Trump vs. Higher Education: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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Our main story tonight concerns universities. They've brought us friendships, staggering, unrelenting debt, raunchy comedies where the protagonists engage in antics we now recognize as sexual assault, and amazing research studies like this.

I see this childlike curiosity when people see these rats driving. I'm surprised at the extent, but I know that we've been doing this for a couple of years now, and every person who has seen it, they just, they're surprised, they seem to be intrigued by this.

Yeah. Of course they are. It's a rat driving a car. What is not to be intrigued by? Unfortunately though, tonight's show is not gonna be about rats driving cars. I mean, it can be. You can just play the last 30 seconds over and over again.

I certainly would. Instead, it's gonna be about Trump's ongoing war with higher education. In his last presidential campaign, Trump promised to target universities, especially those that he said were engaging in racial discrimination, suggesting the universities

become increasingly hostile to white students. And as protests against the war in Gaza broke out across campuses, his campaign rhetoric escalated.

To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately, vanquish the radicals, and take back our campuses for all of the normal students

who want a safe place from which to learn.

Okay. A pledge to take back our campuses for all the normal students. It might be one of the most lots to unpack there of all the theirs we've ever unpacked. And with all due disrespect, what the fuck does Donald Trump know about being normal?

Vanquish the radicals is the weirdest possible way to say anything. It is a supervillain phrase, right up there with, guards, seize them, or, let's round up all the. And... for the record, college isn't the place to be normal.

It's the place to eat like a complete monster, get weirdly into posters for the one and only time in your life, and audition different personalities. It's for reinvention. It's the first time that you won't be around the people who've known you forever. So you can change your hair, clothes, everything. Were you stuffy Patrick in high school?

Well, in college, you can be Pat, or if you can pull it off, Trick.

Ooh.

You're not Patrick. Who's that? He sounds like a kid who cried on the bus in fourth grade because it looked like he peed his pants, but no one believed him, and they never let him forget about it, even in high school. Patrick sounds like a real square, but that could never be you, because you're Trick now.

Trick.

Yeah. Trick's chill. Trick vapes. Trick can take the train by himself. I heard Trick's last name was Nasty, not figuratively, literally.

Trick Nasty.

Trick didn't bring a special note to school, excusing him from changing in front of the other boys in gym class. That was Patrick, and he's dead now, because you're Trick. And Trick's good at taking his pants off. Trick knows what he wants at the restaurant, and Trick's phone is always charged. When Trick tells people that that wet spot

on his car goes his sweat, everyone believes him.

Nice sweat, Trick.

Trick's not sus. Trick low-key rips trick, and this is true, fucks. Crick-missed. Anyway, the point is, Trump has long held a grudge against higher education, and now that he's in power, he is acting on it. Among other things, he's targeting the billions of dollars that flow to universities for things like scientific research in order to bend them to his will.

He's done this to schools all over the country, including Harvard, which he justified like this.

Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect.

And all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.

I want Harvard to be great again, probably." I do love... that he felt the need to tack on a probably at the end there. on one out of every 700 obvious lies.

right now, it felt like tonight might be a good time to take a look at Trump's war on higher education. The history of right-wing attacks on what they research and teach, and what this current fight could cost us. And let's start with the fact that conservatives'

distrust of education is nothing new. Nixon famously said, the professors are the enemy. And historically, their attacks have fallen into a few key categories. One big one has been that universities are wasting taxpayer money on things like

frivolous scientific research. Fox has been talking about one example in particular for literally years now.

$503,000 to watch shrimp on a treadmill.

There goes a little guy. This thing cost over a number of years, three million dollars, they say, in taxpayer money.

Remember when the federal government spent three billion of your tax dollars over a decade to study shrimp on a treadmill?

Remember when our government spent thousands to put a shrimp on a treadmill? Do you remember that? Hard to forget.

I mean, yeah. It is hard to forget. Partly because you won't shut the fuck up about it. And partly because it's inherently great TV. Honestly, the only way that'd be made better is if it had its own theme song. You go, shrimp, you go!

Prove that you're not just some bum! Prove that you've got heart! Specifically, one single shaped heart that you keep in your head because you're a scrim shrimp, God damn it, you go!

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The point is, that story won't go away. Just this year, Joni Ernst complained, we put shrimp on a treadmill to see how fast they run. A complaint Elon Musk then tweeted out with the caption, insane wasting of taxpayer money. But there's a few things you should know. First, that video was from 2006,

meaning that shrimp's been running since the Bush presidency. Second, that research was actually useful. A marine biologist and his colleagues were studying how changes in the oceans could potentially affect the ability of marine organisms

to fight infections, which is relevant, given that that impacts how much bacteria could wind up on a plate of seafood in front of you. And for what it's worth, the treadmill in that video actually cost less than $50, and was paid for out of the researcher's own pocket. So to recap, some guy used his own money

to build a shrimp gym for the cost of seven Subway cold-cut combos, all to try and keep shrimp enjoyers from getting poisoned, and somehow, that is academia run amok. Now, the other common attack on colleges is that they are havens of liberal indoctrination.

For years now, Fox has sought out stories on so-called campus craziness, where something as minor as climate activists delayed the Harvard-Yale game gets a lengthy unpacking on the five. They live for this petty shit.

And you know who cracked this code early on? Stephen Miller. Because back in 2007, as a student, he made it onto Fox & Friends with a story about how several school newspapers had refused to run this ad, directing people

to a website that featured claims like, Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbors. And they lapped it up.

Right now, a lot of kids on college campuses, they're only getting one half of the story. And when we're in a situation where you have nuclear threats and radiological threats and biological threats, and we're in a really dangerous time in history, you want everyone in America to have a keen understanding of what it is that we're facing.

And I'm frankly sad to say right now, that's not the case.

Are you a college kid?

Yeah, I'm a senior at Duke University.

Well, you are smart.

Yeah. Steve Miller, would you be very...

Well, I watch Fox & Friends almost every morning,

so that probably has something to do with it.

Oh, I would, I would, every morning, and that's why it might be smart. I've got to say, I'm guessing, is a question Stephen Miller got a lot back then, though... that was probably less to do with his smarts and more to do with the fact that people just assumed he was a 45-year-old undercover narc trying to do an unsanctioned 21 Jump Street on them. But it's worth noting that for all his talk there

about censorship in college newspapers, as a Duke undergraduate, Miller had a newspaper column where he routinely aired conservative grievances like, Christmas is being banned, which as you all remember, happened. He also called affirmative action misguided and devastating,

and said Duke's Women's Studies Department was an effort to indoctrinate students in radical feminism, saying a proper women's studies program would study women from all angles, not one. A pretty weird choice of words coming from this guy, who I think most women would prefer to be studied by

from exactly zero angles. and there's a huge choice of words coming from this guy, who I think most women would prefer to be studied by from exactly zero angles. And the very fact that Miller had a regular column does suggest that, as hard as it may be to believe, there was representation at Duke University for Republican points of view.

And the more you listen to some Republicans complain about what goes on on campuses, the clearer it becomes They want one specific type of thought. we are giving our children over to our enemies

And in a podcast appearance,

over what gets taught in universities.

And that wasn't all that Vance said.

We need, like, a de-bathification program,

de-institutionalize the left, re-institutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right. It is very hard.

men and women of incredible courage,

but I don't see another way out.

And second, you aren't having a stroke.

of certain universities. And here is the head of it laying out their strategy. Under Title VI, we're taking away their money, Mark. We're gonna bankrupt these universities. We're gonna take away every single federal dollar. Wow. He is...

with that screaming madman in that it'd obviously be great

have pointed out.

or are yelled at, it's horrible.

But at Wesleyan, and in many schools,

was roughly the same as the percentage of Jews on the campus generally.

by attacking universities, I think it's a complete charade.

It's just an excuse for getting the universities to conform.

What an illusion has been cast here!

--HARD LAUGHTER --Are you really doing that? Because you always seem so very close.

this guy's team, that his grants were under review.

just four days later, it announced its conclusions and the administration, citing Columbia's continued failure to end the persistent harassment of Jewish students, canceled $400 million in contracts and grants. Just a week later, it sent Columbia a letter giving them seven days to comply with a new list of demands, which were extensive, including calling for the university

to deliver a plan of comprehensive admissions reform and install new oversight of the university's Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department. It was an extreme degree of government intrusion, which is what made it so dispiriting when this happened.

Just in the last few minutes, we are learning that Columbia University will give in to demands from the Trump administration in order to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. It appears that in some way, shape, or form,

Columbia has agreed to pretty much all of the president's demands.

Yeah, they caved in about five seconds, officially solidifying Columbia's reputation as the little bitch university, rather than what it was known for before, being the place that Timothee Chalamet went to for five minutes before realizing he didn't need it.

But here is the thing. That capitulation didn't put an end to it. Because the administration just kept escalating things further, freezing all of Columbia's remaining NIH funding, amounting to about $700 million in total, and even threatening Columbia's accreditation.

And there is no guarantee the administration's gonna stop making demands from Columbia, and why would they when they keep getting met? It's a situation that, understandably, has had a chilling effect on campus, as this professor explains.

Nobody wants to express a controversial opinion

about anything anymore. Michael Thaddeus teaches at Columbia and is a member of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization now suing the Trump administration. I'm a math professor, and math is a wonderfully

apolitical topic. Math, in fact, has flourished under all kinds of authoritarian regimes. But my colleagues who teach history, political science, you know, regional studies, they're terrified. Okay.

Setting aside the breezy, historically, we might have seen a lot of the same things History, political science, you know, regional studies. They're terrified.

Okay.

Setting aside the breezy, historically, we mathematicians have done great under dictators. It is not entirely fair to call math apolitical, because if you know how to listen, much of math has a lot to say, and some of it is very political. For instance, if you add 100 senators

and 435 representatives, you get 535. And if you multiply that by 538, the number of electoral college votes, you get 287,830. Now, here is where it gets interesting. The zip code for the White House is 20500. If you add those numbers, you get, that's right,

308,330. Now, add to that the number 4,494, which is, of course, the corresponding number for the Ensuring Faith in Our Elections Act. We all see where this is going. Do we see it, guys? You get 312,824, and that is already pretty exciting.

But if you multiply that by 17, the age, of course, George Washington was the very first time he held office of any kind. You arrive at 5,318,008. And if you take that number and turn it upside down...

Pretty cool, right?

Fun, right? I don't know if I should fire them or let them host this show from now on. Now, Columbia has since agreed to pay a $200 million fine to restore its frozen research funding, a move that its president has claimed safeguards our independence. But that is a pretty bold take from someone who was just successfully shaken down twice.

Well, that was certainly unpleasant, but at least the moody president who hates honoring deals and loves winning fights will never try that again. Now, some universities did take a slightly different tack from Columbia, because when the administration sent a similar list of demands to Harvard, even throwing in some new ones like demanding an audit

of the political ideology of the student body and faculty to determine viewpoint diversity, Harvard refused to back down. Instead, it sued the government in federal court, and in retaliation, the administration froze or terminated more than three billion dollars

in research grants and contracts with Harvard. The administration's also, among other things, launched multiple investigations into whether Harvard was discriminating against white men. One investigation, for instance, noted increase

among faculty of color, women, and those identifying as non-binary, as well as a decrease in white men in tenure-track jobs. Now, Harvard actually secured a victory this week when a federal judge ruled the Trump administration had illegally canceled its funding,

which is what makes it so frustrating that some think Harvard might try and reach a settlement anyway, as the government can still appeal or mire the university in costly and time-consuming investigations. And I will say, the government going after big universities first is a smart strategy.

For one, it is easy to hate Harvard and people who went there. And if you're not sure if you've met someone who went to Harvard, believe me, you haven't. Because they would have brought it up within the first five fucking seconds of meeting you.

But as this academic points out, if Harvard ultimately caves, that'll send a terrible signal.

Harvard has more wealth, more power, and more institutional strength than almost any other sort of organization in America. If they can break Harvard, then they are sending a sign that they can do it to anybody.

And that is the message that this is trying to convey.

He's right. Fred Armisen is just completely right.

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Because this goes much further than Harvard and Columbia. The administration's frozen billions of federal research funds at all these other schools, and slashed studies at public institutions across the country. Even universities who tried pre-capitulating

have found themselves out of luck. Northwestern tried to get ahead of things by releasing a list of steps it had taken to combat anti-Semitism that closely tracked with a list of demands the Trump administration had given to Columbia.

But it was targeted anyway, several days later, with more than $790 million of their grants frozen. Those funds still have not been unfrozen, even though on Thursday, the university's president resigned. And there is an irony in him being pushed out to fight anti-Semitism on campus,

given that he's a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors. And that is the thing here. For all the talk about how the government's current assault is a direct response to the Gaza protests, here is JD Vance, back in 2021, spelling out the whole playbook.

We go to the universities, we use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to them as leverage, and we say, unless you stop indoctrinating our children, unless you stop indoctrinating our entire society, you don't get another dime of our money. That will stop it very quickly,

but we've got to have the willpower to go

and actually do it.

Right, and that is the exact same plan as now,

and expecting no one to notice.

It's basically the rhetorical equivalent

many of these specific grants targeted

And the end result of all this is, as one researcher put it,

the science in this country is going to be destroyed. cancer, and substance use. And the thing is, even if Trump's cuts get reversed, you can't always start and stop studies whenever you like. Some involve clinical trials and human patients who will now find themselves suddenly without treatment,

as this cancer researcher explains.

We're very worried because what's happening is that, um, one day, we hear our grants are cut, and the next day we have to say to a patient, sorry, no more money's coming in, so we can't treat you on this trial anymore. And could that patient die as a result?

Absolutely, because these patients are on clinical trials because they have no other options.

Look, I feel terrible for patients in that situation, but also for the doctors. Because that is a tough conversation to try to navigate. Bad news, you can't have medicine anymore. Oh, okay, why? Because the president doesn't like anti-Semitism. Really? No, not really.

He just cares a lot about ideological diversity at colleges. Really? No, not really. His brain is functionally pudding now, but the people around him told him to do it, and he said, fine. Okay, but I'm sorry, what does any of that have to do with me? Oh, absolutely nothing. Got it, thanks so much for explaining things.

Dies. And while the costs there are obvious, even science with less immediate practical impact can wind up being incredibly useful. Remember, that shrimp on a treadmill was ultimately about keeping bacteria out of seafood.

Drugs like Azepic are based on a hormone identified in an NIH-funded study of Gila monster venom. A study of how bees optimize their nectar foraging led to an algorithm that now powers the $130 billion web hosting industry. Even that study of rats in a car

discovered that certain stress hormones in the rat's poop changed as they learned to drive, a finding which may now inform future behavioral treatments for mental health. The point is, somewhere out there is a weird little tree frog that jizzes the cure for cancer.

And some scientist probably working at a university is going to discover that because she had a healthy curiosity about frog cum. And honestly... -...that theory kind of makes sense. -... I'm just saying, this pig is over 50 years old. Most pigs don't live that long.

What does she do that most pigs don't? This guy right here.

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All I'm saying is, maybe there's a fountain of youth and it's located between two green spindly legs. Sometimes, science involves asking weird questions and getting unexpected answers. And the thing is, if we lose this vital university research, there's no real replacement for it.

Private industry isn't gonna pick up the slack here because these studies don't often have a clear, immediate return on investment. As the head of Arizona State points out, when we invest in research, that actually helps the private sector,

which is probably something we should talk about a lot more often.

I left my iPhone out, because everybody thinks that this iPhone 16 is the product of the genius, and he was a genius, of Steve Jobs.

Hardly.

There were probably, by my estimation, 5,000 academic research groups through the decades that had something to do with the technology I'm holding in my hand. Nobody even knows they exist. Nobody knows the hundreds of patents that are in here and the thousands of articles that back up

the patents that are in here. There's not one aspect of this iPhone 16 which has not been deeply empowered and enabled by at one point or another, some academic research activity, some academic technological development, and no one knows any of that.

Exactly. Every iPhone ever made contained the work of thousands of academic research papers, which we never talk about. They may have occasionally also contained a meaningful part of a child laborer's finger, but we don't talk about that for different reasons.

The point is, good for the economy.

but obviously, that is not what this is really about.

And it is not hard to see what that is. and I asked myself, how can this be?

five to four, to block that judge's order,

Well, I don't really know.

but even if there is not a fixed destination, there is a clear direction. And that is that they want to turn back a clock that quite honestly had taken way too long to move forward and restore the role of academia to being a training ground for those looking to uphold old systems of power instead of questioning them.

And look, you can have problems with academia. You can think it's too cloistered or too liberal. You can think it's too cloistered or too liberal. You can think it's becoming too expensive or that its resources are misallocated. But the notion of the state suddenly executing a sweeping takeover of higher education to this degree

is chilling. And if these administration's actions have taught us one thing so far, it's that no capitulation will be enough. And they will never stop demanding more. So given that, I'd argue that to the extent they can, these institutions need to stop yielding,

stand firm, and fight back. Because while I do get the appeal of thinking just one more concession, one more payoff might safeguard your independence or let you live to fight another day, it's worth asking, at what point have you compromised so much

that the thing you're supposed to be defending is gone? And if institutions need some inspiration in facing that challenge, maybe I can remind them of one plucky little guy who would not stop, no matter the odds, no matter the forces, to try to push him backwards.

I guess what I'm saying is, universities, you need to act like that shrimp. Get your head down and pump your 20 legs like your fucking life depends on it. like your fucking life depends on it.

Get out there and show people who you are.