It’s now midnight eastern time and it’s looking more and more like we are not going to know who won the U.S. election until later today or perhaps even late this week (Pennsylvania probably will not report fully until Friday).   But it’s not too late to take a few moments to take a good look at the damage done to American higher education over the past four years, and where the system might be headed next.

In some ways the damage to US higher education during the Trump years was fairly small – a benefit (for anyone who wishes to pay heed) of a federal system in which the national government does not have direct responsibility for institutions.  At least until COVID came along, states carried on funding higher education institutions the way they would have.  Federal student assistance for the most part continued to grow unabated.  Science funding, too, was either untouched in the federal budget or, received increases. 

That’s not to say there weren’t policy atrocities.  The Trump administration made it easier for private for-profit institutions to benefit from student aid programs by gutting Obama-era rules on graduate gainful employment.  It made it harder for defrauded students to get their loans forgiven and also interpreted rule on public sector loan forgiveness in such a way as to render it effectively null before proposing axing it altogether.  But by and large, there was no attack on the basic structure of financing either institutions or students. 

To the extent that there was a financial hit up to that point, it has come from the decline in the number of international students, which was mostly due to Trump changing America’s brand from being one of a(n imperfect) shining city on the hill to something closer to Viktor Orban’s Hungary with nukes.  (I say mostly, because there was some softness in US numbers even before 2016, as I wrote about back here for Education Next, mainly because there are a lot of institutions charging very high prices for a not-very-special product).  There is no doubt that this has been a problem for some American universities, but since the US was never particularly dependent on international student revenue to begin with, this was more a “missed opportunity to grow” rather than a body blow to existing system funding.

No, if we want to look for the real damage done, I think you need to look at three areas in particular: the culture wars, the US relationship with China, and – for lack of a better word – national branding.  Taken together, policies in these areas will have catastrophic effects on both American higher education and the American economy – effects that the (hopefully) Biden administration will find hard to reverse.

Throughout Trump’s term in office, the administration has flirted with Sinophobia.  Not always without reason: the concern about increased espionage on campuses is hardly restricted to the United States.   But in the past few months, the Trump administration moved from talking to action: expelling several thousand students with “links” (meaning here highly unclear) to the People’s Liberation Army.  Maybe it’s justified, maybe it’s not.  But without a doubt, the disruption of the China-to-US conveyor belt of talent will have a huge effect on the research output of American universities in the sciences since Chinese grad students and post-docs have long formed the back bone of American labs in the hard sciences and engineering. 

The culture wars were perhaps coming anyway.  Though universities prefer to think of themselves as “non-partisan”, the dynamics of Trumpism make such a stance hard to maintain.  The populist movement of the past few years has above all been a stance against expertise, and universities, as manufacturers of expertise, become natural targets.  For the first time since mass higher education began, universities were no longer able to even attempt to sit “above” the fray: they were part of the fray, as they were in Russia or Hungary (I quite like this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education on how universities are learning to navigate the new environment).

But where they did not need to go – but went anyways in the last days before the election – was into a full-on attack on academic freedom embodied in the September 22 Executive Order on combatting race and sex stereotyping.  In effect, this order sanctions any institution which tries to engage in teaching and scholarship around “systemic racism” – that is, the idea that institutions or laws may have been set up in a way that theoretically treated people equally, but that disadvantaged some as a matter of course.  Many universities are refusing to comply, but that’s easy enough to do with an order given out in the waning days of and administration, where you can wait out the Justice Department.  If Trump wins a second term, American universities will be right in the same kind of position that Hungarian and Russian universities found themselves in when their macho-nationalist governments decided that gender and LGBT studies were illegitimate.

And this is where we need to start to look at the broader damage Trump has done.  We all joke about US exceptionalism, but for most of the past 80 years, it was genuinely exceptional.  More often than not flawed and terrible, but in many ways the leading country that provided an example to the world – and nowhere more so than in science and higher education.  But four years ago, American voters threw aspirational leadership away.  They voted in someone who was an obvious white nationalist, xenophobe, and obscurantist whose relationship with the truth was conditioned by whether it served his purpose at any given moment.  They voted in a racist.  They almost certainly voted in a rapist.

They voted in a monster.  And they may have re-elected him.

No country comes back from something like this quickly.  For decades, America attracted top talent from around the world not just because it could offer them riches, but because it was a place where they and their families could flourish.  The US has not lost that patina entirely, but the fact that it is possible for such a man to be voted will give all potential immigrants reservations for decades to come.  The US, put simply, can no longer credibly claim it is safe for immigrants in the long-term.  And American universities, whose global dominance has relied for decades on its ability to attract top talent, are going to find it hard to maintain their pre-eminence.

In the short-term, there is no question that this has benefitted Canada.  Over the past few years, we have certainly been “winners” in a global talent race, stealing people who otherwise would have gone to or remained in the United States.  But we need to remember that our ability to flourish as a country is, for better or worse, a function of how well our southern neighbours perform.  We will not prosper in a world where the US is in decline.  And I worry – a lot – that America’s inability to attract foreign talent to its universities is going to slow down the entire North American economy, as the largest engines of continental science, technology and innovation slow down in the absence of foreign talent. 

My read, for what it’s worth (again, at midnight on Tuesday), is that the Biden/Harris ticket is likelier to have won than lost the election.  But even if it does, let’s not pretend that any road back from a dalliance with fascism – however buffoonish it may have been – is going to be short, either for the country or the higher education sector. 

And if Trump wins, God help us all.