Key HE lessons from Trump victory

Donald Trump startled many in snatching back the keys to the White House this week, with some significant implications for Australian HE.

The manner and magnitude of Trump’s victory and the outspoken rhetoric of his ticket in seeking to ‘destroy’ and/or ‘reclaim’ universities and heavily tax their financial reserves has significant implications here, particularly with an Australian election imminent in 2025.

While Western Sydney VC George Williams and a few other voices have pointed to the need for universities to reframe their relationship with the community in recent months, a much larger commitment will be required if the sector is to stave off the types of extreme intervention that appears to be electorally mandated for Trump’s next term.
 

1. If we weren’t convinced that caps were locked in for at least a couple of years, then we should be now. In case it wasn’t already obvious across many jurisdictions and eras, there are clearly votes to be harvested when blaming immigrants for a nation’s woes. We may not be about to finish building a wall, but we don’t need to – both major parties have already flagged the importance of appearing ‘muscular’ in cutting down immigration numbers in their pre-election warm up. Expect international students to carry the can for rent prices from Quambatook to Tangambalanga – evidence is clearly no longer essential to build political capital.
2. Higher education domestic fees, university thriftiness and student debt are major issues. At a time when cost of living trumps (pun intended) all else for voters, even our long term existence on the planet, the cost of degrees is going to keep being an issue. In a mid-year poll for New American, US residents offered divergent views on higher ed, but all agreed the price of a degree was too high. While the JRG doesn’t appear to be well enough understood for anyone to put pressure on the actual price of degrees, the wise expenditure of fee revenue, university governance failures and student debt will all be significant political issues.
3. If the sector is ever going to understand the need to write its own narrative, it needs to happen now. A Gallup poll in the US and the New American poll both showed deep divisions between political conservatives who distrusted and often devalued or disliked higher education, and the progressive side of politics who still thinks degrees are the bees knees (because they mostly have one already). HE institutions need to rapidly find ways to prove they are relevant and valuable to middle Australia, or risk being caught by offshoots of America’s anti-university culture wars. At present, the sector is a collective choir of conscripts without a songsheet. A more vulnerable political position is difficult to imagine – until you look at the US and realise it could be so much worse (see point 4).
4. It’s a great time to hire staff from the US. Sure, lots of Australian universities are facing tough times right now, but that’s going to look insignificant if JD Vance lives up to his rhetoric. In 2021 he proposed to destroy the universities’ and he has riffed on similar, albeit slightly less dramatic actions on HE in the campaign, sheeting a significant chunk of the blame for America’s ills home to higher ed. He has already attempted to lift the tax on Harvard’s endowment from 1.4% to 35% – a move now likely as Republicans move towards controlling the Capitol as well as the White House. The future of US University endowments is now very much under threat, challenging the funding of the entire sector. Trump has promised to take HE on directly, ‘reclaiming universities’ and promising to “fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs.” It is a bleak, bleak four years ahead for US universities.
5. International partnerships, recruitment and defence contracts are less certain. It is not the time to bet the Vice-Chancellery on submarine courses, lest The Donald decide to rip up AUKUS, but US action on tariffs, foreign policy and immigration is likely to create opportunities as well as challenges for international collaboration.

Strategies revolving around sitting-on-hands until everyone works out what is happening next year worked for many institutions during COVID, but are no longer an option. If Australian higher education institutions want a chance to wrest back some control over their destinies, sector leaders need to convince communities of their institution’s role and value, before the conservative antipathy to higher education institutions takes root internationally.