In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Steven Brint, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Riverside, about the early days of the second Trump administration and its impact on higher education. Brint discusses the administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape federal governance, including its attacks on DEI programs, proposals to tax university endowments, and moves to condition federal funding on ideological compliance. The conversation explores how these policies could undermine academic freedom, international student enrollment, and the global reputation of U.S. universities. Brint also examines the broader crisis of public confidence in higher education, tracing concerns over cost, curriculum relevance, and perceptions of political bias. The episode concludes with a discussion of the risks facing the American university system in an era of rising authoritarianism and political polarization.

Transcript

John Torpey 

After a second week of the second Trump administration, we have seen a tremendous amount of shock and awe as far as the administration’s efforts to overwhelm the administrative or so called Deep State. If project 2025 meant anything, it envisaged replacing career civil servants with loyalists of the administration. It also meant dismantling DEI programs that is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs paid for or conducted within the federal government. Given the prominent place of DEI programs in institutions of higher education, this raises questions about the consequences in the administration’s actions for higher education and for education more broadly in the United States, and what about the situation of international students in American universities? Another big question. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’re fortunate to have with us today Steven Brint, who is distinguished professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California at Riverside. He’s also a faculty associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Stanford University Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He’s the author of five, head editor of three books, and has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. He’s also written for the American Prospect Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Washington Post, among others. His most recent book, Two Cheers for Higher Education, one honorable mentioned by the American Sociological Association’s Pierre Bourdieu Award, and was named by Forbes as one of the top 10 books on higher education for 2019. He’s an elected fellow of the American Association for The advancement of Science and the Sociological Research Association. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Brint received his BA with highest honors from UC Berkeley and his PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. Thanks for being with us today, Steve Brint.

Steven Brint 

Thank you for having me, John.

John Torpey 

Great to have you. Thanks very much. So as I said at the beginning, we’ve now had a couple of weeks of the second Trump administration. It seemed to me, at first, a bit less chaotic and more focused, for better or worse, on its goals than it had been in 2016. But then they announced a freeze on much federal spending, and that didn’t go so well, and was indeed halted by a judge. So maybe just to start, what’s your take on? You know what some people are calling shock and awe, and Steve Bannon calls flooding the zone?

Steven Brint 

Yeah, they are flooding the zone by issuing dozens of executive orders and making bizarre headlines, like converting Gaza to the Riviera, Riviera of the Middle East. And as you said, Steve Bannon is the person who popularized this phrase, flooding the zone. And by that he met putting out a flood of misinformation and disinformation so that the average consumer of the media was confused and maybe became apathetic because it couldn’t, they couldn’t work their way through the entire flood, and it also made, of course, the media seem disorganized and makes it difficult for the opposition to respond to the flood, also by picking up the few things that they want to organize around, because there’s just so much. The flood now, of course, goes beyond misinformation and disinformation, and includes these executive orders, firings, buyouts, proposed land grabs. And so it’s it really makes it difficult for the opposition and makes it difficult for people to sort of work their way through it. I think it’s been a successful tactic for the Trump administration, but it comes at a potential very high cost for the country. And, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that is not, maybe even meant to be taken seriously, but then also that in there is something you mentioned, John, the decimation of the federal workforce, which is extremely consequential. And, um. Um, and yet it’s hard to pick out what to focus on in the flood. So I think one of the tasks for those who oppose the Trump administration is to focus on the really important things and let the some of it just go un discussed or un opposed, because it puts probably not meant to be serious.

John Torpey 

Right. It’s hard to know what’s important and what’s not. I mean, does he really want to take over the Gaza Strip? Just bottles the mind. But in any case, let’s focus on, you know, the real reason you’re here, in a way, which is, you know, your expertise in higher education, and so I’m curious what you would say about their plans in regard to higher education policy. I mean, there’s talk, for example, once again, of taxing endowments and that sort of thing. And obviously we’ll get into DEI but that’s perhaps the major thing that they’re focusing on it seems. Right. Well, higher ed, I think you would agree was in trouble before this election, and it’s been in trouble for a while. And JD Vance, you know, famously quoting, it turns out Richard Nixon declared professors the enemy. You know, in general, in the American eyes, of the American public, the sector has been, you know, not regard, highly regarded in recent years. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, why you think that’s the case, and what case you know, Trump and his people may have for doing what they’re doing.

Steven Brint 

Yeah. So they have already, in just a couple of weeks, proven to be the most hostile administration towards higher education that we can remember. I don’t think there’s ever been an administration this hospital. So here are a few things that are happening. Five universities, including Columbia and UC Berkeley, are now undergoing investigations by the Department of Education for allegations of antisemitism. Plans are afoot to raise the tax on endowments for institutions with more than a billion dollars in endowments, the new head of the NIH Jay Bhattacharya, has said he’s going to condition grants on an institution’s adherence to academic freedom. That sounds okay, but it’s what it’s going to mean is a bias against speech that the administration disapproves of. This is already happening, and in other science agencies, the people in NSF have been told to scrutinize projects they use terms like underrepresented minority, socio economic, women, disability, and so we’re seeing that kind of censorship coming to the poor. Obviously they want to shutter DEI offices, and they could potentially condition funding on the closing of those offices, unless the courts intervene, and depending on what the courts say they they want to close or reduce the size of the Department of Education, which is responsible for Pell grants and student loans, those could be cut back. I don’t think they’re going away at the department closes, probably Treasury would take up the slack and distribute those those grants and loans. And there are other things that Trump talked about during the campaign, like reforming accreditation, so that there were requirements for Western civilization, or so called American tradition courses that seems to be on hold for the moment, but could come back at some point. So there’s have this blizzard of things that’s happening also in higher education, and there’s the beginnings of some organization against it, but it bodes poorly for the sector, let’s say.  Yeah. So since 2015 public opinion confidence in higher education has really plummeted. So it’s been a decade now, and I believe that confidence in higher education among Republicans is now at about 19% and it’s 30 something, like 35% for the population at large. So it’s it’s been a pretty steep decline. It was a sector that was very well regarded previously. So the big issues, I mean, there are three big issues that come up in public opinion. One is cost. Another is our universities. Is the curriculum organized in such a way that students are learning what they need to learn, and I think many Americans would say for the labor market. But the question is a little ambiguous there, because they just talk about our students learning what they need to learn. And then the third one is allegations of political bias. The professors are all left or liberal, and they’re not giving the other side of many issues, and of course, the latter is a driver among Republicans, but both Republicans and Democrats are concerned about cost, and it’s no wonder, because it is costly to go to college especially for middle and lower income families, and if you don’t have financial aid, you’re, you know, it’s tough, and some people are being priced out and or they’re going to colleges and universities that are delivering very well. So it’s, I think, those are the drivers. And of course, you’ve had this now constant drumbeat on the Republican side about about the problems of higher education, and the sort of populist feeling that this is, this is where liberals and elites who look down on the average American are being trained and educated. And that’s, I think that’s the source of the animus of, that Vance and some others have. In spite of the fact that Vance has a Yale Law Degree, there is this very common populist rhetoric about, they care about, they don’t care about the people we care about. And so it’s, you know, I don’t think it would have happened without the the constant elevation of anecdotes about student protests and professors, you know, the selected professor saying outrageous things that appear on Fox News. But there are some legit, legitimate concerns as well, and there’s areas that universities need to try to address. So I think it’s a mix of demagoguery and some real structural problems that have have been ignored. Right. Well, I think this brings us to the naughty question of DEI, and you know, the extent to which DEI has been seen as part of this larger picture that you paint of, you know, left, left politics kind of gone wild. And I mean, affirmative action was struck down by a conservative Supreme Court about a year and a half ago, two years ago, that seemed to me, you know, a sign of things to come. I mean, people could see that coming a long way away. And DEI is seen as a version of this. And you know, what’s a little bit striking to me is that they’re invoking the idea of meritocracy as, you know, the antidote, or the the opposite number, which doesn’t seem like, you know, an idea that Trump has had a great deal of direct experience with himself. And if you look at the people that he has elevated to high office in the country, that’s, you know, their qualifications are not always the distinguishing, the most distinguishing feature. So I wonder, you know, how you see this in the context of, you know these other dissatisfactions with higher education?  Yeah, so let me talk a little bit about this idea that Trump is now talking about constantly, that we need to return to merit. So I my view, and you’ve suggested this, maybe your view as well, is that the Trump Administration is giving the idea of merit an incredibly bad name. You know, to think that people like Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and Kash Patel are the best people to run these major federal agencies, in my view, is just laughable. They’re loyalists, and at least in the case of Patel, also Trumpist ideologues. And it’s, you know, it’s ironic that Trump is creating his own spoil system, which is rewarding loyalists instead of experts and people who have demonstrated competence. And it’s exactly that spoil system that Andrew Jackson put into the federal government and was followed for a long time and the big city political machines and also dominated in the 19th century, like Tammany Hall, that led to the Civil Service reforms that where you had to hire people who were experts and into these offices. So to me, it’s not only laughable, but extremely offensive and actually Orwellian that Trump’s using the term merit to describe the cronyism and loyalty requirements as introducing into the government as a substitute for expertise and professionalism. And there is the further, as you suggested, there’s the further issue of his constant contrast between merit and DEI. And you know, I, if I was a scholar of color, I would be-I am anyway-offended by that, because there are many, many, many 1000s of scholars of color who are extremely meritorious. So it’s to make that contrast. I think there’s embedded in it as a, as a racist sentiment, honestly, and I think that’s been part of his brand. So it’s, it’s discouraging. I I’ll say that I have, I’m a sometimes critic of DEI so I’ll say some things that are maybe a little different from some academics or many academics. The DEI offices, there’s a wide range of things that they do, and you you know it’s hard to generalize, and a lot of what they do is to try to help students who are maybe new to higher education to feel comfortable in the environment and supported and try to provide equality of opportunity. And there’s, from my point of view, there’s absolutely nothing wrong, that’s great with that. But there are some offices I have personal experience of this, where the prevailing ideology is that the good guys all have one skin color, and the bad guys all have another skin color, and there’s oppressors and opressed and the, you know, there’s an extreme sensitivity to potential bias. Sometimes the sensitivity to bias that’s not there. So I do think that there, there are DEI offices that are problematic, and some of the ideology that’s associated with Dei, in some cases, not at all, is problematic. And I’ve been kind of a long time supporter of moving towards class as kind of the the focus for student success, because I think this social class is less divisive in the larger political environment. It’s also focuses properly on, with on the folks who probably need the support. It’s, you know, it’s transracial, and in our racially polarized times, I think that’s good. It also disproportionately among people from lower income or backgrounds. You’re going to find more underrepresented minorities, so that they’re the folks who probably need this the support the most, and I’m I’m hoping that we’ll have that shift. I’m not expecting it, however, because there are a lot of entrenched interests on, alas, on both sides, but think that would be a healthy change.

John Torpey 

Well, you and I, and Richard Kahlenberg, and a few others have been, you know, beating this drum for a while, and even if we’re not thrilled about the way DEI works, and, you know, the oppression, oppressor, oppressed, oppressed, and that sort of thing. You know, they’re they may want to get rid of DEI, but they’re not turning to what we’re suggesting as an alternative.

Steven Brint 

Exactly.

John Torpey 

Right? I mean, it’s just wrecking ball. Get rid of it, that’s right. So anyway, doesn’t seem like that particular project is going to be advanced very much in the next four years. So maybe we could turn to the question of international students. Our producer, as you know, is a, is an international student. She’s, she was thrilled to be here, and we were thrilled to have her. But then this new administration came into power, and she’s not so sure what. What can you tell her, to comfort her and persuade her to stay with us?

Steven Brint 

Yeah. Well, let, you know, let’s let me talk first, and then I’ll try to persuade her that that’s not a dire situation. So as you said at the beginning, what we’ve seen so far is threats against students who participated in the pro Palestinian protests, and or may take part in protests in the future, and that could mean deportation. Students have a right to protest. And so that’s yet another assault on the Constitution by this administration. And I don’t I think if it goes to the courts, they won’t be able to enforce it. So you’ll recall that many university presidents told their international students to come early because they weren’t sure they would be able to get in if they after the Trump Administration took power, they were worried about possible disruptions in the visa process. And it, you know, the, the first Trump Administration did tighten betting process procedures. But I, I’ve been, I’ve been looking at this, and I think most people who are, who are tied in, um, expect that international students will be allowed to study in the US and stay for a period after they finish their studies, so they are not expecting you know that there’s going to be such a tightening that the flow of students is going to be appreciably affected. We’ll have to see. But more generally, it seems clear that there’s a rift between what we might call the Bannon Wing of the Trump movement and that and the Musk Wing. And the Bannon Wing is opposed to all immigrants, it appears, and the Musk Wing is friendly to immigrants, especially those who are studying science and engineering and are highly educated, and I’d be willing to bet fair about that the Musk Wing is going to win this one. And so because of that, the flow of international students in the US is not going to be greatly interrupted, but, but as I said, we’re going to have to wait and see what what happens? But I’m, I’m optimistic about that one. So your producer, Claire, I think is going to be okay.

John Torpey 

We think she’s going to be okay too, well we’re happy to have her around. So just maybe one final question, which is kind of about the international reputation of American higher education. I mean, what do you think will be the consequences of, you know, the policy changes of administration that sees professors as the enemy?

Steven Brint 

Yeah, well, I It remains to be seen some of these policies are going to harm the sector gives no doubt. So there’s, there’s a discussions now of raising the tax on endowments, which is now 1.4% to as high as 14, and sometimes people are saying 21% if something like that happened that would, that would have a big impact, because it would reduce the amount of spending of our leading institutions, would make them less attractive internationally. It would reduce their endowments over time. It wouldn’t allow them to provide as many scholarships, for example, or students in need. There’s some, there’s some good competitors out there, in Europe and and in Canada, and in some, and especially in the UK. And so the last time I looked the US, had about half of the top 50 universities in the world according to the rankings of the Times Higher Education in England. That number could certainly shrink the image of the United States, to the extent that it becomes more authoritarian, more oligopolistic, or oligarchical, I’m sorry, could suffer. And eventually it could be the case that, these very talented international students will will say, I’d rather go someplace else, where there’s more freedom and the educational experiences is just as good. And that’s a worry. The US higher ed has been one of the most successful export industries that, that we have, and it’s brought in a lot of incredibly talented people. I did a count of this, in the National Academies, about a quarter of the people in the National Academies are, had their education, were born abroad, or had their initial tertiary education abroad, and then came to the United States for graduate school, and in many cases, stayed. And you don’t want to see that kind of blight of brain power that happened, for example, in in Germany in the 1930s happened in the United States in, in the in the next decades. And I’d say that’s a real risk.

John Torpey 

Well, indeed, it’s very worrisome. And I have to say, having had this conversation, reminds me of a book that you may have read as well by Derek Bok called Attacking The Elites. And how much of this, he really kind of foretold, you know, that he foresaw the reasons why people were getting unhappy with American higher education. And you know what could happen, which seems to me the book is in, is pervaded by this kind of fear of what could be coming to American higher education. Well, I think it’s arrived. I don’t know if you know the book, but…

Steven Brint 

Yes, I have the book on my bookshelf right now.

John Torpey 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was, I’m not sure what I don’t normally read these sorts of things, exactly, but, you know, I’ve been interested, as you know, for a long time, and the idea of meritocracy, and so I guess it got on my radar, and I was quite struck by it and quite worried, because he was so obviously pretty worried.

Steven Brint 

Yes, it’s remarkable that he wrote that book in his I think he’s 90 now, so he’s still still writing trenchant analyzes.

John Torpey 

Yes, I think he’s even older than 90. He’s like 93 now. The book is a couple of years older, a couple years old. But in any case, that’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Steven Brint for sharing his thoughts about the early days of the second Trump Administration and their approach to higher education. Look for International Horizons on the New Books Network, and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I want to thank Claire Centofanti for her technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan McKay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.