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The idea is right there , the plan for Donald Trump’s second presidency produced by the Heritage Foundation.

“Cap indirect costs at universities,� the heading says, going on to explain this federal spending should be cut by our elected representatives. “Congress should cap the indirect costs paid to universities so that it does not exceed the lowest rate a university accepts from a private organization to fund research efforts.�

This is the same logic a drastic cut in the amount of overhead it will pay universities along with the grants it provides. The main difference from the Project 2025 plan is they tried to do it administratively instead of through Congress.

On Tuesday, the U of A’s vice president of research, Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, announced that the decrease will cut about $40 million per year in expected revenue for university if the plan goes through. A federal judge ordered the plan temporarily halted Monday after a lawsuit by 22 attorneys general, including Arizona’s Kris Mayes. The order only applies to those 22 states.

The cuts also have a historical source. They come from a longstanding desire to undermine the universities, not because of the scientific research they produce but because they are typically bastions of progressive politics. The federal funding for research just happens to give the federal government leverage over them.

Two experts I spoke with, and , trace the antagonism of many conservatives toward the universities back decades, even as long as a century ago, to the post-World War I years. It’s only now that it’s becoming fully operationalized, in part through these cuts.

‘Attack the universities’

William F. Buckley famously complained of the academy’s tendency toward “collectivism� and “atheism� in his 1951 book, “God and Man at Yale.� Both the behavior he complained of and the critiques he made sound quaint by today’s standards.

In recent years, a collection of allies on the right have aimed to take over, undermine or starve universities in order to diminish their leftism and their exalted place in American culture. Christopher Rufo, one of the main architects of the effort, has

Curtis Yarvin, the totalitarian thinker favored by many Big Tech leaders, has called for a destruction of what he calls which means traditional American journalism institutions and academia. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel has funded Yarvin, co-authored a book called, “The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford,� and offers fellowships for students to drop out of college and pursue tech ideas.

When he was just a candidate for U.S. Senate, in November 2021, , “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.� Later he quoted Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.�

Now, of course, Vance, , is vice president of the United States.

The turning point may have been 2016, when Trump ran for president for the first time. Before that in 2015, that a majority of Republicans, 54 %, viewed higher-education institutions favorably. In 2017, after Trump won, 58 percent of Republicans viewed these institutions negatively.

Oppressor vs. oppressed

They aren’t wrong, of course, that universities, including the U of A, have been broadly left-wing in their politics and that the divides have heightened over the last decade or two. Brint, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California-Riverside pointed to universities “Making statements and taking stands on political and social issues that are almost exclusively on the left, instead of practicing institutional neutrality,� as one example.

Brint, whose research has focused on higher education in recent years, also pointed to the “oppressor vs. oppressed� discourse that has taken hold on some campuses and in some department.

“That’s alienating to a lot of people,� Brint said.

On campuses like the University of Arizona, it isn’t necessarily pervasive, even if some conservative commentators treat it as such.

“Their critique of the academy is really about the soft sciences and the liberal arts,� said Shepherd, author of the 2023 book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America.� “Their problems were with the humanities courses, the English departments and the history departments.�

But these different parts of the universities coexist on the same campuses. The U of A has a Gender and Women’s Studies Department as well as a Biomedical Engineering Department. In truth, that’s been one of the strengths of American universities: Their diversity of offerings can make for a more complete education.

But now it’s a vulnerability, and the U of A is especially vulnerable because of the financial mismanagement of the previous administration. It’s expected to have just 76 days of cash on hand by the end of June, well below the standard of 140 days.

‘Subsidizing leftist agendas’

The Trump administration is making a multi-pronged attack on universities. They want to change the accreditation process, expel foreign students who protest against Israel, tax large endowments and carry out a “revolution in higher education,� as .

“We will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy,� Trump said before his election.

Part of the plan is also to cut federal funding for the sciences, even if it hurts American scientific research, one of the country’s great achievements. It’s simply a point of leverage over the universities that has the side benefit of reducing federal spending.

In calling for a reduction in the indirect costs paid to universities, Project 2025 put it this way: “These reimbursements cross-subsidize leftist agendas and the research of billion-dollar organizations such as Google and the Ford Foundation. Universities also use this influx of cash to pay for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.�

If it hurts Tucson and the communities around Arizona that this land-grant university serves, that’s too bad. If we lose expert scientists, that’s also too bad. If important science is not done, oh well.

It’s the price to be paid for seizing universities back from the leftists.