Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been examining the Trump administration's assault on universities in The Harvard Plan, the series we produced in collaboration with the Boston Globe. In episode one, we met three professors at Harvard who each have a very different take on how their employer should meet the moment. Ryan Enos, the poli sci professor, wants Harvard to take a principled stand.

Ryan Enos: We are waiting on you, Harvard. When will you speak up? If you don't speak up, who will?

Micah Loewinger: Cancer researcher Kamila Naxerova wants Harvard to make a deal to save her grant funding.

Kamila Naxerova: I definitely want a deal. I think that what we do here is extremely valuable. The reality is that without a deal, it's dead.

Micah Loewinger: Engineering professor Kit Parker asked why they couldn't all just get along. Parker is a Trump supporter.

Kit Parker: We need to go talk to him immediately. If he talks to Putin and Kim, he'll talk to us.

Micah Loewinger: They're all professors, bystanders in a fight no one really expected. At stake, billions of dollars in science funding and America's standing in the world. What do you do if you're a decision maker, the leader of a university, and what do you do if you're in the White House and you're determined to change campus culture? That's what this week's episode is all about. Here's Ilya.

Ilya: I want to tell you something about how we got here-

Host: Today on Science Reporter. We are going to look back over the years.

Ilya: to a place where the government is able to twist the arms of the mightiest, the richest, the most prestigious universities in the world, and those universities don't quite know what to do. One way to explain it is to get to know a man who's been dead for 50 years. His name--

Host: Vannevar Bush.

Ilya: That's V-A-N-N-E-V-A-R Bush. People say it different ways.

Hilary Burns: Yes, it's actually amazing how often his name comes up when I speak with people who study or follow American higher education.

Ilya: My Globe colleague, Hilary Burns.

Hilary Burns: Vannevar Bush was a scientist and really a visionary during the Second World War.

Host: Of Vannevar Bush. An admirer has said, "I always think of him as a Cape Coder. His roots are deep in the soil of that historic bit of sterile land. Metaphorically speaking, his shoes are full of its sand." In the story [crosstalk]

Ilya: In photos, Bush wears rimless glasses and a three-piece suit. He's lanky and sometimes smokes a pipe. An electrical engineer by training, Vannevar Bush in the 1930s and '40s was appointed by President Roosevelt to lead a bunch of newly created bodies focusing on military research and development. He was one of the key movers behind the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons.

Host: Well, let's start off by going back to 1945 in New Mexico when you witnessed the first atomic bomb blast. What was your personal reaction then?

Vannevar Bush: Well, of course, my first reaction was one of great relief that the program had been successful and the bomb had gone off on schedule.

Host: Well, now, when you go look back from a vantage point of 18 years, do you have any regrets about it?

Vannevar" No. Of course, President Truman made the decision to use the bomb, but I thought then and I think now that he was right for a number of reasons. One, [crosstalk]

Ilya: "The bomb accelerated the end of the war," Bush said, "America's victory was literally powered by professors of physics."

Hilary Burns: Once the war ended, he wrote a report to President Truman titled the Science, The Endless Frontier. That really became the blueprint for the US science policy and laid the foundation of the National Science Foundation, which developed the ecosystem we have today, where the government funds basic research on university and college campuses.

Ilya: In Science, The Endless Frontier, Bush laid out five fundamentals. They included these points. Science funding must be long-term and predictable. Decisions about what to fund should be made by public servants who understand science. University researchers should have complete independence on how to do their work, including staffing and scope. "This is of the utmost importance." There would be accountability, though. The whole system of taxpayer-funded innovation would be answerable to the US President and Congress, and by extension, the American people. Very different from our rivals in the Soviet Union.

Vannevar Bush: Science is going to be heading on a hundred fronts at an accelerated pace, moving so fast that it's hard to keep up.

Ilya: Like a prophet, Vannevar Bush seemed to anticipate the amazing innovations that did come to pass, from gene therapy to artificial intelligence. Underwriting it all, taxpayers placing their trust in universities and scientists.

Host: Do you see any danger of a certain scientific elite gaining too much power in a situation like that?

Vannevar Bush: No, I don't. I hear it mentioned every little while.

Ilya: In this 1963 film produced by MIT, Bush sounded very confident about the system he built.

Vannevar Bush: It's not very easy, you know, to dominate a group of scientists. They're about as independent a crowd as you can find anywhere. I just about as much think of dominating the scientists of this country as I would of a little clique running a faculty of a university. It isn't done.

Host: [chuckles] It's impossible.

Ilya: For eight decades, Bush's vision prevailed. Sometimes it's even referred to as a compact, almost like a treaty.

Hilary Burns: Academics, researchers, the leaders of industry organizations, college presidents, they all really view Vannevar Bush as the architect of the modern American university. He is the visionary that created the current landscape we have, which became the envy of the world.

Ilya: This year, it came apart not by neglect or decay or some outside enemy. It was attacked by the United States President through canceled grants, mass layoffs, organizational chaos, cuts targeting the biggest research institutions. The person shaking the foundation of Vannevar Bush's compact is a name you might not know. For much of this year, until she left to have her third baby, May Mailman was the White House lead on drafting executive orders and negotiating with college leaders. She has a breezy self-confidence and a propensity to drop little provocations.

May Mailman: I do think that some jobs in the White House are just not amenable to having kids. I don't know if that's anti feminist or I just-- It's not.

Ilya: Mailman grew up in what she calls flyover country, Kansas. Her father was a White American who met her mother, who's Korean, when he was with the army in Asia training to be a doctor. Both parents were politically conservative.

May Mailman: When you're in residency, you don't have any money.

Ilya: Mailman told me. Her mom was appalled when she saw her husband's first paycheck upon becoming a licensed physician.

May Mailman: That's like a real dollar amount, and then you see the amount of taxes taken out of it. I think that was my mom's radicalization moment.

Ilya: Mailman has always been right of center. At Harvard Law, she led her chapter of the Conservative Federalist Society. As she told the New York Times, she accidentally provoked a tempest when the group was seen getting delivery from a fast food restaurant whose owners funded efforts to oppose gay marriage. The delivery bag was left in front of the locker of a gay student group.

May Mailman: There was a group chat going around saying that the federal society is trying to basically threaten the gay student group because there was a strict playbacks. No, that didn't happen.

Ilya: She did not appreciate the rush to judgment. After graduating, Mailman joined the first Trump White House and stayed all four years. During the Biden presidency, she worked for a legal nonprofit, opposing trans participation in sports. When Trump was reelected, Stephen Miller, whom she calls-

May Mailman: -a really good friend of mine-

Ilya: -invited her back for Trump two. They both agreed they could not get stopped by the norms and practices that had gummed up the first Trump administration.

May Mailman: Now, we would never just accept those sort of answers like that. I need a faster timeline. What you're saying does not make any sense.

Ilya: Changing the culture of higher education was of the utmost importance.

May Mailman: If we're putting our top leaders in our top schools and we're setting them up for failure by glorifying minority status or oppressed status, then how can we be a great country? We cannot be a great country.

Ilya: May Mailman does not often speak in the language of science policy. She speaks the language of power, the language of culture wars.

May Mailman: There was a large increase in trans and non-binary identification and even more of an increase in homosexual identification, that's now come down. If you're just like a normal person and you just like are, I don't know, just a heterosexual person, now you're not a victim, and you can't be part of that, and so it becomes cool. There was a fad element. There has to be a fad element, right?

Ilya: In her telling, universities pretty much had it coming when they indulged victim culture. Somehow, these institutions forgot who was paying for their medical schools and labs, the government.

May Mailman: If you're going to have a relationship with the federal government, you are dependent in ways that you have no idea. To act like you are some independent entity is false, like it is false.

Ilya: Is this how it ends, Vannevar Bush's dream? A system that, to be sure, concentrated prestige and money and Nobel prizes in a few places like Harvard, even as the benefits in the form of knowledge and medicine were spread all over the country and around the world.

Participant 1: The Trump administration is continuing efforts to exert control over higher education.

Ilya: A few weeks ago, with May Mailman's input, the Trump administration offered its own revised vision for universities' relationship with the government.

Participant 2: The White House sent a letter to several universities urging them to sign a formal agreement, what it's calling a compact.

Ilya: You could almost squint and think it was the same thing as the informal compact Vannevar Bush envisioned, but it's not. The Trump compact comes with conditions like a commitment to the biological definition of sex, tracking and reporting on the political orientation of students and faculty.

Participant 2: Pledging to support many of President Trump's policy priorities.

Participant 3: To removing factors like sex and ethnicity from admissions decisions.

Participant 4: A cap on the enrollment of international students and strict definitions of gender.

Hilary Burns: The complaints about the compact have been non-specific. I feel like it's just been academic freedom. If anything, it's actually not radical.

Ilya: We'll come back to May mailman a little later in this episode. Before that, what's a school supposed to do in a naked power play like this? Lay low, keep quiet, hope for the best, or make some noise, show some fight, be like Harvard? They sued the government. Here's a thought. What if not all universities need to shield themselves?

Trump: Graduates of the Alabama Class of 2025, standing here before you in this magnificent arena.

Ilya: What if some schools stand to benefit in the new order? The president sees it.

Trump: It is clear to see the next chapter of the American story will not be written by the Harvard Crimson. It will be written by you, the Crimson Tide.

[audience cheers]

Ilya: When we come back, lessons from some academics who resisted and some who are looking for opportunity. This is the third and final episode of The Harvard Plan from the Boston Globe and On the Media.

[MUSIC]

Ilya: This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Marritz, host of The Harvard Plan, OTM's collaboration with the Boston Globe. Many things were different before May Mailman and Stephen Miller, and President Trump decided to throw the full force of the executive branch at universities with the aim of changing the culture. Scientific research funding was considered sacrosanct. The idea of singling out a school for attack was unthinkable. Then, when it happened to Columbia last spring, Paul Boxer was appalled. He's a psychology professor at Rutgers Newark.

Paul Boxer: I studied the development of aggressive and violent behavior from childhood through early adulthood.

Ilya: Boxer became convinced that new tactics demanded a new kind of response. A colleague of his, a chemistry professor named David Salas-de la Cruz, had an idea inspired by 20th-century diplomacy.

David Salas-de la Cruz: A NATO-style alliance for higher education. The idea that an attack on one university should be considered an attack on all universities.

Ilya: The way Boxer and his colleague, Salas-de la Cruz, saw it, Rutgers could be pretty vulnerable to attack. They're a big research school. They got scrutiny for DEI programs and for the handling of campus protests, but Rutgers would not be so vulnerable if it joined forces with the schools it was already connected to through the Big Ten Athletic Conference, including the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, UCLA, and Penn State, big state schools with huge fandoms attached.

Paul Boxer: As a large conference that has tremendous reach in terms not only of our academics, but very obviously things like college football and basketball, we thought that was really a logical coalition to think about from the standpoint of a national defense against any kinds of incursions on universities.

Ilya: Boxer and Salas-de la Cruz set about trying to create a NATO for the Big Ten. They called it the Big Ten compact. If you're not keeping count, this is our third compact after Vannevar Bush's compact and the Trump compact. Not long after, the Rutgers Senate voted in favor of the Big Ten compact. Someone shared the text online. The idea had legs.

I logged on and found the post that had shared our senate resolution, that was getting hundreds and hundreds of likes and retweets. I don't know if they call it that in Bluesky. [chuckles]

Ilya: But when it reached the desk of Rutgers president, who was then a lame duck near the end of his term, he declined to sign on. This was only the first setback. After a spate of articles put a spotlight on the Big Ten compact. They heard from the Big Ten Academic Alliance, which is the scholarly counterpart of the sports league.

Paul Boxer: Well, we soon found out that we were crossing over potentially into trademark violation land because we were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to represent our compact as the Big Ten Academic Alliance compact because the Big Ten doesn't endorse it. Furthermore, if the Big Ten were to endorse it, it would only come if every single provost or other analogous leader of all of the 18 schools agreed to endorse it.

Ilya: Suddenly, Boxer and his allies realized that creating NATO for universities would be a much bigger lift. At state schools, university presidents and trustees have to think about state legislators, the governor, next year's budget.

Paul Boxer: Oh, universities in other states might have political challenges within their own states to prevent the whole university from joining this.

Ilya: A lot of red state schools had become punching bags for state legislatures, who saw them as out of step with their politics. In Ohio, a new law invites students to evaluate and report professors for perceived bias. It bans faculty from striking. In Indiana, professors sued over a similar law, claiming it was chilling to speech. They lost. In Texas, faculty senates at state schools have been eliminated, depriving professors of a voice on policy.

Paul Boxer: What we had to just sort of finally understand was, A, there probably wouldn't be a Big Ten compact that would involve everyone, and B, nationwide efforts that cross political lines like that are probably going to be fraught and maybe even doomed from the start.

Ilya: Boxer and Salas-de la Cruz pulled back, and they redirected their focus to forming alliances in New Jersey. A funny thing happened on the way to the failure of the Big Ten compact. In September-

Paul Boxer: -this ad appears on YouTube called We Are Here, Driving Health Opportunity and Stronger Communities.

Voiceover: Every day we are here.

Paul Boxer: It's an ad by the Big Ten, and it's on the official YouTube account of the Big Ten Conference. I opened it and I watched it, and it's 30 seconds of pretty much every single thing that we've been talking about.

Voiceover: In the medicine that keeps your family healthy, in the food on your table--

Paul Boxer: My younger daughter plays volleyball. We're watching a women's volleyball game on the Big Ten Network, and the ad popped up there.

Voiceover: In the solutions, shaping a better future across the country in every corner of life.

Paul Boxer: What I see is pretty standard issue PR, down to the soaring music and idealized images of college life.

Voiceover: Every day we are here.

Ilya: Paul Boxer, he loves it-

Paul Boxer: I've seen the ad probably times by now. I could probably watch it for you right now and get all misty-eyed again because it's just so moving in terms of its connection to what we've been talking about and struggling for.

Ilya: -and he noticed something else.

Paul Boxer: The other interesting piece of it is that prior to the ad's appearance, the Big Ten had a disclaimer on their Big Ten Academic Alliance website, essentially disavowing their connection to our compact. I forget the exact verbiage of it, but it was basically saying, "The Big Ten Academic compact is not us."

Ilya: That language had disappeared. The Big Ten compact never really came into existence, but also the Big Ten are not trying to stamp it out, so in a way, the idea lives. In sports, this might be dismissed as a moral victory. You lost the game, but you played hard. Good for you. For his own academic reasons, Boxer, the psychologist, thinks this kind of PR effort is actually very important right now. Ideas gel early in young brains.

Paul Boxer: If all you're hearing when you turn on your news is these public universities are terrible, they're indoctrinating your kids, they're endorsing violence, they're doing this, they're doing that, if you don't immediately have evidence to the contrary, and that is a message that you keep hearing over and over again, that's going to become part of your belief system.

Ilya: If universities aren't going to formally band together to resist, Boxer figures they should at least try to tell their own story, a positive story, and give people a better way to see them.

Hilary Burns: Why is it that we haven't seen a greater resistance movement from university leaders this year?

Ilya: A few weeks ago, Hilary and I had the chance to interview Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton. He is also the outgoing chair of the Association of American Universities.

Christopher Eisgruber: Well, look, I have found it very important to speak up about these issues and began doing so in April of last year. I do wish I had more company in doing that. I have great admiration for Alan Garber, for example, at Harvard, who has, I think, rightly taken important stands around academic freedom.

Ilya: More than pretty much any other leader, Eisgruber has stuck out his neck. In a magazine piece, he wrote that the Trump administration's bureaucratic assault on Columbia amounted to "the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Every American should be concerned."

Christopher Eisgruber: I worried a lot about how my own community would react when I spoke out last April because I thought there are risks here that I'm taking for myself. There are also risks that I'm taking for my community.

Ilya: He says he was buoyed by an outpouring of support and has continued to speak out since then, but when I pressed him on the idea of trying to achieve solidarity among schools, almost like the NATO-style alliance that Paul Boxer wanted to create, he dismissed it as some kind of social science rational choice fantasy. "Don't look for grand statements," he told me. "Look at the litigation." This year, the Association of American Universities has filed five lawsuits against the Trump administration, one over student visas, four over cuts to research funding.

Christopher Eisgruber: After never having filed a lawsuit in its history previously, and to get that level of agreement among universities that they're going to take a step as serious as suing the government, I think has been underestimated by folks.

Ilya: Eisgruber told us the Trump administration's compact is concerning to lots of university presidents. Many of the provisions might appear common sense or reasonable, like a tuition cap, but in reality, he says, they could be a backdoor to more government intrusions, ditto with what's sometimes called viewpoint diversity. Conservative views are in the minority on many campuses, which is a key point in the compact.

Christopher Eisgruber: That doesn't mean the government should be in there monitoring whom we hire, how we treat particular departments, or what the distribution of viewpoints are. In fact, I think that's an intrusion on free speech.

Ilya: The AAU, the group Eisgruber chaired, is a consortium of schools that get big government research dollars. Harvard and Princeton are there, but so are schools outside the Northeast, like Vanderbilt in Nashville, and state schools like Mizzou, the University of Missouri.

Hilary Burns: It's a big sports school. They have massive football games, big tailgate culture.

Ilya: All this year, my Globe colleague, higher education reporter Hilary Burns, has been working on a big multi-part series which the Globe is running next month. Everyone should check it out. Her reporting has taken her all over the country, including to Columbia, Missouri.

Hilary Burns: It's kind of a fun school, a lot of school spirit, a lot of people wearing their Mizzou gear around campus.

Ilya: On the south side of campus, between a golf course and the Mizzou arena, there's a 10 megawatt nuclear reactor, which was the real reason for Hilary's visit.

Uriah Orland: Christopher told you the ground rules of photos and everything.

Hilary Burns: Yep.

Uriah Orland: Okay.

Ilya: It was like entering the space age.

Hilary Burns: It really felt like I was in a science fiction movie from maybe the 1960s-

Ilya: -or the age of Vannevar Bush. The reactor was conceived in the 1950s and built in the '60s.

Hilary Burns: They told me before we went in, like, "Don't expect a flashy, really tech-savvy environment. This is old school levers, gadgets, very manual.

Ilya: The University of Missouri Research Reactor, everyone calls it MURR, is the largest university-operated reactor in the nation.

Uriah Orland: Just real quick, sometimes people think of a nuclear reactor, and they think power-

Hilary Burns: Yes.

Uriah Orland: -right? We don't do any power at all.

Hilary Burns: Okay.

Uriah Orland: Up the road, about [crosstalk]

Hilary's guide, Uriah Orland, told us that at MURR, it's the byproduct of the reaction that they're after. Radioisotopes with names like iodine-131 or lutetium, this nuclear waste, it turns out, makes a very effective treatment for a variety of cancers, which means this facility is a pharma factory, a very busy one.

Uriah Orland: Literally, what we produce in the reactor today is in patients next week. In fact, it's Thursday today, so last night or early this morning, we pulled samples from the reactor. Those will leave the facility tomorrow as an active pharmaceutical ingredient of lutetium-177 that will go to the drug company. They'll package it, send it to a hospital, and it'll be administered to a patient early next week.

Hilary Burns: Oh, my gosh. The hospitals are all in Missouri?

Uriah Orland: No, these are hospitals around the world.

Hilary Burns: Around the world.

Uriah Orland: Yes.

Hilary Burns: I went out there because they are taking on this massive project to build a second and new nuclear reactor on their campus.

Ilya: The current one is at capacity and showing its age.

Hilary Burns: I just thought it was so interesting, the timing. They are launching this, hosting celebratory kickoffs for this big project at a time where schools in the Northeast are entering a period of austerity and cutting and laying off people and accepting fewer PhD students, and bracing for real financial turmoil.

Ilya: The price tag to build a new reactor looks to be a little over a billion dollars. it may seem crazy in this moment, but Mizzou is looking to the government to help it raise the money to build it. Here's one reason it may actually work.

Uriah Orland: What I'm concerned about is two-thirds of research dollars are funneled to four or five states, it looks like [crosstalk]

Ilya: At the confirmation hearing for Trump's appointee to lead the National Institutes of Health, Republican Senator Roger Marshall asked--

Roger Marshall: Just would like your commitment for us, flyover states, to spread the love a little bit.

Ilya: Once confirmed as NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya sounded convinced.

Jay Bhattacharya: From the point of view of science policy, it's absolutely vital that the NIH investments are geographically dispersed.

Ilya: For Mizzou, the pitch is focused on national competitiveness.

Uriah Orland: The need to have a secure domestic supply so that we're not reliant on international politics. A cancer patient needs the drug whether we're friends with the country or not.

Ilya: Mizzou is not messing around. Last spring, at exactly the time that other university presidents were feeling Trump's pressure campaign, Mizzou's President Mun Choi finagled an invitation to President Trump's estate in Florida. Hilary asked him about it.

Hilary Burns: How did you get the invitation to Mar-a-Lago? How did that go?

Mun Choi: How did I get the invitation? I was invited by a close friend who was an alum of the university, and he's a very talented and well-respected tax attorney.

Ilya: When he got there, Choi found the place was full of tax lawyers.

Hilary Burns: He was the only college president in attendance, so that caught my eye.

Ilya: Choi was wowed by Mar-a-Lago's history, which goes back to the Cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. He was there with a specific ask for the Trump administration.

Mun Choi: The brilliant idea of having tax credits for radioisotope production, given its critical importance to patients in the United States. I went there to discuss that opportunity, as well as continued advocacy for funded research from federal agencies.

Ilya: Has it paid off the trip to Mar-a-Lago?

Hilary Burns: I would say yes. He's been able to successfully bring a few canceled research grants back online by having conversations with lawmakers.

Ilya: To be clear, the tax break idea has not been adopted, but Mizzou President Mun Choi feels he's making headway.

Hilary Burns: He's still very optimistic that they will get this research funding. He told me that he believes he is on the right track and doing the right thing for the university.

Ilya: Last spring, when the Trump administration started cutting research grants and Princeton's Christopher Eisgruber was speaking out, there were some solidarity statements circulating. President Choi was not interested.

Mun Choi: We made a conscious decision not to sign them.

Ilya: He said he really needs to focus on what is best for his institution, and right now, what is best for his institution is lobbying for the importance of this federal funding to build this nuclear reactor, to fund this cutting-edge, rare cancer research.

Mun Choi: My words and my action can have dramatic impact to this institution. I have to be very careful in what I say and what I do.

Ilya: All research-focused schools have faced funding cuts, including Mizzou, but those cuts are not spread equally, Hilary found. Schools in the Southeastern Conference, which includes the University of Missouri, have lost a significantly lower percentage of funding than the Ivies. SEC schools tend to be whiter and more American, with far fewer international students.

When the Trump administration rolled out its compact in October, it shared the proposed agreement only with a small number of schools perceived to be potentially in line with Trump's thinking. Mizzou was not one of them, but another SEC school, Vanderbilt, was. It's led by a man named Daniel Diermeier, who went on Morning Joe to discuss.

Daniel Diermeier: It was very clear to us both in the initial communication and throughout that, that this was something that the administration was interested in pursuing for sure, and they were interested in getting feedback and commentary.

Ilya: Many higher ed watchers saw the Trump compact as menacing or bullying. Diermeier talked about it more benignly as the start of a conversation. You didn't read it as some kind of a pressure campaign from the administration, sign on, and you'll get preferential treatment?

Daniel Diermeier: We never got any pressure on that. We got an initial conversation, and then there were initial letter, and then there was a couple of conversations that followed afterwards, but it was always in the sense of like, "This is our proposal. We'd like to move forward in that direction."

Hilary Burns: I talk with Diermeier fairly often, and when I asked him this summer about the narrative forming that university presidents are either reformers or resisters in this current moment, he was quick to tell me that college presidents don't despise each other, but there are different points of view.

Ilya: Diermeier has positioned himself as a leader on speech issues. That makes him an attractive figure to the Trump administration, even if other college leaders would prefer he stood with them.

Hilary Burns: Yes, so Diermeier says that other college campuses need to get their ducks in a row. They need to make these reforms act with more urgency to fix their campus cultures. That view, that criticism of other universities has made him quite unpopular in some higher education circles right now.

Ilya: Still, most schools that received the Trump compact found it unacceptable. About a dozen have rejected it. Vanderbilt and Arizona State say they're offering feedback. So far, a two-year military college has said it will sign, and also New College, a state school in Sarasota, Florida. New College was not sent the compact, but after President Trump promoted it on social media, a spokesman said, "When the president asks, we'll be first in line."

Hilary Burns: New College is really a case study for how a state used the power of the government to dictate a college campus's operations and trajectory.

Ilya: For decades, tiny New College had a reputation as a haven for artsy types. Then, Governor Ron DeSantis attacked it as a woke institution and installed a majority of his own people on the board. A bunch of professors left. The student body started to change, fewer weird kids, more athletes.

Hilary Burns: Christopher Rufo, probably the most famous board member, the conservative activist, said that this strategy was meant to balance the hormones on campus.

Christopher Rufo: New College has a culture problem. When they did a study, these consultants hired by the college, they said that the three phrases that most describe the culture here, "Politically correct, druggies, weirdos." The college is saying this. [crosstalk]

Ilya: It's still early days, but the experiment is not going great so far. The cost per student has risen sharply at New College, and graduation rates, which were low, have not improved. The school dropped 60 spots in its US News ranking. A New College spokesman told us in a statement, "The negative numbers you describe are inherited by previous failing administrations," and said, "The school shouldn't be judged until the class of 2028." He noted that the endowment has grown. "We are headed in the right direction."

Christopher Rufo: Music plays 24/7 there. People just chill out at sunset. There's a fire pit there every night at sunset.

Hilary Burns: Wow. [crosstalk]

Ilya: On a tour, Hilary got a look at efforts to spiff up the campus.

Christopher Rufo: We had our Charlie Kirk Memorial. That's where they've had that service with about 100 students.

Ilya: After Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, was assassinated while visiting a college in Utah, New College announced it will build a statue of him. Kirk built a movement attacking liberalism on college campuses and spreading a blacklist of professors under the banner of free speech and open debate. In a lot of ways, New College wants to be the kind of place Charlie Kirk would have approved of.

[MUSIC]

Ilya: When we return, I'm going to put the questions raised by this series to the architect of Trump's pressure campaign. Stay with us.

[MUSIC]

Ilya: This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Marritz, host of The Harvard Plan, a miniseries from OTM and the Boston Globe about Trump's pressure campaign on higher education. This is the last segment of our last episode. I was really happy when, just as we were putting this episode together, an email landed in my inbox from a Trump official who said, "Yes, I'm open to speaking with you." On the day, I talked with May Mailman. She was expected to give birth to her third child at any moment. She reassured me there was enough time for an interview.

May Mailman: Due dates are fake. I switched doctors, and my doctor switched my due date.

Ilya: She spoke to me from her home studio in the Houston exurbs with a professional-looking mic setup. For most of the past year, until she stepped down to have her baby, she was a senior policy strategist in the White House.

May Mailman: The simpler way to describe that was Stephen Miller's deputy. Stephen Miller is the deputy chief of staff for policy. I was the deputy to the deputy.

Ilya: For the many, many people on campuses who are scared shitless by the policies that you did a lot to create and guide, I'm going to speak pretty directly, why should they not be scared shitless? Why do you think they might even one day be happy with the results, or do you think they could ever be happy with the result?

May Mailman: Let's just say that the thing that will happen is Columbia, worst case scenario, what happens is Columbia.

Ilya: I asked her versions of this question a few times, expecting her to offer an olive branch. There was no olive branch. She told me Columbia was already in a lot of trouble over how they handled the Gaza protests in the spring of 2024 and unrest on campus. By settling with the Trump administration, the school solved a lot of its problems. People should be happy.

May Mailman: Okay, some less money, all right, some transparency in admissions, a monitor who's like a guy in New York City who's super middle of the road, no one would ever challenge this person's political bias.

Ilya: Among other things, the monitor will examine whether Columbia is promoting "unlawful DEI goals".

May Mailman: Some things that Columbia had already announced on what they're going to do for antisemitism, including if you are wearing a mask to conceal your identity during a protest, and you're asked for your ID that you are now required to give it. Some sort of public safety presence on campus, some sort of transparency in federal funds. This is the ultimate scary thing, is the Columbia deal. That's it.

Ilya: Again and again, Mailman gave no ground. She knows the critics see creeping authoritarianism from the Trump White House, telling colleges and universities what to do. She told me that is exactly backwards.

May Mailman: You know, sort of the Trump is a fascist or an authoritarian thing never strikes me as super thoughtful because when I think of what have I seen recently that feels authoritarian? The thing that I see is Joe Biden's Mar-a-Lago raid.

Ilya: The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago with a warrant approved by a judge. Joe Biden played no role.

May Mailman: Something like that is the thing that feels the most authoritarian.

Ilya: Mailman likewise dismissed the idea that setting policy to align so closely with one president's priorities will cause problems down the line if the shoe is ever on the other foot. I'm just curious if you're worried about any negative repercussions.

May Mailman: Yes, so I think the general conserve-- Let's play devil's advocate. What if there is a President AOC? I think the reason that that doesn't necessarily concern me is a few things. One, a President AOC would do it anyway. I think that's a lesson that conservatives learn this like, well, if you do, then they do thing is just it's not a relevant talking point anymore because they will, I think, it's just like the general understanding.

Ilya: It felt like Mailman is thinking in terms of endless partisan conflict. She also describes the Trump compact as something that really should not be seen as partisan. She told me it's reminding schools of their obligations.

May Mailman: So that universities don't feel like they are running into the unexpected. "I didn't know I was supposed to comply with civil rights laws and protect students from antisemitic discrimination." Well, now, you know.

Ilya: Obviously, like cancer research has little or nothing to do with antisemitism, which was the stated reason for a lot of stuff. If you want to make a connection, please do, but tell me, what's the thinking behind that strategy?

May Mailman: I actually do think that there is a connection because I think, for example, if you don't have the best students or you don't have the best professors because you don't comply with civil rights laws in your hiring or in your admissions, then the likelihood that money to your program is going to have a high merit result is lower than if you're in an institution that rigorously pursues merit and truth at all times.

Ilya: In September, a judge sided with Harvard in its complaint against the government, saying the antisemitism argument reeks of pretext and adding that the mass cancellation of grants endangered the decades-long joint interest in doing research. We've talked in previous episodes about this case. When I pointed out that the court sided with Harvard specifically on the First Amendment portion of its complaint, Mailman said the judge's ruling was wrong on the law, that it should be in federal claims court, and wrong in the court of public opinion.

May Mailman: When you put it to the American people and you're like, "Harvard thinks that they have a First Amendment right to federal money, to taxpayer money. It's like, that's kind of crazy, but that actually is, ultimately, when you boil it down, what the claim is to a layperson. I think that sounds crazy to people. It is actually a contract claim, right? They're saying that this money is owed. I think the First Amendment vibes of the suit, that they think that they're being attacked because they're-- You're not actually the most liberal university. You're not the most-- That's not actually true.

Ilya: I came away from our conversation feeling disoriented. Mailman was friendly and engaged and generous with her time, but she seemed to be operating on a timeline where everything moves lightning fast. No patience for process, no time to think about the effect all this is having on America's edge in science. I asked her about the provision in the Trump compact that would require schools to monitor ideological diversity of faculty, students and staff. This is an element of the Trump compact that really concerned Princeton's president, Christopher Eisgruber. She basically said, "This is not a big deal. A few schools have already recognized the problem and are working on it."

May Mailman: This is not a new topic. They have ideas of things that maybe wouldn't be mandates of who to hire or mandates of what to teach, but they have seen the policies that have resulted in the degradation of intellectual diversity, and they have ideas. Whether it's rules, schools like citation justice, where you have to cite a certain percentage of minority authors in order for your paper to be present, those are the sorts of things that hamper intellectual diversity because they say that actually what matters is your aesthetic and not your idea. What are the rules that are currently in academia or on campus?

Ilya: Other schools that do that?

May Mailman: This is-- I am not a professor. You would have to actually ask a professor. This is something that I've heard from schools.

Ilya: Okay. I found a handful of articles about citation justice. It is not clear that it's widely practiced anywhere.

[MUSIC]

Ilya: If you listened to the first season of the Harvard Plan, you know that I got started looking at how universities became so politically hot after Claudine Gay, Harvard's first Black president, was ousted. It was a combustible mix of controversies that took her down: Gaza, race, speech, and questions about her own academic integrity. Gay has been pretty much silent since then. I was very curious when I learned that she gave a talk just this past September.

Claudine Gay: The boundaries of permissible inquiry gradually contract as universities internalize donor sensitivities and limit themselves to lines of inquiry that won't strain important relationships.

Ilya: It was at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Gay took questions.

Claudine Gay: When it comes to the independence of academia and how to deal with the Trump administration. When the administration came with demands just after its beginning [crosstalk]

Ilya: What is Harvard doing? The questioner wanted to know. It's fighting the government in court, yes, but also negotiating with it and also making changes on campus, like renaming the DEI office.

Claudine Gay: You know, [laughs] the posture of the institution seems to be one of compliance, and this is distressing. Without saying what she'd do differently, Gay said she's seeing the effects of the pressure campaign on campus. There is a mix of zero tolerance and policy ambiguity that leaves faculty and students really unsure about what we can say, do, and teach. That's hard.

Participant 5: Another hard question. Maybe you might wonder if in the recent past whether the academia have navigated themselves well in very thorny discussions. Think of claims that, speaking of women, might offend transgender and queer students. I was thinking, didn't that play right into the hands of [unintelligible 00:44:39]?

Claudine Gay: No, academia is not to blame. The agenda here is about destroying knowledge institutions because they are centers of independent thought and information. That's what's going on here. That is the story. Nothing justifies that, nothing explains that other than authoritarians don't like independent centers of thought and information.

Ilya: This is a pretty commonly held view at universities, but even some defenders of the academy will concede that maybe colleges brought this on themselves. They became, in the words of their detractors, too woke, too intolerant of conservative ideas. There were too many statements and trigger warnings, not enough robust exchange of ideas. May Mailman told me that's exactly why the Trump administration is promoting viewpoint diversity as a condition of the Trump compact. She said colleges should not be worried about it.

May Mailman: What type of authoritarian regime would be like, "I want more debate. I want views explored, debated, and challenged?" Fundamentally, what is being sought here is freedom and the lack of an orthodoxy rather than an implementation of one.

Ilya: Freedom, lack of orthodoxy, those are nice words. It is not quite how things went for Claudine Gay during her short stint as president of Harvard. It's interesting to listen to her today because the woman who sounded stiff and clinical when she was called before Congress in 2023 now sounds liberated.

Claudine Gay: Let me just say one-- I mean, one more thing I'll have to say here is [crosstalk]

Ilya: It's like after watching Harvard come under attack by the Trump administration this year, she can now make sense of the firestorm that forced her to resign almost two years ago.

Claudine Gay: I would encourage us all to take note of the true line of misdirection that has been a central feature of this political moment, getting us to argue about supposed excesses of academic jargon and excesses of the progressive left. It's all about getting us to focus on that and not pay attention [chuckles] to the power grab that is underway. None of that matters.

[applause]

Claudine Gay: The truth here is that our government, the American government, is attacking higher ed and the university.

[MUSIC]

Ilya: I want to share one update. Since our last episode, we reported that no actions had been taken against National Institutes of Health staffers who signed a declaration spelling out their disagreements with how the science grants process has changed under President Trump and Director Jay Bhattacharya, who says he supports free speech and dissent. This week one of the signers of that declaration, Jenna Norton, was placed on non-disciplinary administrative leave from the NIH with full pay and benefits. She released this TikTok.

Jenna Norton: I was not given a reason for being put on leave, but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity.

Ilya: We reached out to the NIH, an anonymous official there told us over email, "Instead of focusing on her actual job to promote gold standard science, radical leftist Jenna Norton chooses to constantly criticize this administration, even when she is supposed to be working." Vannevar Bush imagined an equal partnership between the government and independent research universities. To produce great science, it had to be equal. This year the research universities UPenn, Columbia, Brown, and just this month, Cornell have agreed to settlements with the government under great duress to preserve the science. They gave up some of that equality.

Vannevar Bush: Right after the war, I said that I didn't believe that Russia would produce much in the way of science or technology-

Ilya: For Vannevar Bush, the connection between freedom of thought and quality of science was clear.

Vannevar Bush: -and the reason was that their laboratories were all commissar-ridden. They were politically controlled and that [crosstalk]

Ilya: Then there was a thaw; Soviet scientists were allowed to direct their own inquiries.

Vannevar Bush: They gave them their freedom. They gave them their entire opportunity to make their own programs. The result was a great burst of scientific achievement and technological engineering achievement. It's the exuberance of newfound freedom perhaps.

Ilya: Right now, that kind of exuberance is in short supply in America's research labs, but humans are a naturally curious and inconvenient species. Nothing is preordained.

[MUSIC]

Ilya: The Harvard Plan Season 2 is reported and written by me, Ilya Marritz. The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen. It's edited by Kristin Nelson, head of audio for the Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On the Media's executive producer. Mixing and original music by Jared Paul. Tom Colligan is the fact checker. Thanks to the Boston Globe's editor Nancy Barnes and to Ryan Huddle for episode art. Thanks to Jazmin Aguilera, Valentina Powers, Alison MacAdam, Julia Barton, the Reinhorn family, Andrea Patino and Will Moose, Kay Lazar, Tal Kopan, Eric Boodman, and Mike Damiano.

Thank you so much for listening to The Harvard Plan. Brooke and Micah will be back next week. This is On the Media.

 

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