There is no name for Donald Trump and Elon Musk¡¯s unfolding chainsaw massacre of American higher education and research. No name, because the so-called free world has never witnessed anything like this before: the extrajudicial detentions of overseas students, the financial punishment of universities that permitted Gaza protests, the ideological shutdowns of ideologically impermissible research topics.

But terrifying ¨C and, occasionally, ironic ¨C as this reign of populist dictatorship and anti-intellectual outrage is, the spectacle that is Donald Trump should not convince us that we are witnessing a huge departure from the established historical trajectory in US higher education. And even more than the current blitzkrieg, it is this larger trajectory that makes it impossible not to feel that the great American century of global leadership in academic excellence and innovative research is over.

In 2023, the Chinese-born AI pioneer and founder of the dataset Imagenet, Fei-Fei Li, published a deeply personal memoir, The Worlds I see: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. It describes her father¡¯s 1989 decision, when she was still in her early teens, to leave a happy family in China¡¯s Sichuan province for the US. Three years later, she and her mother joined him, and her austere immigrant life in New Jersey was followed by an elite higher education at Princeton and Caltech and, ultimately, the endowed Sequoia Capital professorship she now holds in Stanford¡¯s computer science department.

Particularly known for her work on the ethical use of AI for the welfare of humanity, Li was a board member of Twitter, before ¨C note this ¨C that board was disbanded when Musk bought the company, renamed it X and declared himself its sole director. ?

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Would a family from China¡¯s hinterland feel the need to make a similar journey today in order to give their child a chance at a career in a world-changing technology?

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Ample evidence to the contrary is offered by Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot widely considered to have eclipsed ChatGPT in both efficacy and cost. Born in 1985, Wenfeng grew up in a small city in China¡¯s Guandong province. He got his bachelor¡¯s and master¡¯s degrees at Zhejiang University, which is located in Hangzhou, home to Alibaba and many other tech companies.

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Even more of those companies are clustered in Guangdong¡¯s Greater Bay Area: China¡¯s answer to , only with vastly superior manufacturing capacity. Nor is it any coincidence that this area is also a major educational hub. Hong Kong contains many highly ranked universities, and?Shenzhen?is committed to building many more.

AI has been a strategic priority for the Chinese government, and it has already far exceeded the US in the training of AI scientists. Seen in this light, DeepSeek¡¯s outperformance of OpenAI and ChatGPT seems illustrative of Chinese science and tech¡¯s inevitable progress towards outshining its US counterpart. Trump¡¯s war on science seems likely to hasten that progress considerably.

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That war is, of course, part of Trump¡¯s populist harnessing of the power of popular resentment against elites, to the benefit of an oligarchy of business forces, primarily those that former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis recently described as the ¡°techno-feudalists¡±. There are certain similarities to China¡¯s Cultural Revolution, but in more recent years China¡¯s still authoritarian leaders have driven ever-increasing excellence in research and higher education.

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The particular irony of the attack by a populist dictator on US higher education is that populism was one of founding forces behind the American university.

Historian David Labaree points out that US higher education started out humble and parochial. A college, which often promoted the Christian faith, gave a sleepy country town a solid claim on a railway stop, a county hall or even a state capitol, raising the value of local real estate. If you¡¯ve ever wondered why just about every small town in Ohio has a college or even a university, there¡¯s your answer.

This history continues to live in the deep community engagement of higher education institutions across the land, from small community colleges to the Ivy League ¨C manifested most strikingly in their commitment to collegiate sports and local alumni support. Such commitments historically protected against potential accusations of elitism. As Labaree wrote in his 2017 book?A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education, the message was: ¡°This is your college, working for you. We produce the engineers who design your bridges, the teachers who teach your children, and the farmers who produce your food.¡±

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The elitism arose from the widespread adoption in the 20th?century of the German research university model. Joining a global community doing cutting-edge research gave US institutions a cosmopolitan stature and a global reputation, even as ¨C far less conspicuous to the world ¨C they retained their civic pride and community support.?

Yet over the past couple of decades, an unlikely consortium of forces have destroyed this highly successful nexus of the populist, the practical and the elite. The increasing corporatisation of the university, with its cadre of highly paid administrators, and the reduction in public funding, initially motivated by nothing more culturally divisive than the pursuit of lower taxes, has caused tuition to skyrocket. And the consequent erosion of popular faith in the practical value of higher education, except as preparation for a handful of immediately lucrative professions, has resulted in colleges¡¯ supposed liberal elitism alienating many members of the public, including alumni ¨C especially since the breakout of Gaza protests on campuses.

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We cannot lose sight of the fact that, as president, Trump has inherited this climate of pervasive mistrust and disenchantment. Of course, he has manipulated and exploited it in a way only a powerful populist dictator can, but it started to take shape long before his ascendancy.

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As someone who studied and taught in the US for many years, I refuse to give up the hope that America¡¯s institutions will push back. I am optimistic that the administration will eventually be held to the constitution and the law, and universities will reach deals with the government to stave off the worst of the damage, relenting to some demands, deceiving and dissembling wherever they can (such as playing around with trouble-giving terminology on their statements and websites).

However, the cynic in me worries that the larger climate of disenchantment with college will not change even if and when Trump¡¯s initial onslaught ends. After all, without large and highly unlikely government subsidies, tuition is not coming down any time soon. ????

The most terrifying aspect of the situation we are in is that this is probably the worst time in history to lose faith in higher education. Even as digital culture and social media have created a false sense of mass empowerment ¨C of which the very online MAGA movement is the most obvious manifestation ¨C it has turned the masses into unsuspecting markets for the techno-feudalists and made many of their skills irrelevant in the workplace. Many millions will therefore need to retrain and re-educate themselves continually just to keep afloat, as the techno-feudalists get ever more unprecedentedly rich.

In this context, nothing feels more ominously ironic than the assault on the Department of Education overseen by Musk, the arch techno-feudalist of our time. How committed the red states will be to replicating the kinds of access programmes that the federal department has funded is a grim guessing game.

In short, the clever stimulation of popular resentment against the perceived elitism of higher education only leaves the masses to the mercy of oligarchs who have aced the populism game. In the inhuman world of patterns and algorithms trained only to maximise profits for the techno-feudalists, there will be no mercy for humanity.

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?is professor of English and creative writing at?Ashoka University. The views in this essay are personal. His most recent book is .