James Chandler takes us back to the early 1850s and the “Know-Nothing” Movement to find an appropriate historical analogue for the assault on universities being promulgated by the second Trump administration. He begins by focusing on the role of Steve Bannon, ever since he identified Donald Trump as a possible vehicle for a new populist revolution in America, in designing a concerted attack on the “deep administrative state” and most “elite” institutions against which Bannon has directed his political ire. Bannon has been a major driver of Trump’s political revolution, to be sure. But while Chandler mentions the role of Christopher Rufo and some right wing think tanks, I think it may be useful to say a bit more about their ideological backdrop and undergirding of the specific attack against universities.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has been one of the principal architects of the effort to “recapture” public universities in Florida, and more broadly for the ideological attack on elite universities across America. He successfully targeted and caricatured “critical race theory” (CRT) to predicate an unlikely political movement, but it served as a sufficient intellectual justification for governmental intervention.
The term, denoting a specific and influential legal theory developed during the 1970s and 80s by law professors Derrick Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw (among others), held that racial discrimination was not always explicit but nevertheless systematically encoded in both laws and practices including zoning laws and “redlining,” judicial sentencing, bail policy, among many other local policies and practices.
Rufo charged that any effort to use the idea of race to critique the legal system was itself prejudicial, working perforce against whites, men, and other groups that have been victimized in his account by nefarious attacks on common sense notions of equal rights. He whipped up a frenzy of political attacks not just on the legitimate provenance of critical race theory but on anything even vaguely connected to the use of race for what he invariably considered prejudicial purposes. As part of his own personal “influence” campaign, Rufo wrote an entire book on the intellectual antecedents of CRT and DEI theories and initiatives, claiming that universities are now controlled by Marxist intellectuals with dark agendas and revolutionary philosophies.
At first glance, the book seems to be a successor to a spate of conservative attacks on university intellectual life, beginning back in 1987 with Allan Bloom’s best-selling Closing of the American Mind. In fact, it is far more insidious, accusing a small set of revolutionary intellectuals and their radical compradors of undertaking a long but relentless effort to promulgate their ideological viewpoints through their “capture” of our top universities. He focuses on four intellectuals, one of whom is Derrick Bell. The other three are Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, and Paulo Freire. Important though these figures have been, none of them were major shapers of the late twentieth century American university.
The problem is not so much that Rufo provides a deeply flawed account of the rich intellectual history of the university, but rather that he has no qualms about using a spurious historical and theoretical argument to justify precisely what he has accused left academics of doing: engaging in a political takeover of the university. And his book charts a path to do precisely that, as recent actions from the administration have amply demonstrated. His book makes a case for no less than an American cultural revolution. Rufo argues that his account of the radical “ideological capture” of the American university by figures like the ones he writes about fully justifies, in fact necessitates, a revolutionary response. Gradualism is no longer a reasonable playbook for conservatives.
Rufo’s language has permeated both conservative critiques of elite universities and the language used by the Trump administration in its new “Dear Colleagues” letter and in its recent missives to Columbia and Harvard (containing threats to cancel billions of dollars of federal grants). He has unabashedly told The New York Times that he wants “to set them [elite universities] back a generation or two,” laying out a plan for destruction given his diagnosis that the entire system is rotten and requires rebuilding from the ruins of the contemporary university rather than anything resembling gradualist reform. Ironically, although his playbook has been used not just around CRT and DEI but also around antisemitism, there is not a single mention of antisemitism as a concern in his 2023 book. Those who have charged that the Trump administration has used antisemitism as an opportunistic issue for prosecuting its case against universities can certainly make the case that it was only after October 7th 2023 that antisemitism became a stated concern for many on the right wing, certainly those in Trump’s orbit.
Rufo’s plan for action is a direct assault on “academic freedom,” though in fact it is much more than that as well. Since, so the argument goes, radical professors have used academic freedom to insulate themselves and their revolutionary agendas from any outside influence – even from university presidents and trustees – academic freedom is a ruse, a fundamental part of the problem. Whether as a direct advisor to Ron DeSantis, as a trustee of the New College, Florida, or now as a critical influence on recent actions taken by the Department of Education, Rufo has targeted faculty control over teaching and learning as well as over faculty hiring, evaluation, and promotion.
Although Rufo wrote in broad terms about using the suspension of public funding to exert pressure on universities, he was careful in the book not to explicitly advocate for the government to be the agent of change. Rather, he exhorted the public to “lay siege to the institutions that have lost the public trust” with the goal of “reanimating the eternal principles and reorienting the institutions toward their highest expression.” The public should direct the university to protect “the humble values and institutions of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country…. Excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.” And yet Rufo’s “counter-revolution” has been anything but a grass roots movement. Prosecuted by the most heavy-handed government intervention in higher education in US history, the counterrevolution he calls for has been far more a coup from above than a ground swell from below.
Rufo has been extremely influential on another architect of the administration’s assault on the university, Max Eden, the author of many of the Project 2025 proposals about universities. A senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (he was formerly a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Rufo currently works), he not only targeted CRT and DEI, but expanded Rufo’s proposals to suspend government support for universities to pressure universities to comply. He suggested using anti-terrorism laws and protocols to demand information about every student who participated in campus protests, reforming accreditation bodies to put additional pressure on universities and their adherence to “woke ideology,” and soliciting adjunct professors across the country to partner with states to sue universities for discrimination in hiring and promotion.
The Trump administration has largely followed this playbook, peremptorily cancelling billions of dollars in research grants, choosing Columbia as its first target of attack and then training its sights on Harvard, while also demanding access to private student information and imprisoning non-citizen (including permanent resident) students who have been seen as critical either of Trump’s policies or Israel’s actions in Gaza. Again, the attack has been on much more than academic freedom, and yet the rhetoric no longer depends entirely on “extramural” speech, instead targeting both decisions about who gets access to these universities (through admission as well as hiring) and what is taught within them (DEI courses are as worrisome as DEI bureaucracies).
According to the DOE letter of April 11, 2025, Harvard was instructed to “commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” At the same time, the letter demands that Harvard “abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests.” And yet, in what appears to be in total contradiction to the prohibition of ideological testing, the letter goes on to demand that, “every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.”
In a different world, I would ask Chandler to say more about the internal reasons for why the university has so often invited public distrust and even scorn (something I sought to do in my book City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University). Based for many decades at the University of Chicago, he not only works at a great research university, but one that has been identified as the mothership of value neutrality for universities.
Given the immediate context of this kind of assault, however, those questions can come later. The idea that the university should hire “conservative” viewpoints at the behest of the government, especially when it is controlled by self-serving demagogues and partisan hacks, is a way of dismantling all that is good about any university rather than provoking needed change. That, as Chandler makes clear, is not what either Rufo or Eden have in mind, nor for that matter ideologues like Steve Bannon, for whom the university appears to hold no value whatsoever. It appears that the Trump administration has not just read Rufo but also the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, for what it is seeking is the creation of a full-blown ideological state apparatus. Who is the radical revolutionary now?
Nicholas B. Dirks is President of the New York Academy of Sciences – he is also the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and History Emeritus, Columbia University, and former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University.