Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts
In The News Piece in The New York Times
Jarod Lew for The New York Times
Feb. 14, 2025
Kevin Carey is quoted in a New York Times article about the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape higher education.
In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large. Comparing universities to the sci-fi totalitarianism of “The Matrix,” in which parasitic machines have seized control of reality itself, he said, “So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country is fundamentally determined by, supported by and reinforced by the universities.” Why, he asked, have conservatives consented to such intellectual tyranny?