How Universities Won Their Battle with Trump
The Trump administration’s culture war on universities died this week—not with a bang, but with a whimper.
On Monday, education secretary Linda McMahon sent an open letter to university leaders, asking them to publicly commit to addressing ideological bias among faculty, “unruly and violent protestors” stifling discourse on campus, and lingering DEI policies in admissions. “Americans’ trust in universities has reached record lows,” McMahon wrote. “For the good of the Nation, university leadership must seize this occasion to drive essential reforms.”
McMahon’s polite request to please be less woke marked a dramatic retreat from one year ago, when the administration was steamrolling universities with a brazen extortion campaign that conditioned access to federal funding on compliance with MAGA’s cultural agenda. By the end of July, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Brown had submitted to various administration demands—which ranged from curtailing DEI and trans rights to policing campus antisemitism, among other things—in exchange for the restoration of research grants.
At that time, Princeton and Harvard were the two major holdouts, the latter having been the first school to hit back at the administration with a lawsuit. But in August of 2025, the New York Times published a string of stories suggesting that Harvard, which remained in settlement talks with the administration, was on the verge of caving and striking a deal. As veteran journalist and Washington Monthly contributing editor James Fallows wrote, the upshot of these stories “was that not even Harvard—[the] oldest, richest, most famous of the US universities—could defy Trump.”
What has changed since then? How did the Trump administration go from cowing some of the world’s most powerful universities into submission, to gently pleading with academia as a whole?
