Republicans Are Obsessed With the Elite Institutions They Want to Destroy

Trump to the Ivies: "If I can't have you, no one will."

Photo by Somesh Kesarla Suresh on Unsplash

One of the more peculiar positions of the American right is its simultaneous obsession with and hostility to education, and particularly with elite educational institutions. Donald Trump has picked fights with Ivy League schools and talks about them as woke hellscapes; he’s also exceptionally proud that he has a degree from one, and judges others’ intelligence by which schools they attended. Conservative culture warriors want to take over elite universities because those universities have such caché, even though in taking them over, conservatives would kill exactly what has made those institutions desirable and admirable: their dedication to rigor and excellence.

Last week, I tuned into two episodes of The Daily that are worth a listen in tandem. One is an interview with Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who has been behind some of the most successful conservative assaults on education. The other is with Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton. I’ll put my cards on the table here and say that I found the interview of Eisgruber to be pretty bad — unnecessarily hostile, and yet still absent particularly interesting questions. The interview with Rufo was more revealing, although still missed a few obvious moments to push back (Rufo, for example, repeatedly says he wants educational institutions to teach The Truth rather than ideology at which point I was mentally begging the host to ask him whether that means institutions that teach creationism should be defunded). In any event, Eisgruber seemed like the kind of thoughtful person you’d want to head a university, while Rufo came across as an articulate psychopath. One man clearly approached the world with empathy and intellectual rigor. The other was very sure he was right.

The second man — Rufo, the confident man — is clear that he wants to destroy the American educational system as we know it, and also that he believes conservative reactionaries will do a better job educating the American public than the current lot of mostly-liberal academics. The problem, though, is that we know what happens when conservative reactionaries helm educational institutions, because they helm many of them — and none of them are top-tier research universities. Liberty University may churn out a lot of congressional interns, but they aren’t exactly curing cancer. There isn’t a lack of religious conservative education in the US. The problem is that religious conservative education in the US isn’t very good, and they aren’t putting many of their resources into the public good.

One thing that really seems to stick in conservatives’ collective craw is that universities are bastions of liberalism. Professors are more liberal than the general public. Students are more liberal than the general public. This, in the conservative telling, is evidence of discrimination.

Maybe it’s evidence of something else.

Modern American conservatism rejects Enlightenment values of inquiry and reason. Look at the Trump administration, a group of people with more power than just about anyone else in the world, appointed by a president who can pick just about anyone on the right to work for him. And who we have running the country are… those guys. They are not exactly the best and the brightest America has to offer. And that’s perhaps because the American right is not churning out — or attracting — particularly bright people these days.

Modern American conservatism rejects the scientific method and basic scientific conclusions. It is the year 2025 and Republicans are still denying human evolution, climate change, and vaccine efficacy. It’s not discrimination for Harvard to not employ a biology professor who teaches that God made Eve from Adam’s rib. It perhaps follows that if a person rejects scientific fact and learning information that conflicts with their closely-held ideology, they may not thrive in institutions of higher learning.

It’s also the case that American conservatives have profoundly debilitated their own kids. Red states generally do a far worse job at educating their children (not to mention simply keeping those children healthy and alive) than blue states. Part of that is money: Blue states tend to be wealthier. But a lot of it really does come down to policy priorities. Conservative states gut public education. They do not invest in educational excellence, but in the dissemination of religious and right-wing ideology. And their hostility to education is tied up in a broader dislike of a post-Enlightenment modern world: Of secularism, of feminism, of racial equality. The religious conservatives who attack public and higher education understand perhaps better than anyone else how educational institutions have been key in bettering women’s social, political, and economic statuses — that women would not be nearly as financially independent (and therefore less dependent on men) without public and higher education; that non-whites, too, would not see nearly as much opportunity for advancement without integrated educational institutions. Understanding this is key to understanding why conservatives want to topple higher ed and hobble public schools. It’s about hostility to information to be sure, but it’s also about hostility to the ways in which public education is an equalizer, and therefore a status threat to white Christian men.

Right now, conservatives are trying to defund and take control over universities including Columbia and Harvard, which they claim are badly mismanaged. But look at how they’ve managed the institutions they currently control like, say, the White House. Americans are far less secure today than we were six months ago. The global economy is teetering like a Weeble as Trump’s trade policies shift by the hour. Innocent people are getting shipped to Salvadoran prisons and the administration is refusing to bring them back because the sadists in it seem to genuinely enjoy the idea of sending random innocent people off to one of the world’s most brutal prisons. American citizens are getting emails telling them they have to leave the country. The editor of the Atlantic is getting added to the Top Secret War Plan group chat. The Trump administration is both making spectacularly bad decisions on purpose while also making a series of really dumb mistakes.

This is because they want power alone, not the possibilities for public betterment that come with power. They want to destroy the institutions that are the historical homes of people who have been driven by something other than just self-interest and destructive impulse, because those institutions reveal them as small and foolish and deeply lacking.

We know what it looks like when Donald Trump runs things: It looks like those things getting run into the ground. He’s done it with his companies; he’s doing it with the federal government; and he’d like to take some of America’s most venerated institutions down with him. The funding he’s pulling from universities isn’t coming out of gender studies programs; it’s being yanked from life-changing and society-bettering scientific, technological, and medical research. He is quite intentionally making life worse not just for university researchers but for most Americans, not as a side effect but as the goal.

You know the badly caricatured abusive men on Lifetime movies that grab terrified women and say things like, “If I can’t have you, no one will?” That’s what’s going on with conservatives and higher education. They can’t build great educational institutions themselves because their own ideologies get in the way of educational greatness. But they want the status that comes attaches to the elite institutions others have built. And if they can’t have that, well, then no one will.

xx Jill