A great piece by Meghan O’Rourke here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/university-defunding-trump-rufo.html.

If you can get this up – I could only do it by subscribing to the New York Times – it paints an alarming picture, by a Yale professor, of what appears to be a sudden but long-gestated assault on US universities and their values by Trump and his gang. (American readers: is she right?) As an ex-academic myself – briefly at Yale as it happens – it struck me personally. But it should also be alarming to anyone else who values academic liberty and ‘free speech’, as Rightists profess to; including in Britain, where we can see signs – albeit lesser ones – of the same anti-academic prejudices in our own politics; as well as some of the same silly provocations – ‘non-platforming’ and the like – in our colleges.

(If you can’t access the article from this link, and don’t want to subscribe to the NYT – which however is pretty cheap, and of course well worth getting in any case – you should be able to find it elsewhere.)