In his quest to cement his power, President-elect Donald Trump is coming for higher education and our civil rights infrastructure. The Florida GOP’s assault on public universities and cynical weaponization of antisemitism offers Trump a ready-made blueprint. For those who think “liberal universities” in blue states will manage to hold the line, two recent trends suggest otherwise.
First, since the Supreme Court struck down Harvard University’s race-conscious admissions policy in 2023, many of the nation’s most well-endowed institutions have walked back their antiracist commitments and gutted still-lawful policies and programs. Second, since last October, many of those same institutions have discredited, violently suppressed, and at times, criminalized speech that advocates for Palestinian human rights. Farida Shaheed, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to education termed the “unequal treatment of [pro-Palestinian] protesters” the “most appalling factor” she witnessed during a May 2024 site visit to the United States.
Democratic societies need universities to check authoritarian impulses — in part by pursuing truth and knowledge for the common good, not corporate interest or partisan gain. Yet by backtracking on inclusionary commitments and crushing dissent, our most powerful universities have already enabled Trump to erode democratic norms.
Trump will keep chipping at higher education to further his agenda. To understand how, look to Florida. Under the pretense of battling “woke indoctrination,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has vilified and purged the people, policies, and pedagogy that tether Florida’s universities to their democratic function. He has outlawed unions, eroded faculty protections like tenure, banned equity diversity and inclusion initiatives, and outlawed curricula on racism, gender identity, and other targeted topics.
DeSantis’ hostile takeover of New College of Florida offers a cautionary tale. He handed New College’s Board of Trustees over to right-wing ideologues by appointing people like Christopher Rufo — notorious for orchestrating a Trump-led smear campaign against “critical race theory.” New College has since “aggressively recruit[ed]” male athletes to fix what Rufo termed the “feminization” of higher education; eliminated its gender studies major; criminally charged students who criticize the institution; and literally dumped thousands of books on topics from gender equality to Jewish folk tales. Rufo celebrated the carnage: “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.”
Education scholars like Mica Pollock and Hirokazu Yoshikawa have cataloged the devastating learning loss DeSantis’ reign has already wrought. The American Association of University Professors likewise warns that DeSantis’ “politically and ideologically driven assault [on higher education] . . . threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with the direst implications for the entire country.”
Rufo remains a key right-wing strategist for the incoming Trump administration. Last fall, Rufo identified growing campus protests as an opportunity to revitalize his attacks on antiracist communications campaigns. Less than a week after Hamas’ deadly assault on Israel, Rufo directed “conservatives . . . to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM [Black Lives Matter], DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.” Rufo might be savvy. But he is not original. His tactics borrow from — one might say plagiarize — 19th-century fascist playbooks that, as the 1945 U.S. War Department explained, “play political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seiz[e] power while these groups struggled.”
Rufo’s call galvanized a year of right-wing attacks on universities and the democratic values they pursue — often under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. From congressional hearings to stump speeches to op-eds, the GOP and allies co-opted real anxiety about antisemitism to discredit opponents and rationalize violence against peaceful protest. In Florida, the DeSantis administration banned pro-Palestinian student groups and instructed university leaders to scan course material for “anti-Israel bias.”
The pivot is working. More so than “parents’ rights,” “woke indoctrination,” or “critical race theory,” Trump’s bad faith antisemitism talking points offer the perfect Trojan Horse to veil an unpopular agenda, target opponents, and “lay siege” to the universities that might otherwise resist his authoritarian turn.
As goes Florida, so goes the nation
The rest of the country could soon get the Florida treatment.
Lindsay Burke, who authored Project 2025’s chapter on education, lauds Florida as a model Trump should impose on the nation. Burke celebrated DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act” and “Don’t Say Gay” law as “important measures…[that] rein in the left’s capture of academic institutions.” One of Burke’s Heritage Foundation colleagues defended Florida’s decision to cancel AP African American studies for “lack[ing] educational value” and being contrary to Florida law.
Burke also directs Trump to empower parents as culture war enforcers (through the power to sue schools and districts); to target transgender students and supportive policies; and to nationalize Florida’s “school voucher” scheme — which functions as a massive grift by transferring public funds to private, often religious, schools. This privatization anchors Burke’s vision of education in America. In Project 2025, Burke calls on Trump to “follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.” Many will recognize how Southern states employed — and continue to employ — this model to fund “segregation academies” that defy the Supreme Court’s mandate that public schools integrate following Brown v. Board of Education.
Weaponized antisemitism anxiety, Project Esther are trojan horses
It remains unclear whether a GOP-controlled Congress will pass the suite of laws DeSantis enacted to capture Florida’s public university system as an arm of the state. Even without Congress, Trump can leverage the executive power and the Department of Education to carry out a similar agenda. A common Education Department practice is to release influential “Dear Colleague Letters” that interpret laws the agency enforces. Following Trump’s inauguration, we can expect letters that communicate two troubling positions: First, universities may not promote the “divisive concepts” that appeared in a 2020 Trump executive order designed to ban antiracist initiatives in the federal government. Second, that “anti-Israel bias” constitutes antisemitism and therefore violates Title VI.
Trump’s bad faith antisemitism talking points offer the perfect Trojan Horse to veil an unpopular agenda, target opponents, and “lay siege” to the universities that might otherwise resist his authoritarian turn.
To understand Trump’s interest in harnessing “anti-Israel bias,” a separate Heritage Foundation document is instructive. On Oct. 7, 2024, Heritage released “Project Esther,” its self-proclaimed “national strategy to combat antisemitism.” Project Esther takes aim at pro-democracy and human rights organizations by linking them to Hamas — under what Heritage dubs the “Hamas Support Network.” Following Rufo’s lead, Project Esther seeks to discredit and dismantle Palestinian advocacy groups, then parlay the same guilt-by-manufactured-association tactics to dismantle civil society itself. The same strategy animates a widely criticized House bill that would grant Trump’s Treasury secretary unfettered discretion to strip the tax-exempt status of any U.S. nonprofit it dubs a “terrorist supporting organization.” The bill lacks Senate support but will reappear in 2025 after the GOP controls all branches of the federal government.
Trump spent much of the campaign disavowing Project 2025, which was authored by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups. It is no surprise that Heritage is now rebranding its unpopular agenda under the guise of “fighting antisemitism.” Nor is it a surprise that Project Esther’s authors “are among the most influential movement builders of the Christian Zionist Right.” Nor is it a surprise Trump has since vowed to punish universities that tolerate “antisemitic propaganda” and create “terrorist sympathizers.”
Rufo, Heritage, and Trump are telegraphing their every move. Yet, key Democrats and university leaders are providing cover for Trump to target political opponents under the guise, again, of fighting antisemitism.
An example of this on the political front is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer resurrecting the GOP-led Antisemitism Awareness Act. The bill is so unpopular that I and over 1,300 Jewish professors signed an open letter last spring urging Congress to reject it. The signatories denounced the GOP’s effort to codify into federal law an “internationally criticized” definition of antisemitism that conflates “antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel.” The Jewish professors further warned that the measure “promises to amplify real threats Jewish Americans already face” and would “delegitimize and silence Jewish Americans — among others — who advocate for Palestinian human rights or otherwise criticize Israeli policies.”
Schumer should know better. Trump recently called him a “proud supporter of Hamas” for refusing to shake hands with Israel’s prime minister. Yet Schumer’s support for the bill opens academics, students, and his own Democratic colleagues to the same smears.
A similar dynamic has been playing out on university campuses. As noted above, from New York to Texas, some of our most prestigious institutions are inserting into campus harassment policies the same definition of antisemitism that the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would codify into Title VI.
The courts are not lost, but they will not save us
One question is whether courts will check the Trump administration’s plan to enlist universities in an antidemocratic agenda. On the one hand, the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority curtails otherwise available litigation strategies. However, two data points suggest courts should remain part of the equation.
In October, a federal court ruled that a University of Texas policy that adopted the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act’s definition of antisemitism violates the Constitution. The judge observed that the challenged definition, because it targets criticism of Israel, creates a chilling effect that stifles “political speech that is fundamental to the university experience.” The ruling tracks the concerns those 1,300 Jewish professors voiced last May.
On a different front, plaintiffs in multiple states have sued to prohibit laws — like Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” — modeled after Trump’s 2020 anti-critical race theory executive order.
Courts have begun to weigh in. In May, a federal judge declared New Hampshire’s discriminatory censorship law was unconstitutionally vague. A separate judge enjoined the portion of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” that regulates higher education. These are significant victories for civil rights advocates.
In Oklahoma, Judge Charles B. Goodwin, appointed by Trump, rejected a request to strike down the state’s “divisive concepts” law. But Judge Goodwin’s opinion took an ironic turn: he held that Oklahoma’s K-12 teachers must teach about race and racism. HB 1775, the challenged law, prohibits teachers from “requir[ing]” or “mak[ing] part of a course” eight “concepts.” This includes that “any individual should feel discomfort [or] guilt . . . on account of his or her race” and that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race . . . is inherently racist . . . whether consciously or unconsciously.” For years, most assumed these provisions outlaw topics like implicit bias and grant White parents a veto to cancel any conversation about racism.
Judge Goodwin rejected these assumptions. He explained that HB 1775 “expressly protect[s] the teaching” of subjects ranging from “slavery in America and its political and economic consequences” to “the role of slavery ‘as the principal cause of increased sectional polarization leading to the Civil War” to “the ‘Tulsa Race Riot’” and “the effect of past bias and discrimination on current behavior.”
He also dismissed the concern that HB 1775 prohibits any topic that makes a student “feel discomfort or distress.” Judge Goodwin emphasized that K-12 teachers “may and should teach about events that make students uncomfortable.” He added that it does not “prohibit teaching that an action by a person or an institution is racist . . . or results in undue oppression, or that inaction by a person or an institution in the face of racism . . . is itself racist.” Oklahoma’s teachers can — indeed should — talk about race and teach concepts like institutional racism. White parents, in contrast, cannot veto lessons on the Tulsa Race Massacre or White privilege just because it evokes emotional discomfort.
Judge Goodwin’s opinion is formally limited to Oklahoma, but his analysis could have a much larger impact — particularly if Trump reinstates his 2020 executive order.
So when Trump’s Education secretary says a federal Stop WOKE Act bans African American history, she might actually be mistaken.
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