“To what extent do we go to tolerance with these people and this garbage under the excuse of academic freedom and freedom of expression? … Didn’t the time take these nerves in the group of our faculty members and set some rules of behavior for students similar to what we expect in our families?”
No, this is not a threat from President Donald Trump in 2025.
It is an excerpt from August 1967 speech from Ronald ReaganWhich was elected California Governor six months ago, to Glenn Dominic, Advisor to the California State University System.
Trump’s ongoing attacks on higher education in the right -wing play that Reagan has been created nearly six decades ago. in 2024 campaign videoTrump announced that we will “take this anti -American madness from our institutions once and for all. We will get real education in America.” He said that the goal is to restore “our educational institutions one day from the radical left.”
In recent weeks, Trump threatened to block 9 billion dollars In federal funds from Harvard University and another $ 575 million from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Rigan and Trump knew that they were clicking on popular discontent with elite universities. For Reagan, the mass protests and arrests resulting from the Freedom of Expression Movement at the University of California, Berkeley were. For Trump, the source of the general anger came from Demonstrations and camps supporting the Palestinian It was held in dozens of universities in early 2024.
An American audience is not satisfied
Trump, like Reagan, sees political profits in his attacks. In 2012, 26 % of Americans said in A. Survey by the Pew Research Center The colleges had a negative impact on the way things are going in the country. Last year, Pio revealed this Negative opinions rose to 45 %.
In 1966, Reagan won an upheaval elections against a government ruler, who is Berun by pledging “to clean chaos in Berkeley.” Once he reached his post, he acted with his verbal threats to shoot Clark Care, president of the California University of Campus. Care was widely admired in academic circles, but for Reagan, he was “soft” and was “demonstrators” on the campus. The following year, when the Black Students Union leads a strike at the campus level, San Francisco State College closed, Reagan called for the police intervention and said that the campus should remain open “at a spear point if necessary.”
“Reagan has created a plan for a long -term success of the Republican Party as the conservative” Central America “voice and” silent majority “, written by a historian.
In February 1970, five days of anti -war protests erupted when the local police arrested a student carrying a bottle of wine. This was followed by large -scale riots, as buildings and police cars were fire. Police faced rioters with guns and shot a university student (from paradoxes, not one of the demonstrators). Reagan later defended the police, saying that the anti -war campus protests should be stopped. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s move to it“No more recovery,” he said.
Steve Brent, historian at the University of California, RifersideNoting that by taking strict measures frequently on university protests, “Reagan has created a plan for long -term success of the Republican Party as a conservative” Central America “voice and” silent majority. “
While Reagan was the first Republican candidate to score a major political victory through the higher education attack, the party’s hostility to the liberal atmosphere in many universities campus can be returned to the William F. Buckly, “God and Man in Yale: Academic Freedom Experience.”
The base of the layer in Yale
Buckley, a religious Catholic from the wealthy Connecticut family, graduated from Yale in 1950. Buckley’s book became the best -selling books. He would continue to publish the national review and host the PBS interview program, “Fire Line”.
In an introduction to the book, John Chamberlain, a governorate for life editorial magazine, was accused of Buckley that Yale had prepared “a group of professional resurrected. No democracy.”
Chamberlain said he supported Buckley’s criticism that Yale’s faculty was “skeptical of any religion, intervention and Keynesian in relation to the economy and collective as applied to the relationship of the individual and the government.”
While many Republicans conservatives agreed to this condemnation, they only found a little traction with the public in the fifties. Universities were full of old warriors on the draft law of the digestive system. President Eisenhower, who briefly, President of Colombia University before the elections, believes that the American colleges were important to the emerging middle class and supported her generous financing for them.
During his candidacy for the presidency in 1980, Reagan pledged to eliminate the Ministry of Education, decades before Trump. Reagan was unable to obtain a democracy conference to accept this stadium. During his two periods, the federal budget reduction for education, primary and higher, by 25 %. He ended a number of federal scholarships for university students and paid for special loans.
Since then, every Republican presidential candidate has pledged to reform higher education, along with many “Marxist” or “radical left” faculty.
Until now, the Trump administration has not published the law enforcement to rid the students’ protests, but it was detained Nearly ten students and faculty members on the university campusIndividuals who have student visas or work, who are alleged to have participated in the pro -Palestinian demonstrations.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs canceled at least 300 students visas, according to Foreign Minister Marco Rubio. “More than 300 may be at this stage. We do it every day,” he said in a delayer. A press conference in Guana. “Every time I find one of these crazy people, take out their visas.”
Universities in defense
Trump’s attacks on the “radical left” universities have affected its leadership. Since the pro -Palestinian spring protests, six of the university presidents, including two in Colombia, have resigned.
Universities are not without resources, however, many began to fight. University leaders started meeting directly with members of Congress, as well as employing pressure groups. About 50 institutions, including Harvard, Colombia, Weel and Stanford, have rented pressure companies since the elections.
A poll in February of about 100 university presidents and universities by I found Yale School for Administration 100 % of the respondents agreed that their schools need to “do a much better job in transferring the value proposal.”
Perhaps they will protest the advice of the founding father, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that “investment in knowledge pays a better interest.”
