A focus of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-sponsored plan for the second Trump administration, was bringing higher education under far-right state control. The methods the Trump regime took to implement this plan are now well known. The central component has been the weaponization of charges of antisemitism against universities, including Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell, Columbia, and Brown. Jewish faculty have pushed back hard on these spurious charges. Despite the pushback, including from the courts, the Trump regime has used this method to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from these institutions.
Project 2025 targeted accreditation as a method of bringing higher education under far-right state control. A federal panel has been appointed, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which issues recommendations to suspend accreditation for traditional accreditation organizations. This week, the panel recommended suspending accreditation powers from the American Psychological Association because of its supposed failure to police antisemitism for the programs it accredits – an accusation the APA said it “strongly” disagreed with.
The Trump administration’s tactic of weaponizing charges of antisemitism against supposedly liberal universities is a way of achieving far-right ideological control over universities. This tactic has become widespread across the West in attacking opposition political parties and politicians associated with democratic socialism and the left.
Attacking the left for antisemitism is profoundly ironic.