The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

I didn’t worry much about Trump’s threat at the time. I now realize that was a mistake. American universities did not cause the onslaught that the second Trump administration is unleashing upon them. But they would be in a much stronger position today if they had made a proactive case to the public for their own importance—and taken steps to address their very real shortcomings.

In the aftermath of the Yiannopoulos episode and Trump’s tweet, I worried less about the potential loss of federal funding than about the enormous costs of hiring additional police and converting the campus into a riot zone over and over. Berkeley’s commitment to free speech all but guaranteed that more conflict was in store. Yiannopoulos had announced that he would come back, and Ann Coulter soon accepted an invitation to speak at Berkeley as well. For a time, my concerns seemed justified. Berkeley spent millions of dollars to fortify the campus, and pro- and anti-Trump factions continued to clash. Meanwhile, Trump’s first administration largely spared higher education. Despite relentless criticism of universities for their putative anti-conservative bias, federal support for scientific research retained bipartisan support.

[Rose Horowitch: Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump’s orders]

What I failed to appreciate was that the new administration was preparing the ground for a war on the American university—one that it might have carried out had the first Trump White House been better organized. In the context of crises and protests around controversial speakers, along with the growing preoccupation on campuses with offensive speech and so-called microaggressions, Trump and his allies contorted the idea of free speech to build a narrative that the university, rather than the political right, was the chief threat to the First Amendment. State after state introduced legislation, drawing on a template devised by the conservative Goldwater Institute, purportedly to defend free speech but also to enact draconian protocols for disciplining students who engaged in campus protests deemed to prevent others from speaking. (At least 23 states now have statutes in effect conferring some level of authority to state legislatures to monitor free speech on campus, demanding yearly reports, and imposing harsh new rules for student discipline.) Republican politicians began to include denunciations of universities in their talking points; in a 2021 speech, J. D. Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Now the war has begun in earnest. Trump’s directives to restrict funding for science, especially the mandate to dramatically reduce National Institutes of Health grants for scientific infrastructure, equipment, and lab support—all essential components of university science—will cripple biomedical research across the country. Already, universities are reducing graduate programs and even rescinding informal offers that were made before the spending cuts were announced, and in some cases introducing hiring freezes. If the Trump administration sticks to its decision to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia over the charge of tolerating anti-Semitism, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Nowhere is the assault on universities more pronounced than in the campaign to eradicate DEI. A recent Department of Education “Dear Colleague” letter warned that “using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life” is prohibited. The letter purported to base its guidance on the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, but its language went far beyond the Court’s ruling. The price of noncompliance: no federal funds. This time, I take the threat seriously.

Universities have made two general mistakes in the face of sustained right-wing criticism. First, they have behaved as if their societal value is self-evident. In fact, they need to be far more proactive in communicating the enormous contributions they make to the public good: a campaign not just to defend themselves but to remind the country that our universities are among our most crucial assets. Many of the core elements of the technologies that enable our modern lifestyle—the internet, GPS, new immunological cancer therapies, mRNA vaccines, and medical imaging, to take just a tiny sample—have emerged from academic laboratories. Whether one is concerned about democracy, how scientific research can continue to position the U.S. as a global leader, how to solve global issues such as disease and climate change, or how to maintain a competitive edge with other nations such as China and Russia, we need our universities.

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

Second, university administrators have too often assumed that because a great deal of conservative criticism of higher education has been made in bad faith, none of it is valid. The truth is that universities have not always honored their commitments to free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry as well as they should have, and the decline in public support for universities reflects, at least in part, those failures and shortcomings.

Offices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion named values that for years were largely seen as benign. There was broad agreement that students from underrepresented minorities needed to have the opportunities higher education afforded but required special support to thrive in intense and often hostile academic environments for which they had little preparation or family support. Over the past decade, however, these offices grew in size and influence. With that came legitimate concerns about administrative overreach, bloat, and ineffectiveness.

At the same time, the liberal consensus was unraveling. Some faculty and students had indeed rejected the premise of free speech, noting that when power inflected all social relations, there was nothing like a level playing field; universities, they argued, should side with those lacking power and limit the speech of the powerful. Concerns about the ways in which prejudice was expressed in everyday interactions, often through unintentional slights and statements, not only surfaced as priorities for administrators but were converted into speech codes and protocols. A new language of “harm” was used to prosecute new canon wars, target faculty who offended students in the normal course of teaching, and deploy a new range of techniques to censor, punish, or “cancel” other members of the university community.

All of this came to a head in the protests after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Without any campus consensus about free speech, open inquiry, and civil discourse, an existing political impasse became even more intractable.

When, as Berkeley chancellor, I was petitioned by student and faculty groups to cancel invitations to speakers like Yiannopoulos and Coulter, I worried that to do so would be to invite censorship more broadly, and that any abrogation of free-speech rules on campus would soon be used against other political positions. I warned campus constituencies that the principle of free speech would not only protect liberals when national politics shifted—as they already had in the first Trump administration—but also help enshrine the university’s larger commitments to open inquiry and academic freedom, serious threats to which had already begun.

Now my fear that any curtailment of free-speech principles by universities would be used against universities is coming to pass. The new administration is targeting any use of race in statements or programs promoting diversity and inclusion. This effort goes far beyond admissions and hiring decisions, to the point of threatening institutions over the content of their curriculum, making a mockery of the administration’s supposed commitment to free speech. And the attacks on campus protests and DEI are just the opening salvo.

[Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext]

Governor Ron DeSantis has already signed legislation chilling instruction in disciplines including sociology and Middle East history in Florida’s public universities. Given the cuts to science funding at the federal level, we may soon see efforts to control the teaching of climate science, or biology, and maybe even evolution once again. The playbook to take “back” universities includes much more than what we have so far seen.

Federal support for scientific research, and for financial aid for students, is part of the postwar social contract that was articulated at a time when America recognized the need for as many of its citizens as possible to receive a university education and for American science to become preeminent. America’s universities, and its science, grew to be the best in the world.

This is the time to rearticulate and defend the unparalleled value of our research universities. They are the envy of nations around the globe. We attract the best and the brightest to our shores as students, researchers, and teachers. Creating these extraordinary institutions took the better part of a century, but they can be destroyed very quickly. The attack on the university may eventually backfire politically, but not before it does enormous damage. As higher-education leaders resist efforts to undermine and punish universities for their commitment to knowledge, science, and truth, they must also take care to deliver on the promises they make. Only then will the defense stand a chance of succeeding against the current assault.

Target (TGT) announced it was scaling back its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts one month ago. Now, the retail giant is seeing a rapid decline in store visits.

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Federal workers are scared. They don’t know who to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen workers who have outlined how the administration is pushing a new ideology and stoking paranoia within the government’s remaining ranks. My sources work, or until recently worked, across six different agencies, including the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments and USAID; most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or they feared being targeted. “People are terrified,” one worker told me, “not for losing their jobs but for losing democracy.”

The workers described a fundamental transformation in the character of the government: Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security. One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings—no phones, watches, computers, or other connected devices. (Representatives for the Commerce and Defense Departments, USAID, DOGE, and the White House did not respond to my requests for comment.)

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The widespread paralysis has been driven not just by the terminations and the crippling of entire agencies—which workers say has followed no apparent logic or process—but by executive orders and internal communications. Take the first diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 21, the day after the inauguration. The message, which was sent to all members of the State Department, and which outlined various priorities, takes an “Orwellian” tone, as one State Department employee described it to me. Next to a priority labeled “Stopping Censorship and Prioritizing Truth,” Rubio wrote that although the State Department has been “combatting malign propaganda from hostile states” since the Cold War, the agency has also recently worked to promote “censorship, suppression, and misinformation” targeting Americans—perhaps motivated by “an excess of zeal or misguided attempts to control discourse.” The email, a copy of which I obtained, goes on:

This Department will forever stand in support and defense of Americans’ natural and First Amendment rights to free speech. We will combat genuine enemy propaganda, but always and only with the truth: that America is a great and good and just country, whose people are generous, and whose leaders now prioritize our core interests while respecting the rights and interests of other nations. Above all, programs that lead or in any way open the door to the censorship of the American people will be terminated.

My sources were disturbed by the idea that the administration would dictate “the truth” and accuse workers of censoring Americans. (What censorship Rubio is referring to is unclear, and a State Department spokesperson, who replied to my email inquiry without giving their name, said only, “As a general matter, we do not comment on internal personnel matters.”) Those working on behalf of Trump have already hidden information and engaged in censorship themselves, deleting scientific data and prompting researchers to scrub terms related to gender and sexuality from their work, in addition to purging information related to climate change and more. Because of this, one worker said, colleagues at his agency have considered replacing the generic word including with such as in reports, given the word’s proximity to inclusion, or excising terms like vulnerable groups, which are often used to refer to children, out of concern that they could be flagged under the administration’s sweeps to eradicate anything pertaining to diversity.

Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.

Secretary Rubio’s message is just one example of the many ways the Trump administration has made these red lines apparent. Many Republicans have spoken out against any group or agency that could be perceived as censoring conservative voices. Shortly after the election, for instance, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an operation for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda established by President Barack Obama, shut down after a Republican-controlled House didn’t re-up its funding. Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research—even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades. Some are even discussing whether they should revise existing technical documents to scrub references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As one source told me, “If this administration is dictating the truth and dismantling disinformation efforts, you can’t bring it up anymore. You just don’t want to put a target on your back. Whether it’s intended or not, self-censorship emerges.”

Federal workers told me that this self-censorship started with issues related to DEI. On the third day of the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to email their employees a notice asking them to report one another for violations of President Trump’s executive order. Both the fear of being reported by colleagues and the fear of being punished for not reporting colleagues quickly led to a pervasive loss of trust and communication, my sources told me. Many employees stopped speaking openly in meetings in front of unfamiliar co-workers. Pronouns were dropped from emails; pride flags were taken off desks; references to Black History Month and promoting women in STEM were excised from office discussions, they said. Several workers told me they believed this was the intention: “Make people question what is safe—Where can I speak? Who can I speak to? How can I speak? You create a culture of chaos, fear, and confusion,” Stephie-Anne Duliepre, a former Science for Development fellow at USAID, told me. “I think that was the strategy because it was effective: wearing people out, stripping people’s will or faith that if they ever speak up they would be safe.”

This feeling may be by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Some federal workers who collect health and medical data from Americans to support a wide array of downstream research, including cancer-drug discovery, are discussing whether to continue recording if patients are transgender, or information about pregnancies and abortions, an employee told me. The absence of that information will limit the kind of research that scientists can do, like studying how a drug affects pregnant women, or gender-based health disparities. But the workers are wrestling with whether having these data will put Americans in danger of being targeted by their own government, the employee said. Although workers have often asked patients about illegal behavior in the past, including illicit drug use, this time feels different: “It’s not just because it’s illegal in some places,” the employee said, referring to abortions. “It’s because it’s political.”

[Read: DOGE has God-mode access to government data]

Climate change has become another perceived taboo, sources told me. At the Department of Defense, the direction has been explicit. On January 27, several staffers received an email from superiors, according to a copy I reviewed, stating that the director of Army staff was working to suspend any activities “associated with, but not limited to the following areas: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, Climate and climate change, Transgender, and Abortion policies." In other cases, workers are drawing their own conclusions. Some are discussing how to reframe climate-related policy documents, or even research on issues that could have downstream climate implications, into other kinds of energy and environmental issues that are more in line with the Trump administration’s priorities. (Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to pay “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” for example.)

For any communications related to climate and other sensitive topics, the team that has stopped bringing internet-connecting devices to in-person meetings has also shifted from email to Signal messages, a worker in the group told me. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” the worker told me. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

During my conversations, many workers referred to George Orwell’s 1984, and its portrayal of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a minor government bureaucrat, to explain the scope and scale of their experience. They referenced the Ministry of Truth, doublethink, and Newspeak as they described what was happening. Six terminated workers at USAID conveyed to me how the agency’s rapid dismantlement represented an example of the worst of what could happen in this environment: DOGE swept in, Trump froze virtually all aid spending, and Musk began blasting USAID publicly as a “criminal organization.” Agency staff were slow to grasp the full scope of what was happening and to react—they told me that they wish they’d organized protests or sounded the alarm to the outside world more quickly. Under the new regime, the staff became more afraid to talk to one another in large groups and stopped connecting their personal devices to the government Wi-Fi for fear of being surveilled. “USAID is a canary in a coal mine,” a terminated USAID worker told me. “It felt like being hunted by your own government.”

In recent years, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become a key focus for global corporations.

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McDonald’s is the latest major company to scale back its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. It joins the ranks of Walmart, John Deere (DE), and Ford (F).

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