The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy hosted a panel with experts on Wednesday to talk about the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, during which he signed 140 executive orders, some of which targeted higher education.
The two experts for the panel were Jeffrey Jenkins, a provost professor of political science, public policy and law and William Resh, an associate professor at C.C. Crawford Professor in Management and Performance, who discussed the Department of Government Efficiency, tariffs and the future of higher education in these times.
USC has been hit by federal funding cuts that have exacerbated the university’s already shrinking budget. With research funds in jeopardy, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts being slashed and increasing dissatisfaction among faculty were key talking points in how the Trump administration’s first 100 days impacted USC’s spring semester.
“[Trump’s] administration has really focused on attacking some very elite universities: Ivy League universities, Harvard, in particular, Columbia, some others and placing restrictions on the federal grants that those universities received and [tell them] they need to do X, Y and Z in order to get this money,” Jenkins said.
Resh said there was “a lot of fear.”
“You’re seeing some acquiescence as a function of our first mover status that the president has,” he said.
USC has largely fallen in line with the demands of the Trump Administration, removing DEI-related wording in programs, integrating the Office of Inclusion and Diversity into the Culture Team and then replacing DEI with “community” as a unifying value from the Culture Team, the latter of which President Folt claimed was a change that had been in the works for “almost six months.”
“There’s been a general lack of leadership at a lot of universities over some important issues, and I don’t think that we should have to pay or at least I don’t think we should have to give up our academic freedom for that,” Jenkins said.
“If you can’t stand on principle, then maybe you don’t deserve the chair,” Resh said. “There seems to be a lot of ‘leaders’ within our higher education institutions that really are unwilling to stand on principle.”
Jenkins said universities felt the urge to comply because of the 15% overhead the federal government has on grants for higher education.
“That’s caused a lot of problems at a number of universities,” Jenkins said. “But at a lot of research universities, we’re moving into an era of austerity where budgets are being cut.
“Leaders are being very risk-averse because they’re worried about the level of funds coming in, especially research universities that are tied to large medical centers,” he continued.
“Ultimately, to get some of these dollars back — that Columbia got back and some other places — you have to give up some of your academic freedom,” Jenkins said. “That’s the cost of getting some of these dollars back.”
Resh said he felt Trump skewed the meaning and purpose of education in the country, which he said that the nation as a whole needs to rethink.
“It used to be, not just towards whether or not you produce an ‘X’ amount of skilled workers, but also the socialization of our citizenry,” he said. “From a civic stand[point], having an informed citizenry that is able to make informed decisions at the ballot box, and also in terms of civic engagement and to be actively civically engaged.”
However, the threats and cuts to higher education aren’t the first things that Jenkins said comes to mind when thinking about Trump’s actions during his second first 100 days.
“When I think about what stands out in my mind for his first 100 days, really two things come to mind: DOGE and tariffs,” Jenkins said.
According to Jenkins, Trump has used tariffs as a “cudgel” in an effort to force foreign nations into “reconstructing foreign trade around a position that he thought was more fair for the United States.”
Jenkins also said he believes Trump supporters are getting what they signed up for.
“Trump essentially said what he was going to do if he were elected,” he said. “And he’s doing what he said he was going to do.”
He also said he felt the tariffs have actually backfired on the Trump administration, with negative impacts rippling throughout the global economy.
“They created a great deal of uncertainty in different areas of the American economy,” Jenkins said. “Business leaders don’t like uncertainty.”
In addition to crackdowns on higher education and increased economic turbulence due to tariffs, Trump has also pushed to crack down on immigration, though not necessarily more than has been done before.
“A lot of attention has been spent on undocumented people being in the country and the degree to which we can identify them and remove them from the United States,” Jenkins said, “It’s not clear to me that the rate at which we are removing people like this is really all that different than previous administrations.”