Higher Ed Is the New Big Oil
Frederick Hess
April 7, 2025
Why are colleges in such a perilous position? Ask a Chevron executive.
America’s brand-name universities have become high-profile targets for Trump 2.0. Columbia University is being pummeled. The University of Pennsylvania has been hit with $175 million in sanctions. Harvard and Princeton are now in the crosshairs. Dozens of other institutions are on notice. Billions in research funding have been yanked.
Higher ed leaders are panicked, academic associations are lashing out in fury, and industry publications are full of allusions to Viktor Orbán’s playbook in Hungary. Graduate students are comparing higher ed’s plight to that of the Italian universities under Mussolini. Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber declared that this all amounts to “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.” Just the other week, Atlantic contributor Ian Bogost penned a cri de couer titled “The End of College Life,” warning the “damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.”
The soundtrack across the elite echelons of higher ed has been a plaintive cry of, “Why are they doing this to us?!”
The answer: Elite higher education has become the new “Big Oil.”
