Essayist, poet, and Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about her recent New York Times piece, “The End of the University as We Know It.” O’Rourke discusses the situation at Columbia University; the Trump administration’s attacks on other universities, including the threats to deport international students for participation in pro-Palestine protests; the false notion of the radical college campus; and how the political balance on campuses has actually shifted in recent years. She also reflects on how the Cold War reshaped these institutions and made them national assets; the financial relationship between the university and the state; and why schools can’t just spend their endowments. O’Rourke reads from her essay.
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From the episode:
Whitney Terrell: So universities are still here. Our incoming students certainly expect them to be here for at least three more years, at least that’s how long our program is. So why are you telling them the university’s gonna end?
Meghan O’Rourke: Okay, well, there’s two things here. First of all, there’s a kind of pun in the title, or a double entendre, rather than a pun. In “The End of the University [as We Know It]”, I offer a history of what the goals of the university, the research university, in particular, were, which were to advance strategic national interest, especially since the Cold War. The other thing I’m talking about when I say the end of the university is that I argue that the research university as it has existed in America since the 1940s, and by that we mean what’s called the Cold War University, a university that had federal funds poured into it, might be about to disappear. So I don’t mean that there won’t be students next year, although note that in many places, or rather in some places, there will be no incoming graduate students, that has been announced. What might disappear, or is threatening to disappear, is the long-standing idea that the federal government ought to help fund university research without overbearing federal control and without using the threat of withholding that funding to dictate speech on campus. That is now under direct assault by the Trump administration.
WT: You know, I feel so sad for our chancellor, because we just became—it was a big push to become an R1 university, which is what you’re talking about, and that has to do with getting more grants and more federal funding, and the whole university worked its ass off. We made a big announcement last year, and now it’s suddenly like, ‘Oh, that’s the wrong thing to be.’ We got in the door on the R1 thing late, I guess.
MO: Just at the wrong moment. Yeah, sadly.
V.V. Ganeshananthan: I mean, I don’t know how many university administrators I’m feeling too badly for these days, because they are also, as a collective, really failing to stand up for shit at this point. But anyway, I’m sure we’ll get to that. There are three parts maybe, to the way that Trump is attacking universities: the funding, as you’ve mentioned, then intellectual freedom and those two things tied as you described, and a third involving eliminating or deporting foreign students, most of whom, as far as I can tell, are being targeted for their pro-Palestinian speech. So when you talk about funding, you mentioned attending a meeting at Yale, you described this in your essay, and you listened to “a bracing description of the financial implications of the government edicts from the Trump administration.” What was mentioned in that meeting and how did those things affect you?
MO: Yeah, so broadly speaking, universities like Yale are concerned about three big things, just like not the three you just mentioned, but another three. I’m not supposed to say too much about what happened in that meeting, but I can say the buckets that everyone is concerned about. The first is the federal government threatening to pull, or pulling funding from what is largely medical and scientific research that it has historically given and has actually promised to universities, as in the case of its announcement of pulling $400 million from Columbia a few weeks ago. The second bucket of concern is the proposed reduction of the reimbursement of what are called indirect costs to university research in the sciences. This went from a rate at Yale of something like 67 percent to a flat 15 percent nationwide. A flat fee doesn’t really make sense, because there’s different overhead costs depending on what city you’re in, etc. The third category of change is the proposed endowment tax, or rather tax on endowment income, which appears to be underway. In 2017, Trump passed an act that meant that endowments of certain types are now taxed at 1.4 percent but last year, then Senator JD Vance suggested raising that to 35 percent. If that happens, that’s going to take a big chunk out of universities’ annual income.
I think universities haven’t explained indirect costs very well to the American people, so many people believe something like what Elon Musk tweeted when he said, like, “Can you believe these universities with these billion-dollar endowments are getting kind of a free ride on all these overhead costs?” The reality is much more complicated, and one of the things that indirect costs do is allow us to conduct many kinds of research, and this really goes back to that Cold War goal of funding universities to basically create American leadership in research and technology. The other thing to understand about the endowment taxes, it’s a tax on the income generated by the endowments, and it only is going to apply to universities, or currently only applies to universities that have an endowment of greater than $500,000 per student. So yeah, but those are the three buckets that everyone is concerned about.
WT: Those indirect costs are a big deal. We got an email about it. I mean, it’s not a big deal in the humanities, but for science and medical research, you know, that’s how they pay for their laboratory stuff and for, I think, if I’m wrong about this, grad students and assistantships and all that stuff, and people who are going to work in the labs who are grad students, which is how they pay for college. There’s a whole system around this money.
MO: Yeah, and I think to your point like, this isn’t public charity, right? Let’s go back to that idea of the research university. We’ll talk about this more, I know, but from the beginning, America has really invested in universities as a way of tying knowledge production and national interest. We come out of the cold war in 1945 and basically, this becomes a really big commitment, because when we do that science at Yale, we’re just—
WT: Well, guess who’s not interested in the Cold War anymore. Our freaking administration now.
MO: Well, totally, totally. And I was talking about this with a historian who was saying, like, in a way, this is the real end of the Cold War. Like, we thought it ended a while ago, but this is the moment where we may be coming out of a moment, kind of an era, rather, where we trusted in and in a unified way, believed in the goal of the research university and leaving it alone to do that work. Yeah.
VVG: I think that this Cold War framing is really helpful. It’s also interesting to think about what you say about this proposed endowment tax in light of, right—Like, there is a line, some of which I believe in, where people are sort of like, well, no, universities don’t spend their endowments. People sort of say no, save your money, so many institutions save their money for a rainy day, like it’s raining now, what are you saving for? And to think about what might be down the line, even, that could be an escalation of what’s currently going on is really helpful in a disturbing way. Those indirect costs; I’ve been talking to my friends in the sciences about the ways that this affects their labs and the different nuances of this, and they were talking about the way that each school has a negotiated rate, and that it’s much closer to—I don’t know what the negotiated rate is at the University of Minnesota. I was just chatting about this with a scientist friend at a different institution over the weekend, and he was unpacking this for me. But it seems like, yeah, the idea that all of our institutions are the same and should be operating in the same way, or that keeping the lights on is frippery of a sort is really ridiculous.
WT: There’s so many examples. Yeah.
MO: Yeah, and the other thing I think is important to say—I’ve reported a lot on science for my book The Invisible Kingdom, and I was actually in the middle of starting to write a piece about the NIH, maybe reforms needed with the NIH, before this administration came along, and I may still do that, but one of the things you need to understand about the NIH, too, is that that funding that is coming through the NIH is incredibly onerous to deal with. There’s all kinds of paperwork and rules and regulations and federal regulations that come with it, so some of those costs are even kind of generated by the fact that you’re doing business, not internally within your university, but with the federal government. So there’s that piece too. And then, as you say, like keeping the lights on and having a space in New York City is really different from having it in San Francisco is really different from even having it in New Haven is different from having it in Kansas.
WT: I just wanted to give an example. There are many, many diseases that aren’t financially remunerative for a public company like Pfizer or somebody to do research on, right? Because the numbers aren’t rough, there aren’t enough people who have the problem, right? And the places where you get discoveries for things like that are in the universities, and then that creates a tremendous public benefit. I mean, our university system has been—it’s the envy of the world, up until now, you know? I mean, people come here to study.
MO: Yeah, it helped launch all kinds of things. You know, our space program, medical research, literary magazines, global diplomacy, I think our understanding of radar came from university research, spending by the federal government. The Internet came from DARPA, but a lot of other investments in the university have produced our greatest inventions and much of our science.
WT: You’ve mentioned endowments, right? According to US News and World Report, Yale had an endowment north of $40 billion in 2023. Yale is known for having a large endowment, and you would think that it would be uniquely insulated from this. And yet, this is what we’re talking about, right? This intertwining of the federal government and universities during the past century, how that’s important, how that’s led to discoveries and progress, really. So, I mean, we’ve already talked about this, but I wondered if you could read a section of your essay that sort of directly addresses this.
MO: Yeah, sure, but can I explain a little bit about the endowment first? And this goes, with something Sugi was saying, because it’s not just this—There’s a really big misconception that people have, which is that the endowment is this kind of rainy day fund that we could just dip into at any time, especially when we need it. Well, there’s a way much clearer—and I don’t have, by the way, you know, I have not seen all the details of the Yale endowment, but I have an endowment for The Yale Review of the magazine that I run, there’s certain funds that I’m allowed to access. And what is really important to understand is that the endowment at a place like Yale, it’s not one thing. It’s not a fund waiting to be reached into, but rather a group of gifts from donors over a long time, often with quite specific parameters, and mandates. The money from those gifts is then invested, and the budget that you get is the income from that investment, right? So I have an endowment for The Yale Review. If I spend that endowment, I will soon no longer have any budget, right? Rather, my budget is the income generated by that endowment.
Also, one of the things that kind of gets overlooked is that, you know the key principle of endowments, as the organizational studies professor—I think her name is Elizabeth Popp Berman, and she’s the author of a book called Creating the Market University, which is really interesting. She recently wrote that, you know, a condition of the gift usually is that it is held to generate future income. So you can’t just go in and take it. I’m not allowed to take that. I can raise money, that’s called spendable money, right? So the big endowment of Yale means that it has a lot of income generated every year, and that sustains this huge breadth of the research in a university, but you’re often not allowed to seriously dip into that endowment. There might be little pockets where we could take money and plug it, and that’s a big, a big issue.
WT: You can’t spend the principal.
MO: You can’t spend the principal, and also there’s something called generational neutrality, which is built in, which is that you can’t do that, because then you would harm the future, right? So every era thinks it’s in a bad position. Like, five years ago, COVID, we would have been like, ‘Oh, my God, we need to spend the endowment. Vietnam War, ‘We need to spend the endowment,’ whatever it is.
So Yale, obviously, I think, you know, we’re not—Yale is going to exist. But I’m really worried about places like University of California, San Francisco, where they have I think it’s a $3 billion endowment, more or less. They do incredible research into HIV, long COVID, multiple sclerosis, genome editing. They’re going to get hit really hard by these things that they go through.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara.
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Opinion | The View Inside Trump’s Assault on Universities – The New York Times: The End of the University as We Know It by Meghan O’Rourke • The Yale Review | Meghan O’Rourke • Yale’s Unsafe Spaces | The New Yorker • The Invisible Kingdom (2023) • Sun in Days (2019) • Once (2013) • The Long Goodbye (2012) • Halflife (2008)
Others:
Creating the Market University | Princeton University Press by Elizabeth Popp Berman • 20 Colleges With the Biggest Endowments | The Short List: Colleges | U.S. News