By Daniel Béland

September 23, 2025

Every few years for the past 20 years, I’ve attended the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), which gathers more than 5000 in-person participants and a few hundred online. This year, the annual rendezvous for U.S. and international political scientists, including a large contingent of Canadians, was held in Vancouver.

The difference this year was that the anguish provoked by the  Trump administration’s addition of American universities to its hit list of cultural and economic pillars that, ironically, make America great in the eyes of the world, was palpable. These policies are part of a genuine crackdown on higher education that takes multiple forms.

First, the administration has filed lawsuits and targeted billions of dollars in funding in an attempt to influence policy at universities on issues ranging from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies and LGBTQ+ rightsto immigration, university leadership and academic curricula. This has led to a spectacular showdown between the Trump administration and Harvard University, which the latter won earlier this month when a federal court overturned billions in funding cuts imposed by the Trump administration.

Second, on the immigration policy front, universities have reported seeing student visas revoked for things like participation in demonstrations as well as criminal violations, some of them as minor as traffic infractions. The Trump administration also unsuccessfully tried to ban Harvard from welcoming international students while, more generally, creating a sense of insecurity among visa-holding students. According to what several of my U.S. colleagues told me in Vancouver earlier this month, many visa-holding graduate students and faculty members decided to skip the APSA meeting because they were afraid they might not be allowed to reenter the United States on their way back.

Third, we can list several other factors that have hurt the U.S. academic community, including restrictive changes in student loan policies, cuts in funding directed at environmental and, especially, DEI programs, which have faced a direct and relentless attack from the White House since the very first day of the Trump presidency.

Earlier this month, the assassination in plain daylight and in front of a large Utah Valley University campus crowd of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has further increased the negative attention of the Trump White House and the MAGA movement towards universities. For instance, under pressure from Trump supporters, universities fired or suspended faculty members and other university who had made “inappropriate” public comments in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder.

Yet, some Republicans are going much further than simply going after those who made such comments, and are demanding that the memory of Kirk, a highly controversial figure, to be celebrated on university campuses. For instance, two state senators in Oklahoma recently co-sponsored a bill that would force each higher education institution in their state to build on their main campus a memorial to the slain conservative activist that would have to feature of statue of Kirk.

Although in Canada, universities do not face an outright political attack, this does not mean that some of the trends witnessed south of the border are not present here.

Although this may be an extreme case, it points to the fact that, during the second Trump presidency, U.S. universities are more than ever a political battlefield in the culture wars. These negative conservative sentiments towards U.S. academia are hardly new, and they can be traced back to the campus protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s or, more recently, the publication of influential books such as The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.

These sentiments have intensified in recent decades before reaching a climax this year, especially because the Trump administration is eager and willing to directly take on traditional symbols of U.S. higher education such as Columbia and Harvard.

Although in Canada, universities do not face an outright political attack, this does not mean that some of the trends witnessed south of the border are not present here. For instance, like their U.S. counterparts, Canadian academics lean more to the left than the average population, with a 2022 Macdonald-Laurier Institute-Leger survey finding that nearly 90 percent of university professors vote for left-wing parties while less than 10 percent of them vote for conservative parties.

Controversial social media statements by a small number of professors give further ammunition to those on the right who say that academia is ideologically one-sided. To this we can add recent Aristotle Foundation polling data showing that only half of university students in Canada felt comfortable discussing their opinion on politically contentious topics.

Simultaneously, in Canada as in the United States, people on the right have criticized DEI policies and what they see as a lack of free speech on campus. Back in 2021, the Legault government in Quebec even enacted controversial legislation to protect free speech on campus in the wake of an affair over the “N-word” that took place… at the University of Ottawa.

More recently, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith stated on CBC’s Power and Politics that “If we did truly have balance in universities, then we would see that we would have just as many conservative commentators as we do liberal commentators”.

On the financial side, some conservative provincial governments such as Doug Ford’s in Ontario have been accused of wanting to “starve” universities. If we add recent changes to immigration policies, universities across Canada are facing key financial and political challenges that are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Certainly, this is what I perceive at my university, which is facing financial challenges related partly to changing immigration and tuition fee policies.

Although Canadian universities and their professors will do their best to protect themselves against both cutbacks and criticism, they also need to think about better ways to make academia a more ideologically diverse environment in which right-of-centre ideas and thinkers have a place.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University. He thanks Neil McLaughlin for his comments and suggestions.