There is no area in which the United States’ global dominance is more total than higher education. With about 4% of the world’s population and 25% of its gross domestic product, America has 72% of the world’s 25 top universities. But this U.S. competitive advantage is being undermined by the Trump administration’s war on colleges.

“We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. … The professors are the enemy,” said JD Vance during a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in 2021. The administration has put those words into action. The most dramatic assault has been financial: a freezing or massive reduction in research grants and loans from the federal government. Some of these efforts are under court review, but the cumulative impact could be billions of dollars in cuts to basic research, much of it disrupting ongoing projects and programs.

High quality research in the United States has emerged in a unique ecosystem. The federal government provides much of the funding through prominent institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Private foundations and companies account for most of the rest. Professors at universities, both public and private, use these funds to conduct the research. No other country has a system that works as well. What is at risk now is what Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the Science family of journals, calls, “the social contract that the federal government and institutions have had to enable the scientific research enterprise in America in the last 80 years.”

Just on Thursday, Johns Hopkins University announced huge layoffs, saying it would let go of more than 2,000 employees after losing $800 million in federal grants.

One crucial mechanism to cut funding is through a massive reduction in the overhead, or indirect, costs that universities get reimbursed for by the federal government. Overhead often makes up 40% or 50% of a grant, but last month, NIH ordered that it be capped at 15%. This sounds more rational than it is. Universities divide their costs on science grants into research costs (the salaries of the professors and graduate students) and overhead (the costs of the buildings, labs, energy and utilities and administrative staff). When you are building a complex lab to conduct experiments, the structure and equipment is often far more costly than the salaries and stipends of the researchers. Michigan State University has declared that these cuts could make it stop construction of a $330 million research building for cancer, cardiovascular disease and neuroscience studies.

Government funding plays a unique role. It often supports basic research, the kind that companies have less incentive to do, and its results cannot be hoarded by any one company but rather are provided free to the entire scientific and technological community so that all can use it to experiment and innovate.

The other assault on the universities is a strange new attack on free speech. It began from a principled critique that bureaucracies, universities and elites had all become too woke. But the government’s response to this problem has been Orwellian. It now punishes universities for having on their campuses people who might espouse certain views on topics like Israel and Palestine — and now is punishing the protesters themselves. I have long argued that universities have a huge problem: They have far too little intellectual and ideological diversity — which is the most important kind of diversity on a campus. But the way you fix that is not to restrict radical left-wing speech but to add voices and views from other parts of the spectrum. The answer to censorship by the left is not censorship by the right.

The fury with which the Trump administration has turned on academia resembles nothing so much as the early days of the Cultural Revolution, when an increasingly paranoid Mao Zedong smashed China’s established universities, a madness that took generations to remedy. Meanwhile, in Beijing last week, the Chinese government announced its intention to massively increase its funding for research and technology so that it could lead the world in science in the 21st century. So, as America appears to be copying the worst aspects of China’s recent history, China is copying the best aspects of America’s, striving to take the edge as the United States goes through its own cultural revolution.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.