The Trump administration is continuing its assault on higher education, but in a departure from its earlier high-profile fights with individual institutions like Harvard, it is now rewriting the federal rules that govern all universities and colleges. Rules are being proposed by the Education Department and other agencies to impose the administration’s preferred policies on thousands of schools — including on racial equity, transgender rights, immigration and antisemitism — or face funding cuts and possible disaccreditation. The pressure from the federal government comes at a time of intensifying austerity at many schools. Last week, one of New York’s most iconic universities, The New School, laid off 19 full-time faculty and 68 staff members. Along with coerced “voluntary” separations and early retirements since December 2025, these mass firings constitute a major gutting of The New School’s full-time faculty. “It’s a chilling message to all of academia,” says Jeremy Varon, professor of history at The New School and president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “We fear that the number will grow as universities act more and more like corporations, concerned above all with the bottom line.”
