As a college senior graduating in a matter of weeks, I can’t help but feel a little relieved that I’m getting out now. It’s not just because of “senioritis,” or an eagerness to put my feet in the working world, or the relief of one unburdened by weekly Canvas responses or ten-page essays or other academic tedium.
As I watch President Donald Trump’s attack on education unfold in real time, graduating now feels like seeking asylum. I’m grateful to be escaping as college campuses around the country become pawns for a government grasping for control.
Though I say all this, I really don’t have much to fear — I’m white. I’ve never been publicly outspoken about my political views, at least not beyond the scope of articles that probably only reach a meager social circle.
Despite not having much to fear, the point is that, for the plethora of students, professors, and faculty members who check the wrong marks according to the Trump administration, it’s a hell of a lot scarier. Columbia folding to ridiculous federal demands, and wrongfully persecuting people, enrages me. The president of my own school, Dr. Alexander Cartwright, kissing up to DOGE and partnering with ICE makes me ashamed to call myself a knight. This is beyond the lack of funding that the English department and Humanities in general already receive from a school that has sponsored three different buildings for the Engineering department, but delegates English to a single hallway.
The future looks bleak. It looks scarily reminiscent of regimes of the brutal, not-so-long-ago past. Yet throughout all of this, one university has decided it won’t just back down without a fight.
On April 21, it was announced that Harvard would be suing the Trump administration for its demands and threats to freeze federal funding. When I saw this headline pop up on my phone, I grinned. After an onslaught of atrocities happening at different universities, there was finally a school that would preserve its own right to freedom of thought, of assembly, of speech — a school that would preserve education over a government rife with lies and misinformation.
It’s hard not to see this lawsuit as a sign of hope. Historically, colleges have been the ideal soapboxes for important speakers and ideas, like the Civil Rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. If Harvard stands with its students, instead of siding with a corrupt government, then surely there’s some chance for us yet.
However, I can’t help but wonder if Harvard, being the kind of school it is, has some kind of privilege or ease in being the outspoken one. As an Ivy League institution, I expect Harvard to have a plethora of private donors that it can depend upon to raise funds. Perhaps Colombia does, too. But UCF, a public school in a state that gets redder by the second, might not have much of a fighting chance if its federal funds are cut. But do I accept this as an excuse?
There’s so much that’s uncertain and terrifying going into the remainder of Trump’s four-year term. He threatens the bastions of a society under the guise of asinine identity politics, attacking innocent and hardworking people through education, immigration, etc., to distract from the fact that he’s tanked the American economy and threatened tremulous relationships with our greatest allies.
If any of you remember your junior-year American History class, you have a basic idea of the general direction we’re headed. Trump’s not doing anything new. He’s not reinventing the wheel. He makes you think that he is “honest” and “undisguised,” as no president has been before, which might be the most incredible PR twist of all time. But I think a lot of us see him for what he is. Harvard sees him for what he is. And for the sake of America’s future, I sure hope that other universities start seeing him, too.