A year ago, my energies were focused on a project on academic freedom in Venezuela under Chavismo. Our main findings were that, compared to other autonomous or semi-autonomous institutions in the Venezuela public sphere in the early 2000s––such as the Central Bank, the judicial branch, participatory organizations, and state media—Venezuela’s autonomous universities demonstrated a greater capacity to resist President Hugo Chávez’s assault on liberalism. While those other institutions had quickly fallen under Chávez’s political control, Venezuela’s public autonomous universities and private universities had maintained considerable academic freedom and self-governance and, in fact, were bastions of opposition mobilization. Despite several efforts at gaining political control, Chavismo pulled back from several opportunities to significantly change the laws and reduce university autonomy (Smilde and Pérez Hernáiz 2025).
This, my co-author and I argue, was the result of the strong association between university autonomy and progressive democracy among the population in the biographies of Chavista officials, as well as the strong institutional framework protecting that autonomy. After Chávez’s death, his successor Nicolás Maduro found the recipe to gain control of higher education by dramatically reducing funding to the point that full-time, tenured faculty simply left the university or the country.
Scholars suggest that authoritarians learn from each other (Stokes 2025). To wit, in less than a year President Donald Trump has pursued attacks on academic freedom at a pace that far exceeds what took Chavismo over a decade. In February 2025, the Trump administration sent a “Dear Colleague” letter directing colleges and universities to eliminate their scholarships and diversity training programs that facilitated race-based inclusion, or lose their federal funding (U.S. Department of Education 2025). This was followed by a “Frequently Asked Questions” document suggesting universities could not use race preferences in selecting students for opportunities.
In March, a funding freeze was announced, aimed at eliminating research that included issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as research on gender and LGBTQ issues, Covid-19, and climate change. Between the National Institute for Health and the National Science Foundation, over $2 billion in grants were terminated. Added to this was the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which itself spent millions on research grants (Palmer 2025).
The Trump administration also targeted specific universities, withholding federal grants as they inquired about discriminatory DEI policies and antisemitism. Northwestern, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, University of Pennsylvania, and University of California, Los Angeles all had hundreds of millions of dollars frozen. Only Harvard contested the freeze with the rest reaching deals to reinstate the funds (Bauman 2025). As well, the Department of Justice announced investigations into universities for their DEI projects, including those who participated in a program called the “PhD Project,” which focused on preparing and channeling disadvantaged students for doctoral studies and used race as a criterion (Saul 2025).
The result has been far-reaching processes of self-censorship whereby administrators have rapidly changed the terms of their recruitment and scholarship practices, trying not to run afoul of the Trump administration. Faculty have likewise felt the need to rethink what they say in public or in the classroom, as a number have been sanctioned or fired for what they have said on or off campus (PEN America 2025).
The newest development is the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a ten-point agreement offering preferential federal funding for alignment with administration values, including the promotion of “viewpoint diversity” (Knott 2025). The problem with viewpoint diversity, of course, is that there is no clear way of determining what proper diversity amounts to. If we assume that one historic role of higher education is precisely to generate the type of reflection that can critique the power relations and structured biases of the present, it will, by definition, be out of sync with the common wisdom of any particular era. Indeed, the whole idea of disciplined study is that some knowledge is better than other knowledge. Having that determined by a government, even, or perhaps especially by a democratic government, is a contradiction in terms (Scott 2018).
So how was the Trump administration so successful, so fast in putting the U.S. academy on its heels? Responding to this question can help us understand the evolving nature of the threats to higher education across the region.
In general terms, academic freedom largely varies with democratic strength. If you have an open and vigorous democracy, you are going to have robust academic freedom. However, the current worldwide phenomenon of democratic backsliding has shown some interesting distinctions. While in relatively weak democratic contexts we tend to have classic interference with institutions and individuals that an authoritarian leader or government considers threatening, in relatively stronger states that are going through a process of democratic erosion, it is higher education more broadly that is the threat, as it becomes a battle ground for “culture wars” (Lerch, Frank, and Schofer 2024). “Professors are the enemy,” as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said in 2024, echoing Richard Nixon fifty years earlier (Ernst 2024). In the current context, we see not just efforts to control what this professor or that institution says, but a much broader effort to diminish higher education across the board.
Among right-wing thinkers, universities are seen as an essential part of the “administrative state” that is undermining national character, as well as traditional hierarchies and morality (Rufo 2025). In this view, the powers of the administrative state need to be diminished in order to facilitate the “unitary executive” concept of government, whereby a democratically elected president has unfettered control over the executive branch. Indeed, Donald Trump’s agenda since he took office in January of this year has followed the Heritage Foundation’s (2023) Project 2025, which lays out an illiberal push to pare away the administrative state. Bureaucracies and organizations that are part of the executive branch but have institutional autonomy and control over their budgets, processes, and goals have, over decades, pushed forward regulations to address inequalities, discriminations, and threats to health, safety, and the environment. They are what Donald Trump and his officials refer to as the “deep state,” and the institutions of higher education and research are at their center.
In the Trump administration’s push against the administrative state, higher education is vulnerable because of the degree to which it is funded by the federal government. Approximately 20% of university revenue comes from the federal government, including around half of all funding for research and development (NCES Digest of Educational Statistics 2023). This is a result of the “academic social contract” that developed during the Cold War years, in which the federal government gave considerable funding to universities in exchange for their contribution to the national purpose through teaching and relevant research. Just what that national purpose amounts to, of course, is not self-evident and has been interpreted as everything from upward mobility and the education of bureaucrats to addressing inequalities and making war (Levine and Stevens 2022).
While this model has been fundamental to the creation of an economy based on research and technology, the social bases of support for this configuration have waned. At the same time that the financial returns of attending college are ever greater, the cost is as well, having grown by more than 100% over the past 20 years––U.S. citizens hold more student debt than credit card debt. Public confidence in institutions of higher education has cratered, and politicians are publicly doubting its utility (Banks, Levine, Pham, Stevens, and Sutton 2025). This context has permitted the Trump administration’s attacks.
The literature on democratic erosion points out that only in a handful of cases does a democracy descend into a full-blown autocracy. In most cases, a democracy is deteriorated but not destroyed. This leaves space for “U-turns,” the process whereby a nation tries to repair and even improve their democracy, learning from what happened in the period of democratic erosion (Nord and Lindberg 2025). As mentioned above in our research on Venezuela, we are finding that two factors explain why it resisted more than other liberal institutions: public opinion and institutional safeguards.
If and when the United States manages to get through the current context of democratic erosion, two priorities for higher education should be fundamental. First are institutional safeguards for public funding. Institutions such as the National Institute for Health and the National Science Foundation need to have their budget and autonomy reinforced and guaranteed so that they will not be subject to the winds of electoral politics. Second, institutions of higher education need to again convince the public of their value. They need to develop new practices that make knowledge creation relevant to new and old societal challenges and integrate it with new technologies and professions. At the same time, they need to reaffirm the utility of knowledge for knowledge’s sake (Balme 2025).
Furthermore, much of the public disapproval of education has to do with its inaccessibility, in other words, its cost and the burden of student debt. Here, the declining contributions of state governments (Mitchell, Leachman, and Masterson 2017) as well as the costs of administration are important causes of soaring tuition rates, and higher education’s declining role as a means of social mobility. Alternative sources of funding and more efficient forms of administration need to be found.
In the meantime, it is faculty and their unions and associations that are leading the resistance to the assault on higher education. Universities and their administrators have only tepidly fought back, preferring to quietly negotiate and stay under the radar of a vindictive administration, at the same time that they have restricted student protest. It has been the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and other organizations that have led the lawsuits against anti-DEI executive orders, the dismantling of the Education Department, the deportation of foreign student activists, and the rescission of funding at particular universities (Quinn 2025). And it has been individual faculty that have spoken out in the media and in public protests.