The battle going on between the Trump Administration and the Ivy League universities is not so much a battle of ideas as a struggle for power. With the rise of populism on both sides of the aisle, it is rare to find academic political thought front and center in US politics. Yet the Battle of Ivy League is all about the ‘long march through the institutions’. This idea came from the socialist ideas of Gramsci, Dutschke, and Mercuse.
The Long March
The ‘long march through the institutions’ is an idea coined by Rudi Dutschke in 1967. An East German socialist student activist, Dutschke was a colleague of Herbert Marcuse, the German-American philosopher. The idea, which finds roots in Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ idea, centers on infiltrating key institutions of society in order to promote socialist philosophy. A quick scan of key Western institutions and their evolution in recent decades will suggest that this long march has been abundantly successful. From the rabid rejection of a Students’ Union President for following the law in Ireland in 2017 to a report last year claiming that 85% of US universities restrict free speech, higher education across the globe is in lockstep suppressing ideas that vary from the socialist orthodoxy.
Socialist effects
The most immediate effects of this long march, at least in the US, was the creation of the federal Department of Education and the introduction of federally-guaranteed student loans.
The first caused a centralized governance structure for education in the US. As the rise of crypto has popularized, centralized structures are much easier to infiltrate than disparate, decentralized ones.
Socialist finance
The second inflated the revenue of higher education institutions and drove down the ability of graduates to become financially independent. With the federal government guaranteeing student loans, borrowings are now calculated by the government’s ability to repay, not the 18 year old student with no assets and an uncertain future career. The total cost of higher education tripled between 1980 and 2020 after adjusting for inflation. This increase in costs has led to excessively wealthy universities and excessively impoverished graduates. The combination of wealthy institutions and disgruntled graduates extended the long march’s socialist influence around the globe.
Institutionalizing socialist thought
The combination of indoctrination and wealth gives the socialist infiltrators a significant advantage. They have huge financial warchests to hire like-minded teaching staff, fund their own research, and wield their legacy prestige to bolster their ideology. They receive government backing from fellow infiltrators within federal institutions like the Department of Education. That labor leader, Randi Weingarten, was considered to run the Department of Education under Joe Biden is indicative of the influence wielded by socialist activists that benefits the Department and other infiltrated agencies.
Graduates over the edge
Increased tuition costs serve the socialist movement beyond an enlarged financial warchest, however. Ever increasing amounts of student loans have long-lasting effects on graduates. The average loan amount per student in the US is $38,375 but this varies wildly. It is not uncommon for 22 year old graduates to have loan amounts well into the six figures. They essentially begin their professional careers with a mortgage but no underlying asset. After four years of socialist-leaning teaching, these disgruntled graduates will be far more susceptible to the class warfare ideas of the socialist movement. The two-pronged approach of socialist education with the destruction of a graduate’s financial prospects is an effective way to ensure a growing socialist movement.
Socialist results
The effects of the long march are plain to see. The socialist class warfare ideas are everywhere on campus. The rise of Gender Studies programs – an application of Marx’s class warfare to the ideals of the sexual revolution – has directly correlated with the spread of the gender ideology movement. Recent Supreme Court cases have noted the rise of anti-Asian Affirmative Action in Ivy League universities. The ‘Tentifada’, a foreign-funded anti-Israel protest movement promoted anti-Semitic behavior. After a 50 year long march, the federal government is finally pushing back.
Trump fights back
Donald Trump won his second term largely on his opposition to gender ideology and his support for Israel. In his clampdown against the universities, he wields two weapons: discretion over student visas and federal funding.
Student visas
Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has unapologetically enforced his discretion over student visas. Under the new administration, any information that would have prevented the applicant from receiving a visa, is grounds for revocation. Most notably, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student, is being deported for organizing the Columbia-based ‘Tentifada’ last year. Khalil openly supports Hamas.
Federal funding
Trump is also wielding the Civil Rights Act against universities. In line with federal law and the Trump Administration’s policies, these institutions must prevent discrimination on campus, whether it is through Affirmative Action, the harassment of Jewish students during the ‘Tentifada’, or permitting biological males to compete in female sports and enter female-only spaces. The penalty for non-compliance is withdrawal of federal funding. As Harvard sues the government, it will argue that this is a breach of the First Amendment right to free expression. While the First Amendment is a higher law than the Civil Rights Act, it is hard to see the Supreme Court accept the claim that it is relevant in this case. In short, this is a slam dunk for the Trump Administration in its battle against socialist institutions.
Less than 100 days into the second Trump term, proponents of the ‘long march’ find their socialist movement teetering on the edge. Foreign activists are being deported. Federal funding is disappearing. The Department of Education is being dismantled. The socialist movement no longer has the power. Its opponents have marched back through the government, wielding socialist weapons to defeat a socialist movement.
