“How far do we go in tolerating these people & this trash under the excuse of academic freedom & freedom of expression? . . . Hasn’t the time come to take on those neurotics in our faculty group and lay down some rules of conduct for the students comparable to what we’d expect in our own families?”
No, this is not a threat from President Donald Trump in 2025.
It is an excerpt from an August 1967 letter from Ronald Reagan, who had been elected the governor of California six months prior, to Glenn Dumke, the chancellor of the California State University system.
Trump’s ongoing attacks on higher education echo the right-wing playbook that Reagan created nearly six decades ago. In a 2024 campaign video, Trump declared that “We are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America.” The goal, he said, would be to take back “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”
In recent weeks, Trump has threatened to withhold $9 billion in federal money from Harvard and another $575 million from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Both Reagan and Trump knew they were tapping into popular discontent with elite universities. For Reagan, it was the mass protests and arrests resulting from the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. For Trump, the source of public anger came from the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments held at dozens of universities in early 2024.
A dissatisfied American public
Trump, like Reagan, sees political dividends in his attacks. In 2012, 26% of Americans said in a survey by the Pew Research Center that colleges had a negative effect on the way things were going in the country. Last year, Pew revealed those negative views had climbed to 45%.
In 1966, Reagan won an upset election against incumbent Gov. Pat Brown by vowing to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” Once in office, he acted on his verbal threats by firing Clark Kerr, the president of the multi-campus University of California system. Kerr was widely admired in academic circles, but to Reagan, he was “soft” and had “appeased” campus protesters. The next year, when the Black Students Union lead a campus-wide strike that shut down San Francisco State College, Reagan called for police intervention and said the campus should be kept open “at the point of a bayonet if necessary.”
“Reagan created a blueprint for the long-term success of the Republican Party as the voice of conservative ‘middle America’ and ‘the silent majority,'” one historian writes.
In February 1970, five days of noisy anti-war protests erupted when local police arrested a student carrying a wine bottle. A full-scale riot ensued, with buildings and police cars set on fire. The police confronted the rioters with guns and shot and killed a university student (ironically, not one of the protesters). Reagan later defended the police response, saying anti-war campus protests had to be stopped. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” he said. “No more appeasement.”
Steve Brint, a historian at the University of California, Riverside, observed that by repeatedly cracking down on university protests, “Reagan created a blueprint for the long-term success of the Republican Party as the voice of conservative ‘middle America’ and ‘the silent majority.'”
While Reagan was the first Republican candidate to score a major political win by assailing higher education, the party’s animosity to the liberal atmosphere on many college campuses can be traced back to the 1951 publication of William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.”
Caste rule at Yale
Buckley, a devout Catholic from a wealthy Connecticut family, graduated from Yale in 1950. Buckley’s book became a surprise best-seller. He would go on to publish the National Review and host the PBS interview program, “Firing Line.”
In an introduction to the book, John Chamberlain, a conservative editorial writer for Life magazine, endorsed Buckley’s accusation that Yale had set-up “an elite of professional untouchables . . . The elite would perpetuate itself as it chose. Departments would select their staffs without reference to alumni or parental or undergraduate opinion . . . This is caste rule as applied to education, it might be unkind to call it ‘Fascism,’ but it certainly is not democracy.”
Chamberlain said he endorsed Buckley’s criticism that Yale faculty was “skeptical of any religion and interventionist and Keynesian as to economics and collectivist as applied to the relation of the individual and government.”
While many conservative Republicans agreed with this condemnation, they found little traction with the public in the 1950s. Universities were filled with veterans on the G.I. Bill. President Eisenhower, who had briefly served as the president of Columbia University before the election, believed American colleges were important to a rising middle class and endorsed generous funding for them.
While running for president in 1980, Reagan vowed to eliminate the Department of Education, decades before Trump. Reagan could not get a Democratic-led Congress to accept that pitch. During his two terms, however, he cut the federal budget for education, both primary and higher, by 25%. He ended a number of federal grants for college students and pushed for private loans.
Since then, every Republican presidential candidate has vowed to reform higher education, with numerous attacking “Marxist” or “radical left” university faculty.
So far, the Trump administration has not deployed law enforcement to tamp down on student protests, but it has detained nearly a dozen students and faculty members on college campuses, individuals with student or work visas, who are alleged to have participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
The State Department has revoked at least 300 student visas, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day,” he said at a recent press conference in Guyana. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”
Universities on the defense
Trump’s attacks on “radical left” universities have taken a toll on their leadership. Since the spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protests, six college presidents have resigned, including two at Columbia.
Universities are not without resources, however, and many have begun to fight back. University leaders have started meeting directly with members of Congress, as well as hiring lobbyists. Some 50 institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Stanford, have hired lobbying firms since the election.
A February poll of some 100 college and university presidents by the Yale School of Management found that 100% of respondents agreed that their schools needed “to do a much better job of conveying their value proposition.”
Perhaps they will invoke the advice of one founding father, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
