With former U.S. President Donald Trump set to face Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s crucial U.S. Presidential Elections, we explore how the Republican Party’s MAGA agenda seeks to discredit universities and co-opt them into a conservative regime, and what this means for students.
Long before his 2016 campaign for the Republican Party, Donald Trump was a Democrat. He donated large sums of money to Democratic politicians in the 2000s, including his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and his new 2024 rival, Kamala Harris. During this era, he claimed to be a Democrat because the economy was in safer hands under their watch. A 2015 Forbes magazine article titled, “The Democrats: The Party of the Elite College Education” highlighted that the Democratic Party has appealed to, been funded by, and been run by graduates of elite U.S. universities, mostly from the Ivy League. Trump himself graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an elite Ivy League institution, much like his fellow Democratic Party cronies. Trump even launched his own for-profit company, Trump University, in 2004 as a real estate training course, although it did not gain accreditation as an official university. Ostensibly, he holds personal regard for the value of a university education.
When Trump changed his political allegiance and decided to run for the Republican Party in 2016, he took the reins of a party with a large support base of white, non-college-educated Americans. In 2014, 54% of this demographic supported the Republican Party compared with only 34% who leaned towards the Democrats. Since then, he has played to the crowd, pleasing this large voter base by perpetuating anti-university rhetoric. In his crusade against ‘woke’ ideology from the left, he has positioned universities as Democrat-aligned enemies of America. Just like he promised to ‘drain the swamp’ of bureaucrats in Washington D.C., he now seeks to alter the power structures and curriculum at elite colleges, both of which have a strong left-wing flavour. Trump and his fellow Republicans have constantly spread rhetoric characterised by a mistrust of higher education—Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called universities a ‘cesspool of Marxist indoctrination,’ while former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that ‘teachers unions and the filth they are teaching our kids’ will be the downfall of the U.S. Republic.
Trump’s anti-university rhetoric has been successful, and in 2016 he gathered enough votes to win the Electoral College due to his upsets in the Rust Belt states (those states running from New York through the Midwest that were once dominated by blue-collar jobs that didn’t require a college education). A 2015 Gallup poll showed that Trump’s appeal was highest among blue-collar men. These voters love Trump’s brash, no-nonsense, say-it-as-it-is approach to politics. Trump’s ‘You’re fired’ attitude is blunt and simple, and ultimately relatable to this demographic. These voters didn’t attend fancy universities and don’t want to be spoken down to by Ivy League-educated politicians who use pretentious language while discussing everyday issues from their ivory tower on Capitol Hill.
Nobody understands the issues of everyday Americans and their feelings about higher education better than Trump’s newly appointed Vice-Presidential nominee, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” describes his rise from the underprivileged area of Middletown, Ohio, one of the poorest, overwhelmingly white districts in America. This part of the United States is defined by its history of coal mining and industry but is now considered ‘Left Behind America,’ plagued by poverty, opioid usage, and failing industry. In his aforementioned memoir, we learn that Vance’s mother was a heroin addict and that he grew up in a very dysfunctional and poor family. He eventually defeats all odds and ends up at Yale Law School, having graduated from Ohio State. However, in 2021, Vance turned on the very institutions that gave him a chance and called universities ‘the enemy.’ In 2022, Vance said that universities preach ‘deceit and lies.’ He has been more vocal than Trump about universities and has even said that ‘we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities’ in the U.S. In a recent TIME magazine article titled, “Why Higher Ed Is Scared of a Second Trump Term,” Phillip Elliot quotes Trump, “The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that,” and continues, “Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.” The Republicans are seeking to uproot the traditionally liberal discourse on college campuses and replace it with what they define as a more pro-American, patriotic, and ultimately conservative discourse. These plans for higher education are also laid out in the recently published “Mandate for Leadership,” more commonly known as Project 2025. Project 2025 is a policy agenda for Trump’s potential term as the 47th President of the United States, created by the conservative Washington D.C.-based think tank, The Heritage Foundation. The 922-page document reveals a host of radical policies to be implemented on day one of Trump’s second presidency, including cutting federal funding and accreditation of universities that receive money from the CCP through the Chinese Confucius Institutes set up in universities globally, including at UCD.
As part of their attacks on what they refer to as ‘radical leftist brainwashing’ in universities, the Republican Party has sought to discredit any university or school teaching gender studies classes. In seven Republican states, Trump-devoted lawmakers are considering banning books that contain references to ‘profane language’ or ‘depictions of gender identity.’ At Belfield, the UCD School of Gender Studies teaches four modules in the BSc Social Science and Social Justice undergraduate degree, such as Exploring Gender, Masculinities, Gender, War and Violence, and Gender, Power and Politics. At the graduate level, the school offers 11 modules related to gender. One has to wonder how another Trump administration would affect the career and further education opportunities in the U.S. for graduates from these courses. Right-wing ideologues have rubbished these types of courses as pseudo-scientific, and many of the job roles that graduates from these courses go into involve promoting DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) within corporations. DEI initiatives are already dying out in large corporations due to intense criticism. According to consultancy firm Horton International, in 2021, 56% of organizations had leadership dedicated to DEI, but as of 2023, this had fallen to 41%. Trump has demanded universities purge DEI administrators.
The Republican Party’s sentiments about university are echoed by the right-wing, pro-Trump political action group, Turning Point USA, established by political activist and talk show host Charlie Kirk, which has established chapters across more than 3,500 college campuses in the U.S. Ironically, while spearheading a national student conservatism organization, Kirk himself regularly discredits the value of university education, calling university a scam. He published the book “The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.” In the book, he writes that ‘we all know colleges are filled with far-left professors’ and that in university ‘brainwashing is the norm.’ He states that academia ‘has lost all credibility’ due to ‘woke’ ideals corrupting the views of students. During the intro of each of Charlie Kirk’s eponymous podcasts on Spotify is a clip of Donald Trump endorsing Charlie—‘I want to thank Charlie, he’s an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this country, he has done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.’
A Republican win in November will have a major impact on universities in the U.S. and consequently affect students and graduates here at UCD looking to work or study in the United States post-grad. We are yet to see whether the Republicans will be successful in their crusade against ‘woke,’ ‘leftist’ ideology on campus, but barring a surprise win by the current Vice President in November, the next U.S. President’s administration will have universities in the firing line.
Eoin Gilligan – Politics Writer
