After returning to office last January, President Donald Trump made it clear to America’s universities that federal money comes with strings attached. Since then, the administration has frozen or withdrawn billions of dollars in federal funding from top schools and launched investigations into them, using its leverage to influence admissions, hiring, and DEI policies. The consequences have been stark: According to the Academic Freedom Index, institutional autonomy in the United States dropped sharply last year, placing it on a steeper descent than those seen in Hungary, Turkey, and India.
A new study argues that this attack didn’t come out of nowhere. In the paper recently published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, researchers show how corporate interests, including oil companies, have sought to influence universities for at least half a century, using big donations to shape research agendas. That weakened schools’ defenses against outside influences, the authors say, paving the way for Trump’s attack.
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