The Professors Are the Enemy

It was President Richard Nixon who in a 1972 Oval Office conversation was recorded saying, “The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times.” The words were echoed by now U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance in 2021, in an address he gave called “The Universities Are The Enemy.”

We are seeing this animosity reflected in policy decisions by the administration of Donald Trump and Vance, and by Republican legislators in Wisconsin. It is a remarkable reversal of American politics.

While many professors have long tended to be liberals and could be outspoken in ways that enraged Nixon, others are not, and university graduates tended to vote Republican. The majority of them supported the Republican candidate for president for decades, all the way through 2012, but that has flip-flopped dramatically in the age of Trump. Among college graduates 55 percent voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and 42 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

And we are now seeing an assault on universities, scientists and expertise. “In its first two months, the Trump administration has targeted the U.S. research enterprise in numerous ways, including cuts to funding for the National Institutes of Health, firings at agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Science Foundation,” as the Scientific American reported.

America’s massive advantage in top universities and expertise has long helped make it the world’s economic leader. “From 1996 to 2015, technology transfer from universities sparked development of more than 380,000 new inventions, contributed $591 billion to the national GDP, and supported 4.3 million jobs. In fact, 9 out of 10 U.S. patent holders have bachelor’s degrees, and nearly half have professional or doctoral degrees,” as the Association of Governing Boards noted.

UW-Madison has been an important part of America’s expertise. “UW alumni or faculty have been awarded 20 Nobel Prizes and 41 Pulitzer Prizes. Some 843 UW–Madison alumni serve as CEOs, and nearly 16,000 hold an executive management position,” its alumni association has noted.

According to research by Kittleman Research, UW-Madison has produced 14 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, placing Wisconsin’s flagship university “at the top of the list for producing Fortune 500 CEOs, surpassing even Harvard University,” noted a story by UW-Madison news.

Of course Harvard, the nation’s oldest and most elite university, is now a dirty word for the Trump administration.

In Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers proposed a $697 million increase in the budget for the Universities of Wisconsin, which has been starved for more than a decade. But Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Republicans wanted to cut the UW system budget by $87 million. In the case of K-12 funding and many other categories, Republicans agreed to budget increases, though by less than Evers wanted. After all, the state is sitting on a $4.3 billion surplus. Yet Vos wants to cut funding for the UW system; it has become the whipping boy for Republicans.

As recently as the 1990s state funding comprised 50% of the UW System budget. Today that’s about 18% The system has fallen from the state’s second-highest priority in 1992 to its fifth today, eclipsed by spending on Medicaid, prisons, and state tax credits for property owners, as a study by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found.

“The state’s ranking for total revenues fell from 24th-highest nationally and close to the middle of the pack in the Midwest in 2000 to 41st-highest nationally and last in the Midwest in 2019,” the study noted.

That decline has continued since then. Today Wisconsin ranks 44th of 50 states in public funding for universities. By comparison, Illinois ranks first, Michigan third, Iowa ninth and Minnesota 10th in public funding.

While much of this decline happened under both parties, the funding freezes and cuts have been particularly brutal since 2011, under the long reign of a gerrymandered and hostile Republican Legislature. As a WPR story recounted, “in the 2011-13 biennial budget, the Universities of Wisconsin requested more than $214.6 million over the biennium to fund their operations, but the Republican-controlled Legislature and former Gov. Scott Walker actually cut their budget by more than $203.7 million.

“Further cuts to the UW system were made in the next two biennium budgets.

“During the 2017-19 budget, rather than cut the university system’s funding further, Republicans provided approximately $12 million less than what the system requested…During this time, there was a decade-long tuition freeze. Evers had proposed a $305 million increase for the UW system during the 2023-25 budget, but Republican lawmakers cut state funding for campuses by $32 million.”

In May, nearly 800 business officials representing more than 500 business groups signed a letter of support for more state investment in the UW system. The majority of those officials were likely educated at public universities in this state. Most are probably Republican, or were before Trump’s takeover of the party.

Among those signing the letter were representatives of the following: Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee Bucks, Northwestern Mutual, Sentry Insurance, Rockwell Automation, Epic Systems, Skyward, Delta Dental, The Bartolotta Restaurants, Quad, Snap-on, Exact Sciences, Uline, and Oshkosh Corp. Twenty business groups from around the state have also signed on, including New North, Greater Oshkosh Economic Development Corporation, Oshkosh Chamber, Greater Milwaukee Committee, BioForward, HOAN Group, and the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce.

Also signing was the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, whose President and CEO Dale Kooyenga, a former Republican legislator, offered this comment to Urban Milwaukee: “The MMAC strongly supports providing the UW System with the funding necessary to compete with other states across the country. With an aging workforce, the competition to attract and retain talent is fierce. Providing the resources to prepare that talent right here in Wisconsin is integral to the health of our talent pipeline and Wisconsin’s overall economy.”

Will Republicans heed this plea? They haven’t so far. The combined attacks on universities by Trump and Wisconsin Republicans will be one of many potential issues on the ballot in the 2026 mid-term elections. Will some of those 500 business groups in Wisconsin decide that they’ve had enough? And how might that affect state legislative races? We’ll see.