Politico reports:

Colleges and universities across the country are capitulating to President Donald Trump with staggering speed, moving to slash progressive policies and crack down on student activism as they face compounding threats from an administration hellbent on reshaping higher education.

Columbia University on Thursday appeared poised to submit to a list of Trump administration demands that threaten core tenets of the school’s mission in an attempt to release itself from a $400 million federal funding freeze. The University of California’s board moved on Wednesday to cut diversity statements from recruitment requirements. Dartmouth College on Monday announced it had hired the Republican National Committee’s former chief counsel — an outspoken critic of birthright citizenship — as the college’s top lawyer and leader of its immigration office. And dozens of universities last month rushed to scrub diversity, equity and inclusion policies from their websites and cancel related events.

It’s a stunning display of how some of the country’s oldest, wealthiest and enduring institutions have swiftly folded to Trump, who is acting on longstanding conservative criticisms of universities as elitist and progressive. In the path of the Trump administration’s threats — and with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake — schools are being tested on how their values, jobs and research stand up to today’s political realities.

“It’s going to be tense for a while, because … the [university] presidents are not going to go into full-on resistance mode,” said Holden Thorp, the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They have too much history and financial resources and people to protect to do that.”

A growing number of institutions are initiating hiring freezes, rescinding graduate admissions offers and pausing construction, which may be costly to fire up again even if Congress or a new administration reopens the spigot of cash.

Trump’s tactics are largely delivering on years of conservative frustrations accelerated during the pandemic that galvanized voters against academic frameworks like critical race theory and gender identity as well as DEI and pro-Palestinian protests. As early as 2021, Vice President JD Vance — a Yale alum and not yet a senator — declared “the universities are the enemy.” [Continue reading…]