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GOP
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Donald Trump's efforts to browbeat U.S. universities into submission may have massive consequences for the country for decades to come. Some of his attempts to beat back DEI will have short-term effects, like not having talented women and minority students studying at elite universities. But the long-term effects are far, far worse. Much of the U.S. success since World War II has resulted from discoveries and inventions made at U.S. universities (especially elite ones) that later became products or services that changed the world. One example that both (V) and (Z) know about, albeit from different angles, is the Internet. It wasn't invented by the telephone companies. In fact, when AT&T was offered a chance to build it, the company turned it down, saying POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) was just fine, thank you, and there was no need to do research on improving it. The research that led to the ARPAnet, which became the Internet, was done by a handful of elite universities, led by MIT, UCLA, and Stanford, and was paid for by grants from a DoD agency, ARPA. Only after the ARPAnet was up and running for years did the phone companies get belatedly interested.
Our point is, keeping a technological edge over other countries is crucial for keeping an industrial edge, which leads to a military edge. A key factor here is a strong university system, where researchers are free to explore what they think may be the next big thing in their respective fields, certainly in the STEM fields. Having politicians or government bureaucrats ordering them around is deadly. Starving university researchers of funds or allocating funds on any basis other than merit also leads to eventual decline. The latter has been going on slowly for years, but Trump has made the problem much worse.
Technology is often underrated. The North won the Civil War not because it had better politicians but because it had a stronger industrial base and infrastructure. The Allies won World War II not because FDR was a brilliant military strategist but because they could produce more and better war materiel than the Axis powers. Weakening the universities is the key to a declining future, and that is the road Donald Trump wants to travel.
There are various rankings of world universities out there. One of them is CWTS from Leiden University in the Netherlands. It uses multiple bibliometric indicators, including number of publications, number of citations, and other factors. Here are the top 10 universities worldwide in 2012 and in 2025:
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The Leiden ranking isn't the only one, but the shift from U.S. universities on top to Chinese ones on top is visible even without a sophisticated statistical analysis. Part of the decline happened during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but also during Trump's first term. It is a long-term trend due to underfunding of U.S. universities coupled with aggressive funding from China of its best universities.
Now Trump is accelerating the problem greatly by cutting off research funding to universities that won't let him run the university and won't let him dictate who will teach there, what will be taught there, and who will be allowed to study there. If a university president thinks he or she is better at running the place than Trump, well, there go your research funds. Trump's actions (and those of Elon Musk) cost Johns Hopkins, a leading university in health sciences, $800 million, which forced the university to lay off 2,000 staff.
The rise of Chinese universities is not an accident. In a speech in 2024, Xi Jinping praised Chinese universities' progress in fields from quantum technology to space science. He particularly noted work at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, which has developed a method for creating starch from carbon dioxide. This could eventually lead to ways to convert air to food. Xi has also made sure the top universities are well funded. In China, the educational system is largely merit-based and very competitive. Only the best survive. That is fine with him.
Besides threatening or withholding funding from universities, another thing Trump has done to weaken them is blocking visas of students from all over the world who have been admitted to U.S. universities. This has three effects. First, really smart students from Europe, India, China and other countries will look for other countries to study in, which reduces the average quality of the students at the top U.S. universities. Second, since foreign students rarely get scholarships from U.S. universities and have to pay full tuition (even if the money comes from their governments), it deprives U.S. universities of another source of funding, in addition to the direct cutbacks of federal research money. Third, some foreign students stay in the U.S. and become productive workers in many fields and some go back to their own countries, generally with a very positive view of democracy, capitalism and America in general. This is a major source of America's soft power. Trump has decided to throw it in the garbage can because he doesn't like foreigners. Little good will come of this, but once patterns of where students study change, they will be hard to reset.
On a personal note, (V) understands this model very well. After the Berlin Wall fell and countries in Eastern Europe joined the E.U., he helped set up structural programs in which top professors in some of the Eastern European countries would feed their best students to his university for graduate study. Some got masters or Ph.D.s and stayed, benefiting the Netherlands, and some went home, knowing about Dutch companies and institutions and generally having a positive view of their time in Amsterdam. This is the sort of "soft power" arrangement Trump wants to kill off. As an aside, a number of European countries have created programs to lure the very best foreign scientists who don't feel comfortable working in the U.S. anymore to their country with large initial grants to allow them to build a top research group quickly. They understand that today's research leads to tomorrow's products and services. Trump doesn't. Welcome to the new brain drain. (V)