Just hours after opening its new program for American researchers called Safe Place for Science in reaction to Trump administration policies, Aix Marseille University received its first application. Since then, the university, which is in the south of France and is known for its science programs, has received about a dozen applications per day from what the school considers “scientific asylum” seekers. Other universities in France and elsewhere in Europe have also rushed to save American researchers fleeing drastic cuts to jobs and programs by the Trump administration, as well as perceived attacks on whole fields of research. At stake are not just individual jobs, but the concept of free scientific inquiry, university presidents say. They are also rushing to fill huge holes in collective research caused by the cuts, particularly in areas targeted by the Trump administration, including studies of climate change, public health, environmental science, gender and diversity.If the movement becomes a trend, it could mean the reversal of the long-term brain drain that has seen generations of scientists move to the United States. And while at least some Europeans have noted that the changes in the United States provide a unique opportunity to build stronger European research centers, most academics say that competition is not the short-term motivation. “This program is ultimately linked to indignation, to declare what is happening in the United States is not normal,” said Éric Berton, president of Aix Marseille University, which has earmarked 15 million euros (nearly $16,300,000) for 15 three-year positions. He said the number of openings “wasn’t much,” but the goal was to “give them a little hope.” In France, Aix Marseille University is considered a leader in the push to bring in American researchers. Since that program started, a cancer research foundation in Paris announced it was immediately putting up 3.5 million euros to welcome American cancer researchers. And last week, two universities in Paris announced they were offering positions to American scientists whose work has been curtailed or halted by the Trump administration. “We are researchers — we want to continue to work at the highest level in these fields that are being attacked in the United States,” explained El Mouhoub Mouhoud, the president of Université Paris Sciences et Lettres. The university plans to welcome 15 researchers who are already working on shared projects in targeted areas including climate science, health, humanities and gender studies, said Mr. Mouhoud. As a result, the projects would continue unfettered and the American researchers could enjoy “academic freedom to do their research,” he said. “That’s good for everyone,” Mr. Mouhoud said. The alarms at European scientific institutions began sounding as the Trump administration started slashing jobs and freezing science grants as part of its broad cost-cutting measures.Firings at U.S. centers deemed the pinnacle of science have been announced week after week including at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, fired 1,200 employees and put grant reviews on hold, essentially turning off the tap of government funding for research projects in labs across the country. The cuts come as some federal agencies have removed terms from websites and grant applications that are deemed unacceptable to the Trump administration, which is seeking to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives. Among the terms considered taboo: “climate science,” “diversity” and “gender.” Taken together, the actions have sent a chill through academia and research institutes, with scientists worried not just for their jobs but the long-term viability of their research. “What we see today is actually censorship, censorship of fundamental values ,” said Yasmine Belkaid, president of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who moved to France last year after 30 years in the United States, where she had led the National Institutes of Health’s Center for Human Immunology. “We could lose a generation of science, a generation of scientists, something that we cannot recover from,” she added. “It is our duty collectively to make sure that science on the whole is protected.” Philippe Baptiste, the French minister of higher education and research, has been among the most outspoken and active European leaders on the issue. Mr. Baptiste, who led the French National Center of Space Studies before joining the government, described the Trump administration’s decisions as “collective madness” that required a swift and robust response from around the world.“They are making decisions” he said, “that call into question whole swaths of research not just in the United States, but the world because there are a huge number of programs that we do jointly with the United States — on earth observation, on climate, on ecology, on the environment, on health data, on space exploration. It’s incalculable.” Speaking of scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with whom he worked closely in his past job, Mr. Baptiste said: “These people are of exceptional scientific quality, dealing with weather, climate and earth observation. And what’s the idea? To say that we can no longer work on these issues?” Mr. Baptiste has been working with the presidents of French universities to come up with a government program. He has also pushed for a Europe-wide response, including drafting a letter, also signed by government ministers in 11 other European countries, which demands a coordinated effort and dedicated funding from the European Commission for start-ups, research and innovation. More than 350 scientists signed a petition published this week in the French newspaper Le Monde, similarly calling on the European Commission to set up an emergency fund of 750 million euros to accommodate thousands of researchers working in the United States. A European Commission spokesperson said a meeting was being planned to coordinate the most effective response to the Trump administration cuts to scientific research.In Brussels, two sister universities — Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Université Libre de Bruxelles — said they planned to market to American students a program offering 36 postdoctoral positions open to international researchers from around the world. The positions, largely funded by European Union money, will focus on research in climate, artificial intelligence and other areas the schools view as socially important. In the Netherlands, the minister of education, culture and science, Eppo Bruins, announced that he wanted to set up a fund “in the very short term” to attract leading scientists in a variety of fields. While he did not mention Mr. Trump directly, he hinted at it in a letter to the Dutch House of Representatives. “The geopolitical climate is changing, which is currently increasing the international mobility of scientists,” he wrote. “Several European countries are responding to this and are going to attract international scientific talent. I want the Netherlands to continue to be at the forefront.” Ulrike Malmendier, a German economist who is member of Germany’s leading economic council, urged European governments to increase investment in science to attract out-of-work researchers from the United States. “The development in the U.S.A. is a huge opportunity for Germany and Europe,” Ms. Malmendier, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Germany’s Funke media group. “I know that a lot of people are thinking about leaving.”

The Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle the Education Department drew a pair of court challenges on Monday, as opponents called the plan an attempt to evade congressional authority. The first lawsuit was filed in federal court in Massachusetts by the American Federation of Teachers, a teachers union; the American Association of University Professors; and two public school districts in Massachusetts. Within hours the N.A.A.C.P., the National Education Association union and other critics had brought a case of their own in federal court in Maryland. The challenges came four days after President Trump signed an executive order that directed the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the department.” The day after the order, Mr. Trump announced that the Small Business Administration would assume control of the government’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio, and that the Health and Human Services Department would oversee nutrition programs and special education services. The Education Department, created in 1979, cannot be closed without Congress’s consent. The Massachusetts lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s moves since it came to power in January, including an effort to roughly halve the department’s work force, “will interfere with the department’s ability to carry out its statutorily required functions.” Ilana Krepchin, chairwoman of the Somerville, Mass., school committee, which is a plaintiff in the Massachusetts case, said that the Education Department was a “cornerstone of equitable public education.” “Dismantling it would cause real harm — not only to our students and schools, but to communities across the country,” Ms. Krepchin said. Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said that all federally mandated programs would remain in the agency and that the administration had promised to work with Congress in order to close the department. “Instead of focusing on the facts and offering helpful solutions to improve student outcomes, the union is once again misleading the American public to keep their stranglehold on the American education bureaucracy,” Ms. Biedermann said, referring to the American Federation of Teachers. Top Republicans on Capitol Hill — including Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions — have pledged to support the president’s push, which has been embraced by some right-leaning groups. But rank-and-file lawmakers are expected to face significant pressure, both for and against the plan, before any vote is held. Charles L. Welch, the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said last week that he was “dismayed” by Mr. Trump’s order and urged lawmakers to, in effect, defy the White House and help preserve the department. The Education Department has limited power over what is taught in American classrooms. Its principal jobs are to distribute money to schools, enforce civil rights laws and run the federal student aid program for college students. It has historically played a large role in data collection and education research funding. It is not clear when any legislation to close or rebuild the department might come to a vote. In the Maryland case, the N.A.A.C.P. and the N.E.A., the nation’s largest teachers’ union, were among the plaintiffs who argued that the administration’s tactics over the last two months amounted to “a de facto dismantling of the department by executive fiat.” “Donald Trump’s own secretary of education has acknowledged they can’t legally shut down the Department of Education without Congress,” said Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Legal Defense Network, which is helping represent the National Education Association in the case. “Yet that is, for all intents and purposes, exactly what they are doing,” he added. “It’s a brazen violation of the law that will upend the lives of countless students and families.” Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the N.A.A.C.P., accused Mr. Trump of doing far more than trying to shrink or shutter an agency. “Education is power,” Mr. Johnson said. Referring to Mr. Trump, he added, “He is deliberately destroying the pathway many Americans have to a better life.” The N.A.A.C.P. and the other challengers in Maryland asked a federal judge to prohibit the Education Department and Ms. McMahon “from continuing their dismantling of the department and implementing the March 20 executive order.” In a separate, privacy-focused case also in Maryland, a federal judge ruled on Monday that the Education Department could not supply sensitive data to the Department of Government Efficiency, which is led by Elon Musk.

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When Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead pro-Palestinian demonstrations while a Columbia University student, was detained this month, the Trump administration argued he should be deported to help prevent the spread of antisemitism, invoking a rarely used law. Lawyers for Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident who is being detained in Louisiana, quickly responded that the administration was retaliating against their client for his constitutionally protected speech criticizing Israel and promoting Palestinian rights. Last week, the government quietly added new accusations to its case against Mr. Khalil, saying that he had willfully failed to disclose his membership in several organizations, including a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees, when he applied to become a permanent U.S. resident last March. It said he also failed to disclose work he did for the British government after 2022. The Trump administration appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil’s case. On Sunday, in a filing opposing his release, Justice Department lawyers argued that the new allegations reduced the importance of concerns about Mr. Khalil’s right to free speech. “Khalil’s First Amendment allegations are a red herring,” they wrote. Given the new allegations, they added, there was an “independent basis” for his deportation. “The new deportation grounds are patently weak and pretextual,” said one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, a co-director of CLEAR, a legal clinic at the City University of New York. “That the government scrambled to add them at the 11th hour only highlights how its motivation from the start was to retaliate against Mr. Khalil for his protected speech in support of Palestinian rights and lives.” Mr. Khalil’s lawyers are fighting for his release in a New Jersey federal court. His wife, an American citizen who lives in New York City, is expected to give birth next month. The new allegations, listed in a document from the Homeland Security Department, include that Mr. Khalil did not disclose his work with the U.N. agency or Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups that set off pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the school. Mr. Khalil earned a master’s degree from Columbia in December.The government also said that Mr. Khalil failed to list his continuing employment with the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, after 2022. The efforts of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers in New Jersey to secure his release are separate from the immigration court proceedings — currently being held in Louisiana — that could lead to his deportation. But in order to deport Mr. Khalil on the basis of the new allegations, the government would have to convince an immigration judge that any failure to disclose the relevant information was willful, and that it would have made a difference in his chances of receiving legal permanent residency status. The Trump administration is also standing by its original justification for Mr. Khalil’s detention, citing a little-used law that says the secretary of state can initiate deportation proceedings against noncitizens whose presence in the United States can reasonably be considered a threat to the country’s foreign-policy agenda. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has accused Mr. Khalil of participating in antisemitic activities, referring to protests on Columbia’s campus at which, the secretary said, students expressed support for Hamas. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have denied that their client promoted Hamas and have argued more generally that their client’s speech is protected by the First Amendment. They are expected to challenge the constitutionality of the law Mr. Rubio used to initially justify Mr. Khalil’s detention. Jesse Furman, a federal judge in New York who reviewed Mr. Khalil’s case before transferring it to New Jersey last week, said that the First and Fifth Amendment issues raised by the case warranted careful review. “The fundamental constitutional principle that all persons in the United States are entitled to due process of law demands no less,” he wrote.

Well before political leaders were taking action against cellphones in the classroom, the superintendent of schools in Schoharie, N.Y., a rural district about 40 miles west of Albany, was well along on his crusade against Big Tech’s commandeering of the adolescent mind. By the beginning of the school year in 2022, David Blanchard, who had been appointed as superintendent seven years earlier, had implemented a bell-to-bell policy. This meant that students could not use phones (or smart watches or earbuds) at any point during the school day — not during lunch or study halls or periods of transition from one class to another. The effort certainly seemed extreme. This was before Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” spurred consensus about the destructive impact phones were having on teenage mental health, before the former surgeon general’s call for warning labels on social media platforms. Mr. Blanchard was troubled by all the disconnection he was seeing. His experiment yielded benefits right away. “We found a transformative environment,” he told me recently. “We expected kids to be in tears, breaking down. Immediately we saw them talking to each other, engaged in conversation in the lunchroom.” One unanticipated outcome was that students flooded counselors’ offices looking for help on how to resolve conflicts that were now happening in person. Previously, if they found themselves in some sort of fight with someone online, they would have called or texted a parent for advice on how to deal with it, Mr. Blanchard told me. “Now students were realizing that their friends were right there in front of them and not the people on social, a few towns away, that they had never met.” Enrollment in elective classes also went up when the option to scroll your way through a 40-minute free period was eliminated. The success in Schoharie has been a showpiece in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent campaign to ban cellphones in schools across New York. At least eight other states, including Florida and Louisiana, have instituted restrictions of varying kinds. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Phone-Free School Act requiring every school district in California to devise a policy limiting the use of smartphones by July 2026. This week a suggested cellphone ban was the subject of a public hearing in the Texas State Legislature, where a bill was introduced with bipartisan support a few months ago by a young member of the House who lamented that she had been “born into these devices.” Governor Hochul’s proposal follows the Schoharie bell-to-bell approach. In a rare instance of agreement between labor and government, it is supported by the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City schoolteachers. As Michael Mulgrew, the president of the U.F.T., put it, “It is simple, and everyone knows what the expectation is.” Still, the proposal’s all-constraining formulation has not made it an obvious or easy sell. Introduced in January as part of the state’s current budget negotiations, it is opposed by some groups like the state’s School Boards Association. These groups favor an alternate strategy coming out of the statehouse that endorses the notion that local jurisdictions ought to have say in how policy limiting phone use is devised. Studies comparing students with and without cellphones in classrooms generally show better academic performance among those without. The advantage of keeping devices out of students’ hands for the entire day is that it both reduces the time teachers have to waste policing phone use and also minimizes the possibility that whatever erupts on Snapchat during lunchtime will kill any chance of paying attention to the “Moby-Dick” discussion in the afternoon. In Schoharie, students put their smartphones in a pouch with a magnetic lock — the kind used in stores to prevent theft — which cannot be opened until a school attendant releases them at the end of the day. In recent years, parents around the country have demanded more and more control over what their children are reading and doing in school. The constituents most opposed to all-day phone bans are the mothers and fathers who seem to be addicted to constant filial contact. Governor Hochul has spoken to aggrieved first-grade teachers who told her that they are overseeing classrooms full of children wearing smart watches. “Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, ‘I miss you and can’t wait to see you,’” the governor told me. “That’s a parental need,” she said, “not a student need.” The continuation of these patterns, she worried, was bound to keep children from emerging as fully functioning adults. It is the sadly all too reasonable fear of many parents that something catastrophic could happen at school without their being able to reach their children. It is a fantasy that communication would save them. Throughout the rollout of the proposal, the governor’s office has had law enforcement come in and speak with school groups to explain how misguided a notion that is. In an emergency, phones distract children from remaining focused on whomever has been entrusted to keep them safe; calls and texts create added panic. Should the governor’s proposal pass, it would take effect in September. Parents in Schoharie were quite resistant to the ban at first, Mr. Blanchard told me. But they came around when they realized that with the addiction broken, it became much easier to manage their children’s digital lives at home — and much more gratifying to see them engage with the world without staring at their hands.

President Trump announced Friday that the Education Department would no longer manage the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio or supervise “special needs” programs in a major shake-up of an agency he has sought to eliminate. Student loans will move under the Small Business Administration, while special education services, along with nutrition programs, will move under the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Trump said. Mr. Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office that the moves would take place “immediately,” adding that he believed the restructuring — which critics swiftly vowed to challenge in court — would “work out very well.” “They’ll be serviced much better than it has in the past. It’s been a mess,” he said of the loans. He added, “You’re going to have great education, much better than it is now, at half the cost.” Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for his announcement on Thursday, with an executive order aimed at closing the Education Department. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. Reassigning such primary functions would further hollow out the agency, though education experts and union officials questioned Mr. Trump’s authority to do so unilaterally, particularly in the case of student loans. Many suggested that the result would not be better service — only more confusion for borrowers. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, insisted on Thursday that major programs like student loans would still be run out of the Education Department, albeit a much leaner one. Pressed Friday to clarify what functions would be moved, and what legal authority Mr. Trump had to transfer them, she invoked Congress. “President Trump is doing everything within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families such as student loans, special needs programs and nutrition programs,” she said. “The president has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect them to help the president deliver.” High ranking Republicans in Congress have already committed to introducing legislation to support Mr. Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Education Department. Beth Maglione, the interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said it was “unclear” whether Mr. Trump could move aid programs away from the department. She suggested that a transition, even one authorized by Congress, would require time and careful planning. “The administration would first need to articulate a definitive strategy outlining how the work of administering student aid programs would be allocated within the S.B.A., determine the necessary staffing and resources and build the requisite infrastructure to facilitate the transition of these programs to another federal agency,” she said. “In the absence of any comprehensive plan, a serious concern remains: How will this restructuring be executed without disruption to students and institutions?” In the executive order, the president compared the size of the federal student loan portfolio with that of Wells Fargo, the bank — noting that Wells Fargo had over 200,000 employees, while only 1,500 people worked in the Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid. “The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the order stated. On Thursday, Mr. Trump pledged that the legally mandated funding for students who attend high-poverty schools and who rely on federal Pell grants, as well as “resources for children with special disabilities and special needs​,” would be preserved even as the department was gutted in accordance with his plans. He indicated that this was important to Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, who served as S.B.A. administrator during his first term. The restructuring Mr. Trump announced on Friday would transfer some of the largest programs handled by the Education Department into agencies that have had minimal involvement with schools and are going through staffing reductions themselves. The S.B.A., headed by Kelly Loeffler, announced Thursday that it would cut 43 percent of its roughly 6,500 workers, while H.H.S., led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has offered buyouts to most of its roughly 80,000 employees.

The Trump administration moved early Friday to detain an international student at Cornell University who has led protests on its Ithaca, N.Y., campus, in what appeared to be the latest effort to kick pro-Palestinian activists out of the United States. A lawyer for Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies, said in court papers that he had been notified by email early Friday morning that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was seeking Mr. Taal’s surrender. Last year, Mr. Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus that featured weapons manufacturers. As a result, the university had ordered him to study remotely for the spring semester. Mr. Taal, a great-grandson of Gambia’s first president, Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, is a citizen of both Gambia and the United Kingdom. According to court documents, Mr. Taal, who is here on a visa, said he feared deportation in part because his name had been circulated on social media and in media reports as a potential ICE target. The move to detain Mr. Taal comes as the Trump administration tries to deport other pro-Palestinian students and academics. About two weeks ago, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident of Palestinian descent who recently obtained a master’s degree from Columbia University, was detained in New York. On Monday, the government detained Badar Kahn Suri, an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, claiming he had violated terms of his academic visa. Other students have also been targeted. ICE did not immediately return a request for comment. Last weekend, Mr. Taal filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to block possible action against him. A hearing had been scheduled in that case for Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y. A lawyer for Mr. Taal, Eric T. Lee, argued in the lawsuit that his client was exercising his right to free speech and that there were no legitimate grounds for his deportation. The lawsuit also challenged the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order to “combat antisemitism” that instructed federal agencies to deport immigrants whose actions could be regarded as “antisemitic or supportive of terrorism.” Earlier this week, neighbors saw law enforcement agents near Mr. Taal’s apartment building by Cornell’s campus, according to affidavits filed in the lawsuit in the Northern District of New York. “This does not happen in a democracy. We are outraged, and every American should be too,” Mr. Lee said in a statement. Lawyers for Mr. Taal are asking the court to delay his surrender to ICE, pending the outcome of the litigation. On Thursday, hundreds of Cornell students and supporters held a rally in support of Mr. Taal, who is also the host of a podcast called “The Malcolm Effect.”

The University of California said on Wednesday that it would stop requiring the use of diversity statements in hiring, a practice praised by some who said it made campuses more inclusive but criticized by others who said it did the opposite. Diversity statements typically ask job applicants to describe in a page or so how they would contribute to campus diversity. The move away from them, by one of the biggest higher education systems in the United States, comes as the Trump administration escalates an attack on higher education over diversity programming. For a decade, the 10-campus system was a national leader in using such statements, as universities increasingly came under pressure from those who wanted more diverse student bodies and faculties. “Our values and commitment to our mission have not changed,” Janet Reilly, the chair of the system’s Board of Regents, said in a statement late Wednesday. “We will continue to embrace and celebrate Californians from a variety of life experiences, backgrounds and points of view.” The announcement came as universities have faced a number of direct challenges from the new Trump administration. Two weeks ago, the administration announced that it would end $400 million in research grants with Columbia University over criticism that the institution had not done enough to crack down on antisemitism. The Education Department sent letters last week to 60 colleges warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they didn’t protect Jewish students. Four of the University of California system’s 10 campuses — Berkeley, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara — received the letters. And last month, the Education Department issued guidance that interpreted the 2023 Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions practices far more expansively to include any “race-based decision-making.” The University of California system’s president, Michael Drake, did not address diversity statements during his opening remarks at a meeting of the Regents on Wednesday. But he painted a bleak picture about the university’s finances. The system is bracing for a state budget cut of 8 percent and is concerned about threats from the federal government to curb funding. Like several other universities in recent days, Dr. Drake announced a systemwide hiring freeze. In a letter to the system’s leaders on Wednesday, the university’s provost, Katherine S. Newman, said the Regents had directed Dr. Drake to eliminate diversity statements for all new hires. “The requirement to submit a diversity statement may lead applicants to focus on an aspect of their candidacy that is outside their expertise or prior experience,” she wrote. She added, “We can continue to effectively serve our communities from a variety of life experiences, backgrounds and points of view without requiring diversity statements.” Even before Mr. Trump took office, diversity statements had become a lightning rod. Conservative critics describe them as “loyalty oaths” that limit diversity of thought in academia. Others saw them as another tool that savvy applicants could use to hit the right buzzwords and gain an edge in hiring. Some states, including North Dakota, Florida and Texas, have barred requiring them or stopped them altogether. Amid the pressure, several colleges, including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, recently said they would stop requiring them in faculty hiring. “They encouraged a performativity,” said Steven Brint, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. “People knew the right thing to say.” The University of California was sued over diversity statements, but the federal suit was ultimately tossed out because a judge said the plaintiffs lacked standing. But to their supporters, the statements were a test of how comfortable applicants were navigating increasingly diverse student bodies. Diversity statements do not gauge beliefs, but actions, said Brian Soucek, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Professor Soucek said the university was backing away from one of its core values and capitulating to the Trump administration in a futile attempt to avoid the president’s wrath. “Attempts to appease those who have been explicit about their intent to destroy higher education as we currently know it are politically naïve,” Professor Soucek wrote this week in a letter to faculty leaders. In an interview, he added, “Show me how that worked out for Columbia.”

In October 2023, three days before Hamas fighters attacked Israel, Columbia University’s new president stood outside Low Library and posed a foundational question. “What,” she asked, “does the world need from a great university in the 21st century?” The president, Nemat Shafik, argued that the world required much. Rigorous thinkers who were grounded in the age’s great debates. Researchers whose breakthroughs could transform societies. Universities that extended their missions far beyond their gates. Seventeen months later, Dr. Shafik is gone and the Trump administration is offering a far different answer. The ideal Dr. Shafik described, much of it historically bankrolled by American taxpayers, is under siege, as President Trump ties public money to his government’s vision for higher education. That vision is a narrower one. Teach what you must, defend “the American tradition and Western civilization,” prepare people for the work force, and limit protests and research. “I have not experienced, across 46 years of higher education, a period where there’s been this much distance” between the agendas of university leaders and Washington, said Robert J. Jones, the chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The outcome of this clash over the purpose of higher education stands to shape American culture for a generation or more. If the president realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors.Two months into Mr. Trump’s term, universities are laying off workers, imposing hiring freezes, shutting down laboratories and facing federal investigations. After the administration sent Columbia a list of demands and canceled $400 million in grants and contracts, university leaders across the country fear how the government might wield its financial might to influence curriculums, staffing and admissions. “Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-working taxpayers,” Mr. Trump said in a campaign video. “And now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America.” The goal, Mr. Trump declared, is to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.” Other Republicans have spoken, often in more measured language, about their own frustrations with higher education. Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, bluntly complained during a hearing last month that colleges were “not preparing students to succeed in the modern work force.” With presidential power magnified by a largely genuflecting Congress, Mr. Trump’s challenges to academic freedom and First Amendment protections have not provoked broad and visible public outrage. The sobering reality for university leaders is that Mr. Trump has the administrative upper hand, and academia has startlingly few vocal allies. The fusillade against higher education led by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance — men with Ivy League degrees — is more furious than past conservative crusades against the country’s elite academic institutions. The administration, though, is capitalizing on imperfections that have been tearing at the system’s stature for years. “His genius was in understanding and then exploiting the resentments, the anxieties, and the vulnerabilities of” voters who already had “critical sentiments” toward higher education, Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, wrote of Mr. Trump in his 2021 book, “What Universities Owe Democracy.” Private polling conducted for universities shows that many people believe that these nonprofit institutions are anything but — one consequence of high tuition costs. Even though a college education almost always provides graduates with higher lifetime incomes, rising debt has made the value of a degree a matter of debate. Politicians have eagerly caricatured colleges as sanctuaries of intolerance and “wokeism” where admissions processes have sometimes considered race or favored the well-connected.For all of their grand talk — “For Humanity” is the name of Yale University’s $7 billion fund-raising campaign — administrators and professors often acknowledge that they have not mustered easy-to-digest responses against even routine criticisms. Universities strained to be more accessible, building up more diverse classes and handing out more financial aid. But Chancellor Jones, who will become the University of Washington’s president this summer, nevertheless described higher education’s public relations strategy as “a work in progress.” Many leaders concede that while the role of the university in American life is clear to them, it has grown muddled to many. “Higher education has always been able to stand up and invoke its moral authority,” said Roger L. Geiger, a distinguished professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and a leading authority on the history of American colleges. “What’s happened is they’ve simply lost that moral authority.” The Pew Research Center found in 2012 that 26 percent of Americans believed that colleges and universities were negatively affecting the United States. Last year, even before the campus demonstrations that led to thousands of arrests, Pew reported that figure had increased to 45 percent. Much of Mr. Trump’s higher education agenda during his first term empowered for-profit colleges. Now, though, Mr. Trump is taking clearer aim at the cultures and missions of major nonprofit universities. His tactics, university officials and researchers believe, could throw American higher education toward an earlier time — closer to when, as Dr. Shafik put it, universities “were kept separate from the world around them.”American higher education predates the republic itself. Harvard, for example, was established in the colonial period to educate clergymen. George Washington’s idea for a national university was never realized, but Abraham Lincoln found more success pursuing the idea that higher education was entwined with American ambition when he signed the measure that led to publicly funded land-grant institutions. Research became a focus of universities late in the 19th century. The nation’s reliance on universities greatly accelerated during and after World War II, as the United States began to lean on academia more than most other countries. Essential to the system was Washington’s new willingness to underwrite overhead costs of expensive research projects. By 1995, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that universities were “the core strength” of the American research-and-development apparatus. Universities also assumed part of the United States’ soft-power strategy, working on foreign aid projects that spanned the globe. That symbiotic arrangement is now in jeopardy. The administration has framed its proposed cuts to overhead expenses, for instance, as a way “to ensure that as many funds as possible go toward direct scientific research costs.” But administration officials have also depicted the longstanding framework in harsh terms, including the assertion that it created a “slush fund” for liberal university administrators. As Dr. Geiger put it, the Trump administration’s approach represented “a new era.” Besides upending individual studies, cuts to federal money could unleash dramatic consequences for the structures and objectives of universities. “No one can assume, for example, that biochemistry is going to have a sustained future of generous funding,” said John Thelin, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and a former president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. He could think of no president, provost or medical school dean who had, in recent years, appeared particularly nervous about an evaporation of funding. These days, it is hard to find a president, provost or medical school dean who is not anxious about something. At Illinois, the federally funded Soybean Innovation Lab will close next month. Dr. Jones fears that research on everything from insulin production to artificial intelligence could ultimately wither, undermining the university’s ability to advance what he called “the public good.” “Before, we were just trying to tell our story to improve the value proposition in the eyes of the public, but now it becomes a bigger, much larger issue than that,” said Dr. Jones, one of the few top university chiefs who have been willing to be interviewed on the record since Mr. Trump’s inauguration. The threat is also acute at private institutions, even those with the biggest war chests. Johns Hopkins said last week that it would eliminate more than 2,000 jobs in the United States and overseas, the largest round of layoffs in its history. The University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump’s alma mater, is among the universities with new hiring freezes. (It announced that step before the Trump administration said on Wednesday that it would pause about $175 million in funding for Penn because it had allowed a transgender woman to compete on its women’s swim team.) In recent weeks, presidents at public and private universities alike have weighed how long any institutional lifelines could last. But professors doubt that a major university can meet its modern ambitions without a relatively open spigot of federal support. “Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.”So far, Mr. Trump has not signaled any interest in retreat. That has left academic leaders searching urgently for how to save an ideal they insist is imperative. Asked whether he feared a wholesale remaking of the American university, Dr. Jones replied that he did not like to use the word “fear.” But, he added, “it is a concern — I can’t say that it is not one of those things that a lot of us are concerned about.”

As conservatives fought against cancel culture on college campuses, they developed a particular fondness for the First Amendment. It was un-American, they argued, to punish someone for exercising their right to speak freely. Today, however, many of those same conservatives, now in power in state and federal government, are behind a growing crackdown on political expression at universities, in ways that try to sidestep the Constitution’s free-speech guarantees. President Trump and Republican lawmakers say that new laws and policies are necessary to protect students from harmful and objectionable content, to prevent harassment and to discourage conformity. To that end, Mr. Trump has threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of federal dollars from universities because they moved too slowly to quell protests that left many Jewish students feeling threatened. And Republicans in state legislatures have drafted sweeping prohibitions against classroom “indoctrination” and the display of certain L.G.B.T.Q. symbols. They have also demanded the removal of art they consider inappropriate. In some cases, the Trump administration has said existing federal law already gives the president all the power he needs to act. When Mr. Trump said he would deport student activists, for example, he claimed to be acting in the interest of American foreign policy. Tellingly, administration officials have said they are not bound by the First Amendment when it comes to noncitizens. “This is not about free speech,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.” Critics of this broad approach, including some on the right, say Republicans are being just as heavy-handed and censorious as they claimed the left was toward them. “That makes the situation so much worse,” said Greg Lukianoff, chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech group that often represents moderates and conservatives who claim they’ve been retaliated against for their political views. “Now we have all this federal pressure and pressure from state governments — sometimes really direct and clear, and sometimes hazy and confusing,” he said, adding, “There’s a lot fewer people who care about the nonpartisan defense of free speech now.”For many First Amendment experts and academics, the new laws and orders reveal an especially insidious threat: Public officials who are willing to marshal the power of the state against people whose views they dislike. “A number of people in elected office have gotten extraordinarily comfortable with the idea that they should use that office to control the spread of ideas and information,” said Jonathan Friedman, a managing director at PEN America, a free speech advocacy group. “And at a fundamental level, that’s what makes all of this so dangerous,” Mr. Friedman added. While the federal government’s role in some aspects of education is fairly limited, it does hold powerful tools that the Trump administration has been eager to use. It can launch civil rights investigations, for instance, or withhold research grants. States, which provide more funding for public schools and universities than the federal government does, have greater leverage and control. Legislation approved last month by the Ohio State Senate sets parameters for the discussion of any “controversial belief or policy” at state universities — including climate change, electoral politics, abortion and immigration. The bill demands that faculty members “shall not seek to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious point of view.” Sponsors say its purpose is to “allow students to exercise their right to free speech without threat of reprisal.” If it becomes law, universities would also be required to post all undergraduate course syllabuses online, along with the professor’s contact information and professional qualifications. Many states have taken aim at diversity, equity and inclusion programs in university hiring and admissions. But Republicans in Arizona are going further, by trying to remove the subject entirely from the classroom. The State Senate approved a bill this month that would deny funding to any public college or university that teaches about contemporary American society through the academic framework of concepts including “critical theory, whiteness, systemic racism, institutional racism, antiracism, microaggressions.” A bill awaiting the governor’s signature in Utah would outlaw pride flags at public schools and on government property.In some cases, Republicans have directly interfered with campus activities. Students at the University of North Texas took down a pro-Palestinian art exhibit last month after a Republican lawmaker complained that it referred to genocide in Hebrew.At Texas A&M University, officials banned drag performances on campus, saying it was “inconsistent” with the university’s values to host events that “involve biological males dressing in women’s clothing.” The American education system has long been a target for conservatives, many of whom see it as hostile to their values. In the last few years, the country’s most explosive political and cultural clashes — over Covid policy, racial inequality, gender identity, immigration, Gaza — have played out with intensity on campus quads, at school board meetings and in the classroom. Disruptive student protests have been an animating issue for Mr. Trump. In 2017, he suggested revoking funding from the University of California, Berkeley, after the university canceled an appearance by the professional right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Today, Mr. Trump — who declared in his recent address to Congress that he had “brought back free speech” — continues to antagonize academia, but this time he is using the power of the presidency. After his administration announced that it was canceling $400 million in funding for Columbia University, accusing it of failing to protect students and faculty members from “antisemitic violence and harassment,” legal scholars called the move an existential threat to academic freedom. “Never has the government brought such leverage against an institution of higher education,” said Lee C. Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University. Some conservatives said this kind of action is overdue and unsurprising. “When you take federal funds, you agree to abide by all kinds of rules,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Universities agree, for instance, to abide by certain accounting standards and anti-discrimination policies. Those rules are not always enforced consistently, Mr. Shapiro said. Nor is the Trump administration “exactly being legally precise” in a lot of what it has done, he added. “But part of this vibe shift that elected Trump is wanting law and order in a lot of ways,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And that includes on college campuses.” The arrest earlier this month of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who was born in Syria and studied at Columbia, was one of the most aggressive moves yet by the Trump administration in its effort to punish pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Mr. Khalil served as a spokesman for a student group that embraces hard-line anti-Israel rhetoric and says it supports liberation for Palestinians “by any means necessary, including armed resistance.” In announcing the arrest, the Department of Homeland Security accused Mr. Khalil of aligning himself with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Voicing support for such causes is not, however, a crime, and the Supreme Court has declared all manner of hateful speech to be protected by the First Amendment, including cheering the deaths of soldiers at their funerals and, in certain cases, cross burnings. “It can’t be a crime — or even a civil offense — simply to hold and express heinous views,” said Ann Coulter, the conservative firebrand whose college speeches have been the targets of protesters and have sometimes been threatened with violence. Ms. Coulter, an immigration hard-liner who acknowledged that she had rarely heard of a deportation that she didn’t support, said the president would be setting a terrible precedent by making protected speech — as offensive as it may be — a reason for deporting a legal green card holder like Mr. Khalil. But Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, said that the law is not always clear when the speech of noncitizens is at issue. And he said that Mr. Trump’s attempts to punish noncitizens seemed consistent in many ways with powers that Congress had already given presidents. Does that mean that Mr. Khalil can be deported for protesting, which is a constitutionally protected act? “The only honest answer,” Mr. Volokh said, “is we don’t know.” Conservatives have tested the scope of the First Amendment in other ways recently. Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told the dean of Georgetown University Law Center that he had begun an “inquiry” into the school’s teaching and promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion — and insisted that he would not hire students from any university that continues to offer such programs. In response, the school’s dean, William Treanor, wrote in a letter that the First Amendment guarantees Georgetown, a private, Catholic institution, “its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.” “This is a bedrock principle of constitutional law,” Mr. Treanor continued, “recognized not only by the courts, but by the administration in which you serve.”