President Donald Trump’s plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a big, beautiful ballroom has California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former President Joe Biden dubbing Trump “the wrecking ball president.” Newsom calls the Trump design a “metaphor” for an administration that’s “ripping apart the Constitution,” while Biden sees it as the “perfect symbol” for the threat Trump poses to “our very democracy.”
The left’s sudden interest in preserving our landmarks marks a lapse in their mission to dismantle all reminders of our “racist” past. To prevent further breaches of their newfound sensibilities, on Nov. 18, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced the “Stop Bribery Ballroom Act,” which would ban so-called “pay-to-play” schemers from donating to projects that involve federal buildings.
Warren will not admit that Trump’s ballroom benefactors know exactly what they’re financing — a venue where presidents can host events that do not require porta potties and makeshift tents. Nor will Warren admit that, until recently, donors who have poured billions into American universities did not know they were financing professors who would take a wrecking ball to our Western traditions — to our pride in our founders and to our faith in free markets, ironically, the very system that has bankrolled the hard left’s takeover of higher education.
While it’s tempting to argue that the gambit professors use to recruit students for left-wing causes is an American invention, history tells us otherwise. Recalling his former allegiance to “theoretical socialism,” 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky notes that few educated elites can “resist that well-known cycle of ideas and concepts that had taken such a firm hold on young society,” so much so that “not even murder would have stopped us … surrounded by doctrines that had captured our souls.”
Dostoevsky’s appraisal of Russia’s young radicals matches the image of American university students chanting “death to Zionists” and “death to Israel” in the wake of Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israeli citizens. The good news is that those images have prompted donors to withdraw their support for universities that breed contempt for America and contempt for both Israeli and American Jews.
Billionaire donor and Harvard alum Bill Ackman was the first to bolt, citing Harvard’s “discriminatory practices,” but Harvard alum Ken Griffin was more specific in his reasons for halting donations to his alma mater. Griffin contends that the $500 million he has already contributed has fostered “whiny snowflakes” who are “caught up in the rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee.” No doubt Griffin speaks for former donors nationwide when he asks, “Will America’s elite universities get back to the roots of educating American children — young adults — to be the future leader of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions and a DEI agenda?”
Harvard Law School grad and leftist firebrand Elie Mystal is a well-known by-product of Harvard’s anti-American bias, still insisting that Americans are “the bad guys on the world stage.” But if Trump reaches an agreement with Harvard to invest $500 million in AI instruction and a series of trade schools, we just might see a loosening of the hard left’s grip on higher education and on American culture writ large — what playwright David Mamet has dubbed “Wokelahoma.”
Another reason for optimism can be found in liberal George Packer’s September column for the Atlantic, where Packer argues that American schools have failed in their mission to educate “democratic citizens.” Packer decries the money schools spend developing programs “so opaque and politicized that they seemed irrelevant, if not hostile, to the larger society,” then, remarkably, Packer admits that “Some things are true even though the Trump administration says they’re true — the academy has become inhospitable to conservative views.”
Despite The New York Times’ pledge to do “much, much better” in its effort to “understand the country” that reelected Donald Trump, the Times has overlooked recent polls showing a large majority of Americans — 70% — calling for reform in higher education. So it’s no surprise that the Gray Lady has taken a dim view of Trump’s “escalating war” on academe.
If Trump decides to build a Hall of Fame for Doomsday Prophets, the Times’ David Brooks would be its first inductee. Brooks predicts that Trump’s “assault on democracy” will leave us all suffering from a “slow moral, emotional, and intellectual degradation,” and “What worries (Brooks) most is the rot creeping into your mind, and into my own.”
My fervent hope is that elected officials, university donors and university alums will join forces to remove the rot that, for decades, has been creeping into our universities.
Nan Miller is professor emerita in literature from Meredith College and resides in Raleigh.
