shot outside Boston, right near Tufts University. The woman backs away, the guy grabs her hands, and then a few more people approach her from behind.
The woman’s name is Rümeysa Öztürk, and she’s a graduate student at Tufts University. The people approaching her are federal agents. They arrested her after the State Department revoked her student visa.
[Sound of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest]
Rosin: Just before that, ICE arrested Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. He’d been a leader of student protests. The administration said that amounted to supporting Hamas.
News anchor: They claim his student visa was revoked.
Rosin: Other students targeted for deportation: a fellow at Georgetown, also arrested.
News anchor: —detained a grad student from India who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa.
Rosin: Columbia was threatened with losing $400 million, and then they agreed to some demands. Harvard is now also under review for roughly $9 billion.
There are dozens more universities on a list, suspected of using racial preferences or of “forcing women to compete with men in sports.”
President Donald Trump: Your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports, so you better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.
Maine Governor Janet Mills: See you in court.
Trump: Every state—good. I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.
[Music]
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.
The administration tells one story about its attack on universities: that they’re protecting students against anti-Semitism, protecting traditional women’s sports, going after unfair racial preferences.
But our guest on the show today says that is just what’s on the surface. Adam Harris, who is a senior fellow at New America and who also covered education for The Atlantic, argues that the administration has a much more ambitious, grander plan. And it starts with a pilgrimage to Hungary.
[Music]
Rosin: Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Harris: Thanks for having me.
Rosin: Sure. So Adam, about a year before Trump is elected, a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo decamps to Budapest, writes a dispatch called, “Orbán’s War,” referring, of course, to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. And it turns out to be kind of a road map in a surprising way for this moment, what we’re seeing politically and particularly with universities. What is Rufo’s argument in that essay?
Harris: Yeah. He argues, effectively, that one of the more significant things and the thing that wasn’t necessarily understood broadly at the time was the way that Orbán undertook this effort to sort of reshape institutions, both publicly and privately, to create a sort of conservative elite.
Rosin: Okay. And this came, it seems like, as a revelation to conservative intellectuals—like, because Hungary is not an analogous country, but it seemed like a place that you would pilgrimage to learn things. So what was revelatory about this?
Harris: Yeah. Well, Rufo says that they’re facing some of the same issues that conservatives in the United States are, right? The sort of rejection, as he calls it, of sexual difference, the sort of liberal creep into the more general institutions. And Rufo really finds surprising the ways that Orbán was able to successfully combat that in his creation of that new sort of conservative elite in Hungary.
Rosin: It’s interesting because I think of conservatives in this moment of their ascendance as anti-intellectual. This is a slightly different view, where they’re viewing the university as a source of a lot of decline—say, decline of Western civilization. So instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, it sounds like the vision in this essay is, No. Take it back.
Harris: Yeah. It’s sort of: Take it back. Bend it to your own means. Strengthen what they believe are the sort of cultural foundations, right? He talks about family life. He talks about Christian faith. He talks about historical memory. And what a lot of conservatives feel that they’ve lost is that control of historical memory, right? When you think about some of the history curriculums that have been attacked over the last several years, it has been because those curriculums are a sort of fundamental reassessment of the position of some of our most celebrated figures in American public life.
Rosin: So it’s actually incredibly ambitious.
Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. We’re only 60-some odd years into the idea of a multicultural democracy, since the Civil Rights Act. And a lot of people feel that we lost something when we moved into that era. And so effectively, some of this is trying to reclaim that visage of that sort of pastoral past that we lost.
Rosin: Ah. Okay. Okay. I’m starting to understand how this fits more broadly into “Make America Great” and what the attack on universities is actually about. So we haven’t said yet: Who is Christopher Rufo, and how did these ideas start to spread?
Harris: Yeah, so Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist who around 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, started looking into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. And he started writing a bunch of blog posts and articles that really examined the DEI in several different areas.
He would pool some of the most jarring examples and sort of use those as a way to indict the entire apparatus that has grown up out of the civil-rights movement. But by September of 2020, some of those articles, some of what he said on TV gets to President Trump during the end of his first term, and that really launches this broader interrogation that we’ve seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity.
Rosin: Okay. So it’s diversity principles, but it’s also diversity principles as filtered through universities.
Harris: Yes.
Rosin: But it’s essentially creating an intellectual road map of all these executive orders, these things that Trump is putting together—there is a grand idea behind them.
Harris: Yes. There’s a grand idea behind them.
Rosin: And as Trump is elected and starting to pick his cabinet, you as an education expert, what did you notice? Like, what did you start to pay attention to in university news?
Harris: Yeah. Well, around December, actually, there was a piece that came out in the Washington Examiner by a conservative education scholar, Max Eden, who argued that Linda McMahon could do a couple of things upon being confirmed as the education secretary in order to overhaul higher education and to ensure that institutions sort of got into line. And one of those things, he argued, was to take a “prize scalp.”
Rosin: A “prize scalp.”
Harris: A “prize scalp,” and that’s a quote-unquote. And he said that institution would be Columbia University, that the administration should go after Columbia as hard as it can. If Columbia did not comply, it should remove its Title IV funds. If Columbia did comply, then they should find another way or they could find another way to remove funding from the institution.
And so when one of the first institutions to receive a big hit on their funding, $400 million, [was] Columbia, the first thing that came to my mind was, Oh, this is a part of the playbook that they talked about in December.
Rosin: So how did Columbia fit into the playbook?
Harris: Yeah. Well, over the last, you know, year and a half, really since October 7, when students started protesting the war in Gaza, Columbia has become the sort of poster child for the ways that higher education is doing things wrong, right?
Rosin: Out of control.
Harris: Out of control. You know, The student protestors are controlling the institution. The leadership doesn’t really have a wrangle on its faculty. There were criticisms of the curriculum—all of these things.
And Columbia and most Ivy League institutions aren’t necessarily places where people are gonna jump to defend them, right? These are places that have multibillion-dollar endowments. When people say that they don’t trust higher education, they don’t mean their local community college. They don’t mean the public regional down the road. They mean Harvard and Columbia because it seems like an unattainable place where the elites are developed anyway.
And so over the last two years, really, you’ve seen these attacks on Columbia and how they’ve handled anti-Semitism on campus. Or you’ve seen attacks on Columbia and what they’re teaching to students. And the imperfect plaintiff nature of Columbia makes it easier to say, Well, everyone has said you’re not handling this well, so let’s go ahead and remove your funding. And it would be one thing if they sort of stopped at Columbia. It would be one thing if they came into office, did a long investigation into what’s going on—because that’s typically what happens, right?
As someone who’s covered the education department for the last, you know, seven, eight years, anytime you have a Title VI investigation in cases of discrimination, those typically take months, if not years, to complete. And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table.
Rosin: Okay, so if it didn’t go through the usual process, it didn’t seem to be about what they said it was about. So you, as someone tracking this, what do you think it was about? Like, why remove Columbia’s funding? What was that first move about?
Harris: Yeah. So in that piece that I mentioned from December, the argument was: You remove the funding from Columbia in order to scare other institutions into compliance. And if those institutions don’t immediately comply, then they also know that, Well, I can get my funding taken away too.
We have seen, now, $150 million [taken] away from Penn within days, right—at least paused at Penn within days—of launching or announcing an investigation. And so, really, these timelines just don’t necessarily comport (1) with the way things are done, but they also don’t comport with a proper or legitimate investigation, given the amount of staff they have now at the Department of Education.
Rosin: Okay. So they’re not following the rules of a proper investigation. They’re just trying to get universities to comply. But comply with what?
Harris: Yeah, so there are a couple of various—it was interesting because the administration has gone farther than just saying, Hey. You need to get everything in check. Figure it out, Columbia. They’ve actually given them a list of things that they could do in terms of disciplinary measures for students. They said that one of the academic departments needs to be put under a sort of academic receivership, meaning that someone comes in from outside of the department to serve as the chair and look over their curriculums and things like that.
So there are these sort of very specific guidelines for what can and cannot be said on campuses. And once you start restricting speech in one manner, that sort of means you can restrict speech in a lot of different spaces. So if you say, Well, you can’t have these pro-Palestinian protests in a specific area, and if you do, then we’re going to take your funding away. There are a lot of things there that are reminiscent of the ways that Southern governors used to say that students at Alabama State couldn’t have sit-ins, otherwise they were going to remove the funding from Alabama State College.
It’s adjudicating specific behaviors and speech that students are making, which is really a threat to all of the principles of an institution. When an administration can come into an institution and say, You have to do this very specific thing. These are the policies that you have to implement, the principles of shared governance, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of a sort of free system of higher education really go away—and those same principles that are sort of the bedrocks of our democracy, right? The First Amendment is literally about free speech. When those sorts of things go away, it becomes a very dangerous environment that limits what people can say and do.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break: the narrowing of the American higher-education system—and who will get left out.
[Break]
Rosin: You started out by saying the ultimate vision was building a conservative elite. So is the way you put this entire picture together, is that essentially: You break down, you take away their funding? I mean, now I just sound kind of paranoid and conspiratorial, but maybe this is the plan. Like, you take away funding—in this way, it’s a little confusing, because some of the funding is for science so, you know, it’s not all completely directed. But you take away the funding. You therefore shock the university into stopping behaving the way it has, and then what? What’s the ultimate—I don’t know what happened in Hungary, so—
Harris: Yeah. So that vision that Rufo discussed sort of happened in Hungary, where they’re trying to get back to the cultural traditions, the cultural values that the nation had—those sort of ideas of Christian faith, the ideas of family life. In the same way, it sort of embodies that notion of “Make America Great Again.” And so the question has always been, Well, when exactly was America great?
And over the last several years, there has been an argument that has built up in conservative circles that America was better off in terms of these ideas of personal liberty and the freedom of association before the Civil Rights Act was signed, that this sort of administrative state that has built up to enforce the rules of the Civil Rights Act—so you think about things like race-conscious admissions, which was just voted down at the Supreme Court. You think about these reassessments of curriculums, which prior to the 1960s were legally allowed to obscure and/or omit the contributions of African Americans, of Natives, of Mexican Americans.
You consider the programs that were meant to diversify the workforce more generally—those are some of the programs and things that conservatives are trying to attack in certain ways by saying that they basically discriminate against white people, that it’s reverse discrimination to include those policies, which is why you see a part of this, alongside that $400 million from Columbia, was that broader letter, that “Dear Colleague” letter that said, Hey—if you use race in scholarships, in hiring, in your sort of faculty committees, in your student groups, in any of these things, then we are going to investigate you, and you are going to be in violation of Title VI. And when an institution hears you’re going to be in violation of Title VI, they will start thinking, We’re going to get our funding taken away in the same way that Columbia did.
And so this push to eliminate the Department of Education runs alongside this broader push to get higher education under control, right? These are sort of parallel tracks that end up forming a double helix, right? They go right together. It’s like if you’re going to say that you’re going to investigate anti-Semitism with a vigor that no one has ever investigated it with before, and you remove half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights that actually investigates anti-Semitism, the thing to do wouldn’t be to remove people who are investigating those complaints. The thing would be to beef up that staff so that they didn’t have 20 to 25 cases on their load, so that they could have those five to 10 complaints they were really focusing on.
Rosin: Right, because they could find examples of anti-Semitism. They could find examples of other kinds of discrimination. But it’s obviously not what you’re actually after if you’re eliminating the office.
Harris: Exactly.
Rosin: You know, as you’re talking, what’s chilling about this is that I do, in fact, associate higher education with the opening of the mind and the broadening of the views. Like, that is what I think university is for. I mean, that is what education in the U.S. does. So it would be a profound shift to think of education as inculcating a very narrow or particular set of content, you know?
Harris: Yes. And you know, it’s interesting. Over the last several years, right, the last couple of decades, actually, there’s been this argument that institutions don’t teach students how to think; they teach students what to think.
Rosin: That’s what conservatives say.
Harris: That’s what conservatives say, yeah. It was one of the first things that Betsy DeVos said when she became the education secretary, was that colleges are teaching students what to think as opposed to how to think. And in some ways, this effort is actually trying to do that. It is trying to teach students, This other stuff is out of bounds, right? But this is the acceptable sort of curriculum for your class. These are the acceptable things that you can say. And even if they’re not saying it explicitly, institutions are taking it as such.
We’ve already seen some colleges, such as High Point University, when that Dear Colleague letter came out that said, Make sure you’re not using race or using discriminatory language in any of these things, they sent out a letter to their faculty, to their staff and said, Remove all of these. They gave them more than 40 words and said, Remove them from everything. Get rid of them in your PowerPoint presentations. Get rid of them in your curriculums. They ended up walking that back. But you see the sort of chill that that already starts to have when administrators are thinking, I don’t want to lose my funding, and so I’m going to go ahead and say, “Let’s just get rid of all of that in our curriculum.”
Rosin: Now, the administration created a task force, and there is this growing list of universities that are up for investigation. Is there any criteria? Do you see any pattern in the universities? Because it does seem to include both elite and less elite. You know, big-city schools, small schools. Like, can you detect anything in what they’re looking for?
Harris: So it’s difficult to detect a trend there. There is a way that you can sort of have a veil of legitimacy on any investigation. And so if you have received a complaint from a school of anti-Semitism, you can say that, Okay. That’s going to be the school that we are going to investigate. And knowing that all it took was 14, you know, 15 days for the administration to go ahead and remove all of $400 million of Columbia’s funding, those institutions may be more likely to say, Whoa. Whatever they’re saying for Columbia to do, let’s go ahead and do that—
Rosin: So that they won’t come after us.
Harris: —so that they won’t come after us.
Rosin: So merely putting a university on the list—and actually, maybe even the arbitrary nature of the list—actually spreads the fear more widely. Maybe this is what I’m realizing now. It’s a very common tactic.
Harris: Exactly.
Rosin: If you just put Harvard and Columbia on the list, then other places wouldn’t have to worry about it. But if you spread it far and wide, then everybody follows your orders. Okay. That’s obvious. So I see now very clearly putting the pieces together, putting the bigger picture together of how they’re scaring universities.
I want to know what’s happening inside the universities and how they’re responding. As someone who doesn’t follow higher education as closely, it’s not that clear to me how important this funding is or how reliant universities are on federal funding.
Harris: Yeah. So for an institution that is, say, more tuition dependent, they rely on the students paying their tuition and that tuition helping them to meet payroll. Title IV funding is incredibly important because if you are not allowed to take loans from students, if you’re not allowed to get Pell Grants from students, then a tuition-dependent institution is going to go out of business. For bigger institutions like Columbia, these are institutions that have federal grants from, you know, the NIH, that have federal grants from the Defense Department, that have USDA grants, that have grants from the, you know, Education Department, right? So it’s very varied, and their tentacles are all through the federal government.
There’s this idea that’s sort of been bubbling up that, Well, these institutions have big endowments. Why don’t you just start using that? There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about endowments. That’s not just, like, fungible money that you can say, Oh, well, that’s $50 billion. We can spend $10 billion and make up for it tomorrow, because most of that money is tied to very specific things. Say a donor made a $400 million donation to the School of Fine Arts: If you start using that for payroll generally, you can guarantee you’re never gonna receive a single dollar ever again, because people can’t trust you to be good stewards or faithful stewards of that money. They can also sue you.
And so there are some colleges that, you know, from 30 to 40 percent of their budgets really kind of come from the federal government, but that’s not to say that this is a completely foreign system. There is not a successful higher-education system in the world, really, that is not sort of subsidy driven, that doesn’t receive significant government subsidies.
Rosin: That’s interesting. I think of the United States as having a largely private university system and that other, you know—I am always jealous of overseas, how they have more public universities. But I never quite put together that, in fact, there is a strong interdependence between public institutions and universities of all kinds. So now I see why that makes them extremely vulnerable.
I’ve watched university presidents—I mean, it mostly feels like they’re scrambling. You know, Columbia was a probably terrifying example for a lot of college presidents because it does seem that even when university presidents comply or try to comply with Trump orders, they still get punished. Do you see any responses now, like, as you’ve watched, maybe since October 7 and then through Trump’s election? What kinds of discussions are they having about how to handle this situation?
Harris: So there’s been a lot of sort of internal back-and-forth at institutions. You haven’t really seen many public responses, in part because there’s a sort of “keep your head down and hope that it’s not you,” you know, some of the smaller institutions, maybe public institutions. For some of the public state institutions, they’re trying to fight things that are going on in their own states, right?
Consider a place like Ohio, where they have a bill that’s supposed to reform higher education. Florida, Texas, North Carolina, all of these states: There’s this big federal thing that’s going on, but you also have these state reforms, whether that’s to tenure, whether that’s to establish a conservative center on campus, whatever it may be. They’re also thinking about those issues, as well. And so a lot of presidents are in sort of a, Keep your head down. Try to avoid being noticed. And if it’s happening over there, then it’s not happening to us, and we’re already thinking about our budget for the next year, as opposed to a cohesive pushback to say, This is an attack on higher education more broadly rather than these singular institutions.
Rosin: And do you think that’s a realistic thing to ask of university presidents? Because it is disheartening to see them fall, one after the other—I mean, both in congressional hearings, in all sorts of ways. And then there’d just be deadly silence. But there’s also silence on the streets. There’s silence in a lot of places. And so I just wonder: Is that a realistic hope?
Harris: It should be.
Rosin: You want to hold onto it?
Harris: I do, because we’ve seen institutions in the last few years be pushed into these policies that say they won’t make public statements about political events, right? In Ohio, in that bill, it said that public colleges can’t make statements about partisan or ideological statements outside of celebrations of the United States and the flag—like, really sort of jingoistic, patriotic statements. And pushing back doesn’t have to look like a president being out in the streets, but it does look like reaffirming your institutional principles and living up to your institutional principles, right? Because a principle’s only a principle when it’s tested.
Rosin: Right.
Harris: And a belief is only, like—you only actually have a value and make public that value when that value is under attack. And so if higher education doesn’t believe in the principles that it was founded on, then institutional leaders should remain silent. But if they do, then there’s a kind of obligation there. It’s one of the reasons why they get paid so much.
Rosin: Whoa. Okay.
Harris: (Laughs.)
Rosin: No. I mean, you’re clear. I appreciate it.
Just one final thing: We started by talking about the ultimate goal of this to be the creation of a different kind of elite in the U.S. I wonder if they have a fully fleshed imagination of what a conservative elite would look like and act like and believe. Like, is the end of the vision real?
Harris: I don’t know if it’s a fully fleshed-out view, but they have pointed to certain institutions and said, This is what it could look like. Those institutions are Hillsdale College, the College of the Ozarks.
I actually went to the College of the Ozarks when Pete Hegseth was speaking, and there was this really, you know, sort of telling quote that he gave during his speech that was just like, I went to Harvard. I went to, you know, the Ivy League institution. Those places have lost their way. This is the sort of place that’s doing it right. This is the future. And you look across the student body—it’s majority white and not even, like, a slim majority. It’s students who, when I spoke to them, talked more about the idea of it being a place where they could go and not have to have a ton of loans on the back end of going to college.
But it was also a place that has—it’s the only college in the country with a vice president of patriotic activities. Every student is required to take a patriotic-education course, where it’s a mix of current events and the founding documents alongside, like, military training. And it’s not a military school. So I don’t know that there’s a fully fleshed-out idea, but I know that there are institutions that they point to as examples of what a college should be, and there are also places that they can point to, like a new college now, and how to make that happen.
Rosin: What ended up happening in Hungary, by the way? Has it broadened into a vision beyond that individual college? Do they have a conservative elite?
Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. And if it’s not a sort of fully fleshed-out one to this point, it is much further along than it was when Orbán launched his assault. I think one of the other things that was really interesting about that piece that Rufo wrote was that he talks about the ways that things seemed normal—
Rosin: And what did he mean by “normal”?
Harris: By “normal,” he talks about, Oh, people talk about it as if it’s, like, an economic backwater, but, you know, business goes on as usual. But there’s this quiet administrative, instructional war that’s going on in education, sort of reshaping things. And so it’s like, Make everything seem as normal as possible while also launching this assault that transforms the way that a country fundamentally operates.
Rosin: And feels and what young minds accept as excellence, basically.
Harris: Exactly.
Rosin: Right. Well, Adam, I think the only option after this conversation is to join you in holding out hope that some group of university presidents stand up for what a university is. Thank you so much for helping us understand that.
Harris: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
