It’s impossible to exaggerate the degree of shock moves like these caused in American élite higher education. One could ask: How did universities not see the assault coming? In the early weeks of 2025, it had been little more than a year since the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned, after facing harsh questioning by members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about antisemitism on campus. Beginning in the first week of his second term, Donald Trump signed a raft of executive orders targeting higher education, by, among other things, ordering investigations into D.E.I. programs and antisemitism on college campuses. And hadn’t the new Vice-President, J. D. Vance, given a widely noticed address at a conservative convention in 2021 which he titled “Universities Are the Enemy”? But, from the universities’ point of view, conservatives’ unhappiness with them is eternal—in one form or another, it goes back more than a century—and it had never escalated to the level of an all-out war, including during Trump’s first Presidential term. It seemed inconceivable that the hostile rhetoric needed to be taken literally.