The extent to which the Trump administration has gone to strong-arm the world’s wealthiest university into abiding by its wishes has sent
shockwaves through higher education.

But the actions taken thus far against Harvard University — and other academic institutions across the country — were essentially laid out two years ago in Project 2025, a 900-plus page master plan of sorts that reenvisions a federal government with expanded presidential power.

Though President Donald Trump tried to distant himself from the
controversial conservative initiative while on the campaign trail, many
of his moves related to higher education in recent months have come
straight from it.

“Project 2025 is being carried out in almost every aspect of the Trump attacks on higher education,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and a former president
at Mount Holyoke College.

Trump and Harvard are currently in the midst of a historic showdown.
Last week, Harvard sued the Trump administration after it threatened to
pull $9 billion in federal funding unless the university agreed to a
series of demands ordered in the name of addressing antisemitism.
Sending a wave of resistance through higher education, Harvard said it
would not comply with the demands.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and
which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,“ Harvard President
Alan Garber wrote in a letter to the school community.

While the Trump administration is positioning its actions against
colleges and universities as a quest to clamp down on antisemitism,
“this was not something that came as a result of the attacks on Israel
by Hamas, this was something that they said they were going to engage in
years before,” Pasquerella said, citing Project 2025.

Some higher education leaders took the document’s contents seriously
when it was first published, she said, though they didn’t necessarily anticipate what has actually come to fruition. Others viewed it as a
worst-case scenario, and thus, have been shocked.

“This couldn’t even have been imagined, that this kind of attack on
higher education would be leveled,” Pasquerella said.

Bruce Kimball, emeritus academy professor at Ohio State University and co-author of Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education, said
Trump is far from being the architect of what’s transpiring between the federal government and the higher education establishment.

He cited growing disdain and resentment, specifically toward the
country’s wealthiest and most elite universities, that took root in the
1980s and has mounted since. As endowments increased, so did the cost of
a college education and student debt.

The authors of Project 2025 capitalized on the snowballing narrative
pushed by members of the Republican Party that higher education
institutions have become liberal bastions that espouse anti-American
teachings.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who’s led the national movement opposing critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI),
says colleges and universities should “reform, or lose funding.”

“The Trump administration has a once-in-a-generation chance to reform
higher education,” he co-wrote in a February blog post titled “How Trump Can Make Universities Great Again.”

He went on to write that higher education institutions have devolved
into “left-wing propaganda factories” and abandoned the “pursuit of knowledge.”

“These schools posture as though their position is untouchable, but
their business model is nearly entirely reliant on federal largesse,”
Rufo wrote. “Demanding that universities behave in a manner worthy of
their unique financial and cultural position is long overdue.”

Perhaps equally as important as Project 2025, but not receiving nearly
the same attention, is Project Esther, another publication by the
Heritage Foundation that came out last October before the election.

Project Esther describes the pro-Palestinian movement as a “Hamas
support network” that’s disrupting the American education system. It advertises its contents as a national strategy to combat antisemitism.

“It lays out a blueprint for exactly what’s happening around the weaponization of antisemitism,” Lundquist said.

The Department of Education released in March a list of 60 universities, announcing investigations into whether the schools have failed to meet
their obligations to Jewish students under Title VI of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964.

“Harvard is the test case,” Roberts Forde said. “If the federal government can bring Harvard to its knees, then there goes higher
education. We’re watching really closely what Harvard is doing and we’re hoping they stay the course and continue filing lawsuits.”

https://www.masslive.com/news/2025/04/how-trump-vs-harvard-is-a-page-out-of-the-project-2025-playbook.html

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