Opinion | JD Vance Wanted to ‘Aggressively Attack’ American Universities. His Wish Has Been Trump’s Command.

June 03, 2025 1 min read

Thomas B. Edsall
New York Times

Excerpt: Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, is not a left-wing academic. He is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and the editor at large of Compact, a heterodox online magazine that leans to the right. In the case of Trump v. Harvard, Conti wrote in Compact, the university “is close to being an appendage of the Democratic Party.”

Despite Conti’s indisputably conservative credentials, he has come to believe that the Trump administration’s approach to higher education — and toward Harvard in particular — not only violates due process but also threatens to destroy the reputation of the United States as an international center of learning.

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