Republicans Have Hated Universities For Years. Anti-war Protests Gave Them A Reason To Punish Them.

In 2021, JD Vance proclaimed “the universities are the enemy.” This week, the White House declared war against them.

President Donald Trump and his administration are escalating their attacks on higher education, intensifying a yearslong effort to hobble the campuses they say breed progressive ideology by casting them not as spaces of innovation, but as hotbeds of hate.

Republicans have long blamed college campuses for being ground-zero for a number of “woke” culture war issues to which they’re now taking an axe, including diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and academic frameworks like critical race theory. The protests that roiled college campuses last spring in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war gave Republicans fuel to go after the schools over concerns about antisemitism, and since taking office, Trump has swiftly taken actions designed to punish higher education.

The Trump administration's effort pulls levers of power across the federal government. The Department of Education on Monday warned 60 universities under investigation for antisemitism that they could face penalties, reminding them that taxpayer support “is a privilege.” Last week, Trump’s administration pulled $400 billion in funding from Columbia University, an upper Manhattan bastion of progressive activism, over allegations of antisemitism there during last spring's protests. Over the weekend, Trump moved to deport a Palestinian green card holder over his involvement in anti-war protests as a graduate student at Columbia — and threatened that more pro-Palestinian activists would soon meet the same fate. And the White House has said the Department of Homeland Security is looking into students who have engaged with pro-Hamas content online.

Meanwhile, cuts to research institution grants by the National Institutes of Health are causing campuses across the country to consider halting medical research, stopping construction and euthanizing lab animals.

“What I like most about the President is just the pace, the intensity, the focus on doing what he said he was going to do, which no one's better at doing,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told POLITICO of the Trump administration's recent education directives. “I always say we make the job too complicated. It's pretty simple: What'd you tell the voters you were going to do if you got elected? Then go do what you said. He's doing that at an unbelievable pace. That's the key.”

It’s a shrewd political tactic from the GOP to frame elite colleges as the factories of extremism as the diploma divide reaches an all-time high. Fifty-six percent of voters without a college degree supported Trump in the 2024 election, up from 51 percent in 2020, according to exit polls.

“At a lot of these schools, they’re not pursuing what is good, true and beautiful. It’s become the oppression Olympics and a weaponized complaint seminar of people sitting in a circle and finding out who’s been offended the most that day,” Charlie Kirk, a conservative youth whisperer and political fireband, told Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom last week. Those conditions, he added, “creates a very weak political movement, which I think plays into one of the reasons we were able to steamroll you guys back in November.”

It started in the months after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, when the Republican-led House education panel summoned the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a hearing over allegations of antisemitism related to pro-Palestinian anti-war protests on their campuses. In a now-infamous exchange, U.N. Ambassador Elise Stefanik, then a New York congresswoman, asked the presidents of Harvard and Penn if “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate their schools’ rules. They said it depends on the “context.”

“It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and that is why you should resign,” Stefanik retorted.

Both presidents stepped down in the following month.

But it was Columbia — known colloquially as “the activist Ivy” — that became Republicans’ biggest bogeyman. When students there pitched tents on a campus lawn and refused to leave the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” last April, it launched the school into the eye of a national political firestorm, with progressive members of Congress joining keffiyeh-wearing activists in the encampment while Speaker Mike Johnson told the students to “stop wasting your parents’ money” and called for the National Guard to be to remove them if they didn’t comply.

Then, in the middle of the night on April 30, dozens of masked demonstrators charged into a locked campus building, declaring it “Hind’s Hall” (after a Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military) and streaming an “intifada” sign down the side of the building.

Former Columbia President Minouche Shafik, working with New York City Mayor Eric Adams, called in the New York Police Department. And in a stunning moment carried live on every media network, hundreds of officers in riot gear streamed onto campus, sawed through the barricades and dragged the screaming protesters out. Shafik, a Baroness in the British House of Lords, resigned in August and returned to London.

The protests at Columbia have continued, as have the arrests. But Trump’s extraordinary move over the weekend to have federal immigration agents arrest and deport Mahmoud Khalil, a lead negotiator during the encampment who is Palestinian and a Syrian national, at his Columbia-owned apartment, represented a staggering intensification of a crackdown on student activism the president promised on the campaign trail.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who are adversarial to the foreign policy or national security interests of the United States” under the Immigration and Nationality Act — a 1952 law used during the Red Scare era to disproportionately target and deport Jewish immigrants.

Leavitt said Khalil organized the protests and distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda,” referencing a flyer distributed on campus last year with the logo of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Khalil told Al Jazeera in May that he was afraid of losing a student visa and thus decided not to participate in the protests, but instead represented the protesters in negotiations with university administrators. A spokesperson for the protest group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, previously told POLITICO it was not responsible for distributing the flyer. But a POLITICO analysis found that some members of the group had engaged with pro-Hamas online content.

Leavitt said the Department of Homeland Security was “using intelligence” to identify other students on other college campuses who had engaged in similar activity. She added that “Columbia has been given the names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity and they are refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus.”

Columbia spokesperson Samantha Slater referred POLITICO to a statement Columbia President Katrina Armstrong released Monday. "We will follow the law, as has always been the case, and rumors suggesting that any member of Columbia leadership requested the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on or near campus are false," she said, adding that "law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings."

All of the recent moves represent the fulfillment of long-held conservative wishes. “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” Vance told the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, before he had been elected to the Senate. Now he's Trump's Vice President, and the White House is beginning to do just that.

Juan Perez contributed to this report.