In early October, the Trump administration offered universities a “deal” that was unconstitutional and threatened academic freedom. The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education was, as Erwin Chemerinsky described it, “extortion, plain and simple.” Unsurprisingly, none of the initial nine campuses signed onto the Compact, with seven of the schools rejecting it outright. Even after the administration extended the offer to all colleges and universities in late October, only a handful of ideologically aligned schools—such as New College Florida and Valley Forge Military College—have expressed interest in signing. The gambit appears to be a bridge too far, even for institutions that had previously displayed little interest in standing up to the administration.
While it is welcome news that campuses across the country overwhelmingly rejected the Compact, the right’s assault on higher education is far from over. The grievances and demands enumerated in the text of the Compact provide a concise summary of arguments the administration thinks it can use to discipline and diminish the independence of higher education institutions and manufacture, maintain, and increase public support for their platform. This includes several familiar conservative talking points, such as screening out international students for “anti-American values,” adopting a binary definition of sex for sports, and eliminating considerations of race and sex in admissions and for financial aid awards. Yet it also includes one demand that, while first reading the Compact, sent chills up the back of my neck: a demand to “freez[e] the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.” “Too many young adults,” the Compact states, “have become saddled with life-altering debt that has affected, among other things, their ability to have a family or purchase a home. Universities have a duty to control their costs, including by eliminating unnecessary administrative staff, reducing tuition burdens, [and] engaging in transparent accounting.”
This argument is familiar because it is one that I, and others on the left, have made. When I initially read that section, I scoffed, thinking to myself “the Trump administration isn’t seriously calling for a tuition freeze, right? That’s ridiculous.” But then came the prickling sensations at the nape of my neck as I realized that this wasn’t a misstep on their part, but rather the first step in a scarily effective MAGA strategy.
In Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein lays out how right-wing populists identify popular leftist and progressive positions, subsume them, hollow them out, and then regurgitate them as their own, creating what she calls “dark doppelgangers.” Calls to reign in Big Pharma, for instance, went from being a solidly internationalist left position to a core tenet of the MAGA movement. The veneer is similar – pharmaceutical companies are making massive profits and are deeply enmeshed with the political elite who they pay to protect them – but the substantive critiques of capitalism are missing, replaced with conspiracy theories. This strategy works best when the popular position has either been abandoned by the left or effectively undermined by neoliberal democrats. Traces of this strategy can also be found in the otherwise confusing statement issued by the left-lauded President of the UAW, Shawn Fain, in support of Trump’s tariffs even as Trump was pushing through a long-term plan to dismantle the NLRB. This twisted narrative, in which Donald Trump presented himself as a friend of the working class, is only possible because of decades of Democratic neoliberalism and wall-street deregulation.
When it comes to higher education, Trump and MAGA are well positioned to cast themselves as dark doppelganger defenders of affordability. There is already a broad consensus among Americans that the cost of college is too high. This is, moreover, an area that will be particularly appealing to MAGA, as it offers a chance to attract disaffected, new supporters. Given recent partisan realignment—with college-educated voters preferring Harris to Trump by 16 points—the right has an opportunity to peel off new support from a chunk of the electorate that either did not vote or did not vote for Trump by co-opting an issue that is important to them.
Trump’s proposed solution, a five-year tuition freeze, represents a brilliant bit of faux-populism—one that will appeal to voters while also reassuring his wealthy backers and corporations that they have nothing to fear. The proposal creates the illusion that he is taking decisive action to intervene in response to people’s pain while obfuscating the larger, and less popular, goals he is actually advancing. Hiding behind the push to temporarily slow rising tuition costs is a plan to abandon higher education as a public good in this country.
Currently, colleges and universities primarily rely on a mix of government funding and tuition revenue to fund their operations. In general, public universities receive more public funding—including federal and state funding—but private institutions also rely heavily on public funding. Public funding for higher education is being reduced, and targeted for elimination, at multiple levels. Research funding is being slashed, student grant funding is being cut, state budget allocations for higher education are being eroded, and plans are being laid to privatize student loans. Without these funds, many institutions will have to shrink or close. The surviving institutions will accept fewer students and the cost of attending will primarily be paid by the student and their family.
This shift reflects the vision of higher education currently held by many republicans, who think higher education should be a private service available only to those who can afford it. In their minds, the cost of college should be controlled by eliminating programs they dislike or devalue. In short, they envision a university ecosystem that teaches and researches in the fields they value, while serving a smaller student body that is whiter and richer. Within this context, Trump’s tuition freeze dog-whistle sings, “I will cut government funding to universities and intervene directly in tuition costs so that universities cost too much for most Americans to access, but not too much that you can’t afford to pay your kids way.”
To prevent Trump and his allies from seizing the initiative on this issue, the left, and progressive democrats, must reclaim the position that higher education is a public good that serves society as a whole, not just the individual students, teachers, and researchers. For the past five decades, fiscal and cultural conservatives have undermined the idea that higher education should be a fully publicly funded pursuit by prioritizing the “market-model” for higher education in their policymaking. In 1970, as the governor of California, Ronald Regan argued that “the state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” Two years later, the federal government replaced institutional-based grants that went directly to public universities who were able to keep tuition costs low, with a federal student financial-aid program that could be used to pay for tuition at public or private institutions. Private universities lobbied heavily in favor of this shift.
Now that these programs are under attack, it will be tempting to set our sights on protecting and incrementally increasing Pell Grant funding. Instead, we should adopt the strategy of tenant organizers who no longer accept increasing rent assistance as their liberatory horizon and instead are pushing for decommodified social housing. Academic labor unions, non-academic labor unions with on-campus locals, students, and progressive should be at the forefront of a strategy that unabashedly calls for taxing long-term capital gains and dividends to pay for tuition-free higher education. If we are to prevent MAGA from outflanking and corrupting a popular left position, we must embrace solutions that will actually address the underlying issue.
