What is Happening to Universities?
A bleak view from the Foreign Languages Building
Amid the torrent of news that hits us each day, I’ll forgive you for not paying attention to what’s been happening to higher education. You may have read about the Trump administration’s dealings with certain prestigious universities like Columbia or Harvard. You may have even caught a headline or two about what’s been happening at the University of Virginia or UCLA. But what about the University of Cincinnati, or Howard University, or my own university, the University of Illinois?
At research universities like Illinois, federal grant monies have been a staple of research and teaching since the late 1950s. However, in the last year federal funds have gone from being a big and steady stream to something more like an on-and-off kitchen faucet as the Trump administration has pursued its agenda. In fact, three different agendas, each of which has little relation to the others apart from their connection to ecosystem of the Trump administration. What are those agendas?
First, led by Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget, the Trump administration is making widespread cuts to federal funding, save projects where the lobbying or ideology is strong enough. The agenda here is an old GOP one: to permanently cut the size and role of the federal government. Research at universities is a relatively small part of the federal budget, especially given the return on investment. In 2023, just under 1% of total federal outlays was devoted to university-based research & development projects. Most of that money went to the sciences and engineering. Now, many of those projects are either on hold or have been terminated as part of what have been presented as “across-the-board” cuts—which, it turns out, are not so across the board.
Rather, reflecting Stephen Miller’s influence in the administration, federal funding has become intensely ideological. Universities and researchers have been told outright that they have to eliminate certain words and topics from research (and in some cases teaching) to maintain federal grants. This is the second prong of the Trump administration’s higher-education agenda, and it points to how these cuts, though widespread, are not even handed. The Trump administration is insisting that researchers tow the new ideological line or lose funding. I have an economist friend, for example, who lost a federal grant that looked at the economic opportunities, or lack thereof, of black farmers in the United States. (The latest statistic I saw said only 1% of American farmers are black, and the number was shrinking.) Why? Because the research focused on blacks.
Amid all of this, the Trump administration claims American campuses are rife with anti-semitism and anti-whiteness. May Mailman seems to have a significant role in this set of maneuvers. Given just how white the Trump administration is and how out loud is anti-semitism in Trump’s coalition—witness Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson—the sincerity of these efforts is dubious, to say the least. Rather, accusations of anti-semitism and anti-whiteness is about using a federal law called “Title VI” to exert ideological control over universities.
Title VI allows the federal government to sanction and punish higher education institutions for discrimination. As has been widely reported, the Trump administration is using this law aggressively. They have targeted cases of anti-semitism coming from the political Left, some of which are legitimate, but the vast majority of which are about students and faculty opposed to Israeli policies in Gaza (most Americans, by the way, are opposed to the Israeli government’s policies). Some sixty universities are or have been under investigation for anti-semitism. None of them, as far as I know, are targeted at anti-semitism coming from the Right. Other universities are being investigated for anti-white and anti-Asian-American discrimination. I was not able to find any that are being investigated for anti-black or anti-Latino-American discrimination.
The sum of this three-pronged attack on higher education has already meant millions of dollars have been lost research funding. Administrators and university presidents are running scared. Grant-funded graduate students in the sciences and social sciences are living with uncertainty about whether they will be able to finish their degrees. Campus speech is being closely monitored. University administrators are being forced to turn over the names of students and faculty who participated in campus protests against the war in Gaza. The campus climate, to say the least, is fraught.
We are learning through the Trump administration just what the state can do to punish its political enemies. In short, far too much. And the collateral damage is wide and deep. Many are talking about the adverse effects cuts in research funding will have in the sciences (we will do that a bit here in two weeks at Civic Fields). Medicine is under siege. And let’s not forget farmers, who, in addition to getting bombarded with tariffs, are seeing university-based agricultural research being cut left and right.
But I want you to know about another victim: the teaching of foreign languages.
Since the late 1950s, the U.S. government has provided hundreds of universities with funds to teach a variety of foreign languages. Indeed, in the 1950s the federal government helped give birth to a whole academic field called “Area Studies.” The basic idea behind Area Studies, as one historian wrote in 2002, was twofold:
It is primarily an effort to make the assumptions, meanings, structures, and dynamics of another society and culture comprehensible to an outsider. But it also creates reflexive opportunities to expand, even challenge by the contrast, the outsider’s understanding of his or her own society and culture.
These were goals suited to the Cold War and the national interest. Indeed, they were products of the Cold War. As a great power, the United States assumed that it needed at least a portion of its citizens to be conversant with the outside world and to have the capacity for self-reflection on one’s own cultural assumptions and biases. The United States wanted to be a great power—rather, it was a great power—but it wanted to also be a smart one.
After Sputnik in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. Among its many provisions, it distributed money through the Department of Education to universities to begin “Area Studies” units. Most of these universities were research universities like my own that also got a lot of funding for STEM research. The primary job of these “Area Studies” units was to teach foreign languages—not just Spanish and German, but Arabic, Korean, Russian, Hindi, Modern Hebrew, Persian, and more. The aim here was to draw on university-trained graduates to help staff and shape U.S. policy and diplomacy in a complicated world.
One of the first things the Trump administration did this year was to cut these decades-old grant programs. Kapoosh. Gone. It was one of the first big steps in the Trump administration’s body slam of the Department of Education (recall, our current education secretary is the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment!).
What does this mean for the University of Illinois and over a hundred other universities? It is not entirely yet clear, but it looks very much like we will soon be a university where only four or five modern foreign languages are taught, barely better than high school. No Arabic, Korean, Russian, Hindi, Modern Hebrew, or Persian, and few in the way of courses on campus about these regions, nations, cultures, and histories. Given how tight a ship universities like my own run financially, after Trump is gone it is unlikely that foreign-language instruction will make a come back (unless Congress gets involved). The damage being done is, for all intents and purposes, permanent.
So, what is happening to universities? Higher education in the United States is being diminished, made smaller and more parochial, all in keeping with a very parochial administration. This seems self-defeating to say the least, but it is a self-defeat that was always a risk in the bargain the federal government made with universities decades ago.
And here’s where my lament for everything destructive that is going on includes also a reckoning with how research universities like mine have long been getting it wrong.
Federal funding for foreign language instruction was never really about learning in itself. It was about the exercise of power. The same is true of federal funding for science and engineering, which also took off in the Cold War.
Research-heavy universities made a bargain with the federal government: you invest in us, and we will organize ourselves to serve you first, students second.
We are now going through the great reversal of this logic: The federal government built a powerful relationship with research universities to create a steady flow of university-trained graduates to centers of U.S. economic, governing, and cultural power in a complex global climate. But this made universities dependent on the federal government, and not just financially. The dependency extended to their very mission. Education and research became, under this Cold War logic, a means of supplying and serving state power.
The first cracks in this arrangement appeared as early as the 1960s. The Vietnam War caused many professors and students to question the university’s contract with the state. Area Studies departments were sometimes at the frontlines here. Trained in the study of other societies, Area Studies became quite critical of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. They also became critical of Area Studies itself for its apparent complicity with the warfare state. Scholars in Area Studies departments, almost all which depended heavily on federal funding, began to turn the lens back on themselves.
As long as the federal government felt it still needed university services, it tolerated such dissent, and as long as Area Studies departments continued to get a steady flow of federal funding, they limited their dissent.
Indeed, for the federal government there were good Cold War reasons for tolerating “radical” faculty. After all, the United States presented itself to the world as the vanguard of freedom, including free speech and free thought. What kind of free government would punish universities for having faculty and students engaged in acts of protest or dissent?
So, as awkward as the relationship was, Area Studies and the federal government maintained their bargain. The upside for the federal government was a continued stream of well-educated young people who could serve in government, industry, or education in ways that continued to advance the U.S.’s “Free World” agenda. The upside for Area Studies units was continued funding. But the downside was dependence on federal funding—not just financial, but mission-curricular dependence.
And now, under a mad fit of ethno-nationalism and grievance capitalism, the academic dependents are being cut short or cut off by the federal parents and kicked out of the government’s fiscal house.
I feel the pain here. I really do. I lament what is happening. I hate it. I hate that Persian, Arabic, or Modern Hebrew may not be offered at my university in a couple of years.
But I also see in it a faint but real opportunity: we need to figure out a way to disentangle learning and justifications for higher-learning from primarily serving power, be it state or corporate. This is not a way of denying the reality of power. Nor is it a way of saying learning should never serve power. But it is a way of saying that power and learning have become virtually identical in the modern American university—if not the power of the state, then the power of industry. In all kinds of ways, power is the lingua franca of the American university. (Not coincidentally, “power” has become the key word of humanistic inquiry over the last half century.)
Could learning, including learning Persian, instead be “useless”? Could it be about wonder, humility, health, holism, healing, and repair? Could it be about the sheer joy of learning? Could it be about de-parochialization without uprooting? Could it be about attention, awareness, empathy, and other virtues?