Columbia University is just the start of a long-brewing backlash. On Monday of this week the Trump administration's Department of Education put 60 schools on notice that they will lose federal funding if they don't do more to crack down on antisemitism on campus.

“The Department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year. University leaders must do better,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “U.S. colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by U.S. taxpayers. That support is a privilege and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”

On Friday the DOE sent another letter to more than 50 schools warning them that discriminatory DEI programs would no longer be tolerated.

“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “We will not yield on this commitment.”

Most of the new inquiries are focused on colleges’ partnerships with the PhD Project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups get degrees in business with the goal of diversifying the business world.

Department officials said that the group limits eligibility based on race and that colleges that partner with it are “engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.”

The group of 45 colleges facing scrutiny over ties to the PhD Project include major public universities such as Arizona State, Ohio State and Rutgers, along with prestigious private schools like Yale, Cornell, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Colleges are clearly getting the message which is why many of them put hiring freezes in place this week, in anticipation of being short on cash very soon.

Harvard University, the University of Washington and the University of Pittsburgh are among the latest institutions of higher education to announce hiring freezes, citing the uncertainty around federal funding.

Leaders at a growing number of universities across the country say they are looking for ways to cut costs and buy time, as questions swirl around President Trump's efforts to slash financial support for some schools.

Unfortunately for many of these schools, they are only now realizing that they don't have a lot of friends to take up any slack if their budgets are cut.

Prestigious universities have come to find adversaries in many worlds, among the working class, among rich alumni, among highly educated progressives who find them self-regarding. “Universities are good targets for resentment,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University who has written about modern campus politics. “They take such enormous pride in how many people they reject.

“We at universities have not done enough over the years to pay attention to those groups — conservative groups, religious groups — around the country that are essential parts of a democratic culture. The isolation makes us very vulnerable.”

I think vulnerable is the right word for it. Too many groups of Americans see these schools as hostile to their views and identities. The schools have politicized themselves and their students, but that means they are liable to take a big hit when the pendulum swings back the other way, as it is right now.

This isn't just outside supposition either. Patrick Healy from the NY Times opinion page spoke to a college president this week who thinks administrators and professors have taken too much for granted.

I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?

He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.

It goes without saying that no one should have to hire a bodyguard to do their job, but of course this is not a problem that is limited to college presidents. The current president has had two assassins attempt to kill him and Elon Musk is certainly getting lots of death threats right now.

But it's also important to note that it's not just the right that is upset with colleges at this moment. The woke excess has been too much for a lot of traditional liberals too. Columnist Bret Stephens pointed this out.

The people I know who are most disenchanted with Penn, Barnard, Columbia and so on are its alumni, and I don’t just mean the Bill Ackmans of the world — I also mean well-educated liberals who just became disgusted with their alma mater’s tolerance for all the campus bullshit. And that points to a deeper problem for the universities: It isn’t just MAGA voters they’ve lost. It’s also a lot of thoughtful, well-educated people who feel sick at seeing how universities have so often lost their way, how pedagogy has been replaced by ideology, how students have become zealots.

Stephens added that the woke extremism also contributes to the sense many regular people have that universities are places of hostility to them and their beliefs.

...colleges don’t contribute as they once did to the creation of a common civilization with common cultural touchstones. Worse, they sometimes seem to contribute to the antithesis: students and faculty wedded to the idea that Western civilization is nothing except oppressive, colonialist, racist, exploitative and so on. That’s not only false, but it also invites the very reactionary tendencies we’re seeing with the Trump administration’s assault on the universities.

There's no doubt the Trump administration is leading the current pushback, but the bigger problem is that these schools don't have as many allies as they might have believed. The extreme opinions that are common on campus represent about 15-20% of the population. That leaves a large majority of people who just aren't going to jump to their rescue when colleges are under attack. 

Like all generalizations, it's an over-simplification. Universities are big places and different departments have diversity within them. Not everyone on campus is a rabid anti-capitalist who feels mostly distaste for their own country. And some schools have done a good job preserving free speech and responding to activists who go too far. 

But there's no doubt the critical theory folks, i.e. the woke, have become the loudest voices on a lot of campuses. The backlash to this was inevitable and in my view necessary to preserve the kind of actual liberalism (esp. tolerance for differing ideas) that colleges are supposed to be about.