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Abstract: The political boundaries of the American campus extend far beyond its terrestrial limits. Campus “borderlands” reach further, particularly in a world where the footprints of American higher education are cultural, virtual, and existential. This is particularly the case for elite research universities. Although physically rooted in American cities such as New Haven, New York, Berkeley, and Boston, these institutions operate as transnational actors. Their engagements, influence, and institutional identity are global.
At the very top levels of the institutional hierarchy, American higher education extends across domestic boundaries. While the so-called “war on higher education” marks an existential crossroads for all American colleges and universities, elite transnational institutions face distinct perils. For them, the executive attack on race-consciousness, political dissent, freedom of speech, and academic freedom does not merely threaten their educational mandate on a domestic level, but on a global scale.
While scholars have examined the current reckoning in American higher education through a purely domestic lens, this Essay expands the scope to consider its international impacts. As we explain more fully in our piece, Campus Borderlands, the executive onslaught on American higher education is an effort to remake the identity and mandate of the liberal university in the image of the Trump Administration’s white Christian nationalist vision. This vision is not only antithetical but actively hostile to the inclusive, cosmopolitan and transnational oriented missions of elite American colleges and universities.
The Trump Administration’s war on higher education seeks to reshape America’s research institutions, redirecting them from their transnational missions toward an “America First” model. Yet the transnational character of these institutions—long central to their function as instruments of American soft power—remains understudied and undertheorized in legal and political scholarship. Elite universities have historically invited the world’s best talent to teach and learn here in the United States, in turn exporting American values through students and scholars who return home to their countries of origin.
This Essay builds on our work and focuses on the elite American research university as a unique educational actor that transcends domestic bounds. Thus, the stakes of policing campus borderlands and the people within them highlight the broader transnational implications of the protracted war on higher education.
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