The End of College Life - Wash U Prof's article in the Atlantic

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03/30/2025 14:42

Subject: The End of College Life - Wash U Prof's article in the Atlantic

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Anonymous

But college life as we know it may soon come to an end. Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.” In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies “an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.”

Those assessments are correct, but they’re also incomplete. So are the many paeans to the social and economic benefits of university research that schools have posted in the past two months. Yes, academic freedom is at stake, along with scientific progress. But the government’s attacks also threaten something far more tangible to future college students and their parents. The entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools—the brochure-ready college life that you may once have experienced yourself, and to which your children may aspire—is itself at risk of ruination.

Few administrators have talked about this risk in public, but they take a different tone in private as they try to figure out how broken budgets can be fixed. I’ve spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.

Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.

This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.

If a school’s athletics program is unable to cover its own costs, it may need to scale back spending on its sports teams. I’ve also heard from colleagues at schools across the country that construction projects have been scrapped, that study-abroad programs are getting canceled, and that career services face cuts. In the meantime, faculty hiring freezes such as those adopted at Harvard, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Vermont could mean that fewer classes will be taught next year.

For two months now, universities have had no idea what, if anything, might stave off further punishments. The state-flagship-university official I spoke with admitted to hoping that the problem will just go away. Perhaps one scalp will be enough, a message sent. For the moment, though, the demands themselves (whatever those might be for different schools) seem less destructive than the sudden, chaotic application of extreme financial leverage: “It’s all arson and no architecture,” the official said. Universities might be amenable to adjusting the terms of their relationship with the federal government, but they cannot do so quickly and under such duress. The Trump administration appears to want them not to talk, but to die.

As for future college students and their parents, the campus experience they expect—the one that generations of Americans took for granted—is no longer guaranteed. Here on campus, the undergraduates seem unaware of this alarming fact. The crisis for universities may be existential, but another spring is blooming on the quad. College has persisted for a whole lifetime in its present form, in a pastoral setting, underwritten by federally funded research, with football crowds cheering in the distance. Last week, a student in my course on artificial intelligence bounded into the lecture hall, full of energy and optimism. “How was your break?” she asked. I’d designed the class to give undergraduates from across the university insights into the changes AI might wreak on their future professions, but just then I found myself wondering more about the future of my own. Not because technology may disrupt it, but because my own government seems intent on destroying it. “It was good,” I said, faking a smile, unsure of what to say. “It was good.”

see longer full article here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/end-of-college-life/682241/