‘A Really Easy Mark for Trump’: Three Columnists on the Threats to Elite Colleges

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens about Donald Trump’s attacks on Columbia University and other elite colleges and how they became vulnerable to a political and ideological reckoning.

Patrick Healy: Bret, Tressie, Masha, I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?

He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.

So I want to start by asking you the question I asked the university president — what went wrong for higher ed? How did colleges become easy pickings?

Bret Stephens: Big question; lots of answers.

The moment I realized something had gone terribly, maybe irreversibly, wrong in higher ed came in 2015, when Nicholas Christakis, a distinguished sociobiologist at Yale, was surrounded, hounded, lectured and yelled at by students furious that his wife, Erika, had suggested in an email that perhaps students could be entrusted to make their own Halloween costume decisions. The incident encapsulated the entitlement, the arrogance and the unbearably petty grievances of a generation who seemed to find their voice and power in the taking of offense. I was left asking: Who admitted these students? Who taught them to think this way? And why weren’t they immediately suspended or expelled?

Healy: I remember that moment. A Harvard friend texted me and said, Glad you didn’t go to Yale? Then she backtracked with there-by-the-grace-of-God-goes-Harvard humility.