President Donald Trump's attacks on universities are being driven by his right-hand man, according to New York Times contributor Thomas B. Edsall.
“Vice President JD Vance is the most florid member of the administration voicing this hatred of academia,” Edsall said.
The contributor took a look at a speech from Vance at the 2021 National Conservatism Convention in which Vance said, “Universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth.”
He later added, “Universities do not pursue knowledge and truth. They pursue deceit and lies.”
In the same speech, Vance asked fellow conservatives if they “want to do things for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
He ended the speech by quoting President Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”
“Vice President Vance shares some of Trump’s preoccupations, but he is also a something of a different case.” Edsall said, “A graduate of Yale Law School, Vance is fully cognizant of the meaning of due process. Nonetheless, he has been a willing partner in Trump’s continued recalcitrance, his churlish and spiteful defiance of foundational legal principles.”
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Edsall slammed both Trump and Vance in their attempts to “seek to wrest control of American universities and colleges.” He added the two, along with “administration loyalists, have taken a page from Viktor Orban, the autocratic premier of Hungary.”
Gabor Halmai, professor emeritus at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, and Andrew Ryder, director of the Institute of Political and International Studies, said of Orban’s University takeover, “Hungary has witnessed a serious erosion of academic institutional autonomy, with universities being taken out of public control and supposedly ‘privatized.’”
Halmai and Ryder point out that schools in that country “are now managed as foundations overseen by boards of trustees. However, the term privatization is a misnomer as these boards consist of government appointees chosen for their loyalty to the Orban government.”
Edsall, for his part, recognized that the Trump administration has not sought to mask its intentions through devices such as boards of trustees. However, they have “sought to gain the power to directly oversee internal university teaching, hiring, and disciplinary policies.”
