The Trump administration’s reason for suspending federal aid to universities pending their compliance with newly imposed restrictions was their tolerance for antisemitism; however, it’s easy to see that such a rationale is pretextual. It’s well known that many of Trump’s followers are comfortable with antisemitism—for example, many Trump-endorsed representatives post on Gab, run by the notorious Holocaust denier Andrew Torba; Elon Musk rendered Trump a Nazi salute. While in Germany, Vice-President J. D. Vance voiced his support for the antisemitic AfD party. In addition, Trump himself has condoned antisemitism. His response to the Charlottesville chants of “Jews will not replace us”—“there were very fine people on both sides”—is well known; later, he sought to ingratiate himself with the antisemites Nick Fuentes and Ye (Kanye West). In January 2020, he credentialed the antisemitic outlet TruNews to cover his attendance at Davos. In 2024 a Trump campaign ad depicted the Jewish philanthropist George Soros as a puppeteer manipulating Joe Biden, in an echo of a famous Nazi propaganda poster. So the idea that Trump’s suspension of federal aid to universities is motivated by his or his movement’s noble outrage over antisemitism doesn’t pass the smell test. It stinks of hypocrisy. That conclusion is supported by the fact that so many of the concessions he’s extorted from schools—prohibiting the occupation of buildings or the use of face masks during protests—have nothing to do with antisemitism specifically but everything to do with campus protests in general. Responding to antisemitism is a pretext. He wants to outlaw campus dissent and, as we’ll see, to determine what colleges teach.

Trump makes no secret of the animus behind his attack. In a campaign rally on December 16, 2023, he pledged to “root out Marxists and communists from higher education.” Following the examples of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, Trump never cited examples of those Marxists or communists. And while it’s well known that university faculties tilt Democratic, they are doing a poor job of indoctrination. A recent Princeton study found that students at four-year colleges did not, in fact, become more economically liberal after four years, while students from affluent families actually became more conservative. The Marxists and communists at Ivy League institutions had little effect on the thinking of Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito. These results confirm that the political leanings of university faculties have little influence on their students’ views. They point instead to the fallacy of MAGA’s belief that colleges exist to “indoctrinate.” Instead, their purpose is to encourage students to master a body of knowledge—whatever they choose to major in—and to foster critical thinking skills designed to make them more articulate advocates for whatever philosophy they eventually adopt.

The depth of the disingenuousness of the MAGA rationale is evident in two recent New York Times interviews with Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who advises the president. In the first interview, Rufo says his mission is to create “existential terror” in higher education. In the second, he describes his disenchantment with “rotten” New Deal policies that “can’t be justified outside the university.” He claims that the Ivy League “is trying to impose its ideas on America.” These comments reveal that the reforms his movement champions are wholly independent of antisemitism but are ultimately curricular. He wants to decide what colleges can and can’t teach.

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As part of its compliance with the restrictions Trump coerced, Columbia University agreed to subject its Middle Eastern Studies Department to a receivership appointed by the president. Through its lawsuit against him, Harvard University has so far resisted a similar and even broader, institution-wide ultimatum—again based on the hypocritical rationale of tolerance for antisemitism. Whether the university can sustain that resistance has become newly questionable, given its recent assent to demands to restructure its D.E.I. office. The integrity of American higher education may well be at stake in its decision whether to give in to demands for political supervision.