Letters from an American - May 24, 2025

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

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May 24, 2025. On Thursday, the Trump administration told Harvard University that because it had not handed over information on foreign students' protest activities, violent activity, and coursework, the university had lost the privilege of enrolling foreign students. Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, said this decision was based on the administration's determination to enforce the law and root out the evils of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in society

and campuses. This argument has always been a thinly veiled way to use actual anti-Semitism to destroy universities, a reality illustrated by Trump's hosting last night of cryptocurrency investors whose coins are literally named things like the Jews. Harvard promptly sued noting that the administration has engaged in an unprecedented and retaliatory attack on academic freedom at Harvard, and calling the attack a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

With a stroke of a pen, the lawsuit reads, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard's student body, international students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission. Hours later, Judge Allison Burroughs of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted Harvard's request for a temporary restraining order, barring the administration's change from taking effect. She wrote that the new policy would cause immediate and irreparable injury to Harvard. While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university famous

for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump's attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States. That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of Westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as Westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East,

and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God's inspiration. One hundred years ago tomorrow, that cultural impulse surfaced in a national spectacle that would feed directly into today's attacks on education. On May 25, 1925, a grand jury in Tennessee indicted 24-year-old football coach and science teacher John T. Scopes for violating Tennessee's law, passed in May of that year, that made it unlawful to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals. In other words, Tennessee had banned the teaching

of human evolution. The law, known as the Butler Act, was sponsored by John Washington Butler, a farmer and head of the New World Christian Fundamentals Association, which sought to establish the word of God as revealed in the Bible at the heart of American life. Butler later said he didn't know anything about evolution, but had heard that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense. Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signed the law to please rural Tennesseans and their representatives, but he allegedly did not think the law would ever be enforced. The American Civil Liberties Union recruited Scopes to test the law, just as a local man from Dayton, Tennessee thought a trial there would give the town welcome publicity.

The resulting Scopes trial became a national referendum on modernism and education versus a fundamentalist religious urge to move the country backward. Scopes ultimately was found guilty, but the trial showed religious fundamentalists as incompatible with the modern world. While some fundamentalists backed away from the public sphere after the trial, others began to try to transform American business, just as Bruce Barton suggested could be done in his 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, which showed Jesus as the founder of modern business.

In his 2016 The Blessings of Business, historian Darren Graham traces how fundamentalist leaders began to work with big business, especially as Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged traditional racial and gender lines. The New Deal seemed to undermine the influence of the Church by providing federal welfare policies. The Church League of America made common cause with the businessmen who opposed the business regulation in the New Deal, arguing that Christianity elevates and dignifies human personality in contrast

to the so-called collectivist or Marxist doctrines. Free religion, free enterprise are inseparable. One cannot exist without the other. William F. Buckley Jr. applied this line of thinking to higher education in his 1951 God and Man at Yale, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. In it, Buckley argued that Yale University was corrupted by atheism and collectivism, not because its faculty actually called for atheism and collectivism, not because its faculty actually called for atheism and collectivism, but because their embrace of fact-based arguments supported the government that had grown out of the New Deal. Modern universities embrace the Enlightenment tradition of a free search for

knowledge in the belief that informed discussion, fed by a wide range of ideas, was the best way to reach toward truth. As ideas were tested in public debate, people would be able to choose the best of them. This was the basis of academic freedom. Buckley denied this superstition. Truth would not win out in a free contest of ideas, he said. Students would simply be led astray. For proof, he offered the fact that most Americans had chosen the New Deal and continued to support its extension. He called for Yale to replace faculty

that believed in academic freedom with those who would advance the causes of Christianity and free enterprise. Government analyst McGeorge Bundy called the book, dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author. He recognized it as clearly an attempt to start an assault on the freedom of one of America's greatest and most conservative universities. America's post-World War II university system was the envy of the world,

driving innovation and medical and scientific research that made the U.S. economy boom and raised standards of living around the world. But the idea that the modern government imposed the will of what Ronald Reagan called a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital on the laws of God and the natural laws of the United States was a powerful tool to undermine the modern government. In a 1971 memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce, lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote

that the American economic system, which he defined as the free enterprise system, capitalism, and the profit system, is under broad attack. Powell identified college campuses as the center of this attack and called for setting up right-wing think tanks and speaker series to advance the interests of business, restoring what he called balance to textbooks, and for pressure on colleges to appoint right-wing faculty members, all in the name of strengthening

of both academic freedom on the campus and of the values which have made America the most productive of all societies. As Republicans embraced economic individualism and religion, they also embraced anti-intellectualism. Their version was not unlike that of the early colonists, in which rural Americans, especially those in the West, claimed their evangelical religion made them more worthy than the urban Americans in the East, who far outnumbered them. When Republican presidential candidate John McCain tapped evangelical Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate in

2008, he acknowledged the growing power of that demographic. Increasingly, far-right activists insisted that all the pillars of society, including universities, had been corrupted by the liberal ideas behind the modern government, and that those pillars must be destroyed. In 2012, college dropout Charlie Kirk and Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery Montgomery, formed Turning Point USA to purge college campuses of those faculty members they saw as purveyors of dangerous ideas. After Trump's election in 2016, the organization launched the Professor Watch List, which listed faculty members it claimed, without evidence, discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom. I was one of the first on the list.

That impulse to purge society of the institutions that support modern liberal government became a full-throated attack on universities. In a 2021 interview, then-Senate candidate J.D. Vance said that the American right has lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they've ever been. We've lost big business. We've lost finance. We've lost the culture. We've lost big business. We've lost finance. We've lost the culture. We've lost the academy. And if we're going to actually really affect real change in the country, it will require

us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class. I don't think there's sort of a compromise that we're going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we're going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we're going to keep losing. We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power," he said. That same year, Vance told the National Conservatism Conference that, "...we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. We live in a world that has been made, effectively, by university knowledge,

and to rebuild the nation along the lines of white Christian nationalism, the universities must be destroyed. Vance told the audience, the professors are the enemy. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court decided that an American president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. And the next day, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the key organizer of Project 2025, went on Steve Bannon's podcast War Room to tell supporters that America's radical white Christian nationalists were going to win.

We're in the process of taking this country back. He said the country needed a strong leader because the radical left has taken over our institutions. And now the Trump administration is dismantling higher education. As Harvard said in its lawsuit, there is no lawful justification for the government's unprecedented revocation of Harvard's certificate for accepting foreign students, and the government has not offered any. We are in the process of the second American Revolution,

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said last July, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. Thanks for watching!