While the rest of the world eyes dominance in the fourth industrial revolution, Donald Trump is turning America’s clock back in an attempt to defeat woke ideology.
Trump has a bone to pick with Harvard University, but Harvard isn’t having any of it. To punish it for its defiance, Trump has only one cudgel, and that is to withdraw government grant funding.
This, the famed author of The Art of Extortion is more than willing to do.
Harvard is the world’s most prestigious university, according to both the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2025, and the US News & World Report 2024-2025 Best Global University Rankings. Another ranking puts Harvard fourth, after MIT, Imperial College London, and Oxford University.
Harvard is also the richest university in the world, with an endowment of about $52 billion.
It is a private university. It is relatively small, with a student body just north of 20,000, of which almost 5 000 are international students. However, it awards an extraordinary number of advanced degrees. It awarded 1,444 doctorates and 4,626 master’s degrees last year, but only 1,476 undergraduate degrees.
The Trump administration has already frozen almost $3 billion in government grants to Harvard. Trump has announced he is considering blocking another $3 billion “and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land”.
This is certifiably insane. It shoots America in the foot while it is engaged in a high-tech race against its biggest global rival, China.
Beef
Trump’s beef with Harvard is, essentially, that its English Literature department is riddled with Marxists and its students are lefty radicals who protest against Israel.
Shock! Horror! Pass me the smelling salts!
That describes almost every university on the planet. Professors outside economics departments, and especially in humanities faculties, are more often than not filthy Marxists with no clue about how the real world works.
Students are also reliably left-wing. As the adage goes, if you’re not a socialist at 20, you have no heart, and if you’re still a socialist at 30, you have no brain.
Trump considers protests against Israel’s war on Hamas to constitute “antisemitism”. Arguably, a lot of the sentiment expressed at such protests really is antisemitic. In chanting against the enemies of Hamas, they certainly support a violently antisemitic Islamist movement.
This may be deplorable, but it is not illegal.
The administration and Republican congresscritters have also asked questions about Harvard’s research partnerships with entities in, or funded by, adversary countries, including China and Iran.
US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirsti Noem – who famously could not define habeas corpus in a Senate hearing – wrote Harvard a letter, revoking its right to enroll foreign students for defying the administration, and demanding that it surrender a list of all non-immigrant students, together with any surveillance it might have of them.
She said, “the Trump Administration will enforce the law and root out the evils of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in society and campuses”.
A judge has temporarily blocked Noem’s retaliation against Harvard. There’s a lesson there about messing with America’s top law school.
Free speech
Noem probably also doesn’t know that neither anti-Americanism nor antisemitism are illegal.
Both are protected under the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.
If Nazi demonstrations are protected as free speech (which they famously are), then so are pro-Hamas demonstrations. And anti-American student protests are as American as apple pie.
This is the same Trump administration that days ago sent an uninvited “free speech team” to the UK to investigate concerns over freedom of speech restrictions, particularly regarding pro-life activists who have been arrested for (ironically) silent protests outside abortion clinics.
(The UK’s public order legislation prohibits obstructive protests, which includes protests within 150m of abortion clinics intended to harass, alarm, or distress people using abortion services. Why this is any of America’s business is beyond me.)
This is the same “free speech” administration that attacked South African president Cyril Ramaphosa for allowing EFF leader Julius Malema to spout violent and hateful rhetoric.
Trump’s assault on Harvard has nothing to do with free speech or antisemitism. He has a problem with the fact that universities are hotbeds of wokism and left-wing ideology – which they are, but which is their constitutionally protected right.
His defence of free speech extends to religious-conservative causes, but not to ideas that challenge MAGA ideology, Trump’s leadership, or Trump personally.
He is a typical “free speech for me, but not for thee” despot.
Defunding science
Harvard isn’t the only university in Trump’s crosshairs. He has cut funding for medical and scientific research across the board. Academic organisations, like the American Institute of Physics, are already lamenting the impact of these cuts on graduate programmes.
Of course, Trump has no power to penalise only left-wing humanities departments, or to dictate hiring practices or study curricula to universities. His only weapon is to withhold grant funding, and the fact that his “big, beautiful bill” also defunds the National Institutes of Health suggests that he has no interest in targeted intervention.
Meanwhile, he is promising to funnel billions in funding that used to go to universities to trade schools instead.
This is so boneheaded it’s actually funny.
While the rest of the world funds advanced research to compete in the high-tech world of the fourth industrial revolution, in which advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and materials science begin to blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds, Trump wants to train plumbers, electricians and carpenters.
Every society needs its share of plumbers, welders, electricians, and carpenters, of course, but it isn’t like America faces a crisis or is at a strategic global disadvantage because of a grave shortage of tradespeople.
Trump appears to be obsessed by factory work. His idea of making America great again seems to be to make it the leader in the second industrial revolution, involving manufacturing based on steel, chemicals, petroleum and automobiles.
He is an archetypical anti-intellectual populist. Trump is not so different from Pol Pot, who persecuted bespectacled intellectuals, come to think of it.
World-class research
By steering funding away from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, Trump will reduce the number of people who graduate with advanced degrees in the United States.
For a century or more, the US has been in the vanguard of technological progress. The most advanced science and technology, and consequently, the most dynamic high-tech businesses, were centred upon top American universities.
Most famously, Silicon Valley has its roots at Stanford University and the Berkeley campus of the University of California. There are similar high-tech regions elsewhere, such as Silicon Alley around Columbia University and Princeton, the Research Triangle around Duke University and the University of North Carolina State University, Route 128 in Massachusetts around Harvard, MIT, and Yale, and more.
World-class research institutions have always been the bedrock of America’s exceptional high-tech economy. The same is true in the medical field, and arguably in law, business, and many other areas, too.
China pounces
MAGA Republican Tim Walberg says: “no American university or college should be assisting the [Chinese Communist Party] in expanding its influence…”.
Yet that is exactly what Trump’s assault on Harvard in particular, and US academia in general, does. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has promised “unconditional offers” for international students booted from Harvard by the Trump administration. The Chinese territory’s Education Bureau has also called on other universities to do the same.
Japan has also been casting an opportunistic eye at international Harvard students.
Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, told NBC News that Trump’s campaign against Harvard is a “terrible policy error” that could undermine America’s world-leading role in research and development. He said it could compromise the “talent pipeline” and incomes of US universities, benefiting America’s international rivals.
“China will become significantly more attractive than before to students and researchers from the Global South,” Marginson said. “Western Europe will also gain significantly.”
Chip wars
Defunding America’s advanced research institutions compounds the incentive that US export controls on high-end chips have given to China to accelerate its own research and development.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, has stated publicly that he believes US policy on advanced artificial intelligence chips has only made Chinese technology companies stronger.
He has a dog in that race, of course, since Nvidia’s high-end chips may not be sold into China, but Chinese firm Huawei has already demonstrated a new chip that rivals the performance of the banned Nvidia chips.
Other Chinese companies are also responding aggressively to America’s prohibition policy, and other countries are making bank selling AI-compute-as-a-service to Chinese clients, thanks to Trump’s chip wars.
Foot shot
It is hard to imagine a worse shot in the foot for America’s economic leadership than Trump’s campaign to defund its universities.
Whatever one’s views on the wokeness of academia, and whether or not a government ought to have any say in the academic freedom of private institutions in the first place, blocking research grants is guaranteed to do the exact opposite of making America great again.
It will reduce the US to a second-rate manufacturing hub, while China takes the lead in the advanced technology of the fourth industrial revolution. It’s as if Trump looked at China, earning its crumbs as the world’s low-wage workshop while America led the world in high-wage research at the cutting edge of technology, and thought it would make America great again to reverse their positions.
At this rate, it won’t be long before the top 10 global universities are dominated not by American institutions, but by Chinese colleges. Trump is handing China the economic leadership baton on a silver platter.
It doesn’t get crazier than that.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image: Trump’s assault on research funding could cede America’s lead in advanced technology to China. Public domain image from rawpixel.com.