This essay situates the Trump administration’s 2025 assault on academia within a longer trajectory of American capitalism’s influence on higher education, beginning with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and intensified under Reagan’s neoliberal program. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics and the Chicago School’s theory of human capital, alongside Michel Feher’s account of financialized capitalism, I trace how universities, and critical thought itself, were transformed into speculative instruments serving both economic expansion and geopolitical ambition.
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The hypocrisy of the setting cannot be more sardonic: the ethics professor at Harvard, Danielle Allen, debates a pro-monarchy tech entrepreneur and a conservative intellectual, Curtis Yarvin, in the snobbish hall of the Harvard Faculty Club at the end of the 2025 spring semester.
The discussion appears heated and confrontational; the topics of debate range from the political future of the US to the political strategies of addressing contemporary social issues. Interestingly, both participants, though from very different positions, appear to share varying levels of dissatisfaction with Donald Trump’s first months in office.
Some Cambridge residents might have walked out of this event with the thought that events like these could bring the divided America closer to understanding how to address the global crises of today’s democratic order. Nonetheless, the sophistry of both sides of the debate tries hard to play the roles of rivals, while, in essense, they are reliant on the same economic and political maxim, which forms the backdrop of academia. Cocktails and canapés, provided by Yarvin’s publisher, who organized the event, were there for a reason, reminding us of the real powers behind the gathering.
Despite overall disgust with Yarvin’s rhetoric in his writings over the past decades, which, in that particular Harvard debate, is only a little more restrained, his criticism of the blind flatness of the popular democratic discourse is at times sharp and precise. Describing his impression of Allen’s book, who seems to present a critical viewpoint on the contemporary state of things from the perspective of “bright enlightenment” (i.e., democratic, confronting Yarvin’s “dark enlightenment”), Yarvin quips: “It made me feel like I was reading a work of Islamic history that was written by a Muslim.”
That line effectively summarizes the attempts to “fix” the problems of contemporary academia, which did not appear in a vacuum or fall on our heads by will of an evil demon. The destructive model for today’s student or scientist can be traced across the period of legislative action of the last half a century; that, no matter how much characters like Professor Allen might repress, is invoked precisely by these same people who gathered on that quiet evening at Cambridge, MA. What remains repressed are the ties between contemporary US academia and the market, ties legally guaranteed by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.
The Bayh-Dole Act and Its Legacy
Delivered across the Atlantic in the same year that Senator Birch Bayh first proposed radical changes in the relationship between universities, private companies, and the government during U.S. Senate hearings, Foucault’s analysis of American neoliberalism offers a precise theoretical lens for understanding these developments. The core of Foucault’s inquiry, in this context, lies in his analytic focus on the form of post–World War II liberalism advanced by economists of the Chicago School. One of the key figures behind this theoretical shift from classical liberalism to neoliberalism was Theodore Schultz, whose influential 1971 collection Investment in Human Capital laid the groundwork for rethinking the role of knowledge in the modern capitalist state. According to this innovation, human capital is shaped by the role that education plays in people’s lives within the neoliberal state, which seeks to sell alienation from one’s own mind as a form of economic liberty.
Foucault argues that treating human capital as “educational investments” that can be measured, increased, decreased, or inherited is emblematic of a new way of relating to the products of one’s thought. He expands Schultz’s concept by framing human capital as inseparable from the individual’s body, which guarantees their capacity to earn a wage: “It is human because it is embodied in man; it is capital because it is a source of future satisfaction, or future earnings, or of both” (Foucault, 2008, pp. 226, 236). This emphasis on embodiment reflects a transformation in the biopolitics of the state, from caring for individuals to making individuals responsible for caring for themselves. This shift becomes a hallmark of neoliberal rationality, which, rather than proposing communitarian ideals of knowledge as a resource for constructing a shared future, turns knowledge into a means of individuation. It targets any all-encompassing critical vision of the modern world by leaving the individual to survive on their own.
As a result of a decade of social transformation marked by the legacy of May ’68 (during which the role of American universities was significant), and under the growing influence of neoliberal thinking, the U.S. government began reshaping its legislative framework to bring academia into alignment with market priorities. Spearheaded by Senators Bayh and Dole, the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act marked a pivotal moment in this process, enabling the commercialization of federally funded research through private investment.
In the decades prior, patent legislation focused primarily on bureaucratic oversight, reflecting Cold War anxieties around the security of knowledge as a potential tool of ideological warfare. A series of executive orders throughout the mid-20th century established and later dismantled institutions like the Government Patents Board and the Government Patents Office. While these frameworks acknowledged the economic value of intellectual property, they were more concerned with controlling and protecting knowledge than with extracting financial gain from it.
The Bayh-Dole Act disrupted this earlier logic by introducing legislation that reflected neoliberal principles. This becomes particularly clear in Section 209, which governs the licensing of federally funded inventions. Licenses are no longer just legal tools; they are financial instruments meant to ensure the economic productivity of research. Their purpose is to attract capital, support development, and guarantee market application. The obligations tied to licensing (such as submitting development or marketing plans) reinforce the idea that research must yield measurable, profitable results. Federal agencies can revoke licenses if these conditions are unmet, demonstrating the dominance of economic logic in assessing the value of academic work.
Though Section 212 exempts certain educational grants from these provisions, the trend is clear: research with no commercial outcome may remain outside the system of licensing, but as soon as discoveries become materially useful, they fall under the imperative of commodification. Here we see the roots of a bifurcation between profitable fields (like the hard sciences, economics, and politics) and less profitable ones, such as the arts and humanities.
In his 1987 executive order on “facilitating access to science and technology,” President Ronald Reagan, then in his second term, extended this alignment between academic research and private sector interests. The order openly promotes the commercialization of science via the Bayh-Dole Act, framing research as a tool for economic ends (Reagan, 1987, Sec. 1). A defining feature of Reagan-era neoliberalism is its emphasis on competition, shaped by financial market logic. Michel Feher notes that in this context, “economic agents are now primarily intent on making themselves attractive to investors” (Feher, 2018, p. 18). Reagan’s executive order echoes this, emphasizing “long-term national economic competitiveness” and aligning research with the interests of finance capital (Reagan, 1987, Sec. 2(a)).
This vision builds on but goes beyond the Bayh-Dole Act’s original intent. Reagan’s policies not only safeguard national interests; they also compel academia to serve long-term economic strategy. Whereas Schultz had promoted self-investment as a means to develop human capital, Reagan’s financialized model transforms this logic into one of institutional competitiveness on a global scale.
Michel Feher further notes that Reagan-era neoliberal economists and legal scholars helped legitimize the view that maximizing shareholder value should be the priority of corporate governance (Feher, 2018, p. 19). This outlook clarifies how public research is shaped by private interests and how academic inquiry becomes a tool for capital accumulation and geopolitical advantage. The Bayh-Dole Act, initially framed as a vehicle for innovation, becomes a mechanism of structural dependency, binding U.S. academia to market imperatives and signaling the retreat from autonomous knowledge production; a retreat that continues today.
It is evident that Donald Trump, while loudly proclaiming his intention to “Make America Great Again,” mirrors many of Reagan’s policies. Still, a strategic shift makes any direct comparison incomplete, especially concerning education. This shift arises from the emergence of a new generation of conservative intellectuals and politicians poised to replace Reagan-era neoliberal conservatives like Trump. Among them is Curtis Yarvin, whose influence on the current White House is becoming more apparent. By examining Yarvin’s writings (a neoconservative response to neoliberal academia), we may better understand Trump’s educational approach.
Yarvin’s “Revolutionary” War on Academia
In the first chapter of A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations (2009), a compilation from his blog, Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin proposes an almost literal “revolutionary” strategy to rethink the so-called Cathedral, his term for contemporary academia. With a ham-fisted allusion to The Matrix, Yarvin presents himself as the bearer of a cure, casting Noam Chomsky as the disease. UR, as he calls his blog, functions as an ironic form of “The Red Pill,” the name of the opening chapter. There, Yarvin sets the stage by crudely dismantling the myth of American democracy as distinct from totalitarian states like Nazi Germany or the USSR.
“As a good citizen of America, which is the greatest country on earth, one thing you believe in is separation of church and state. I too am an American, and it so happens that I too believe in separation of church and state,” Yarvin proclaims, drawing a parallel between institutions like Harvard and religious authority, both allegedly in place to misinform (Moldbug, 2009, p. 4). While he correctly identifies academia’s entanglement with the public sector, he fails to acknowledge the economic incentives built into its triangular relationship with the private sector, a direct reflection of the neoliberal logic still championed by Trump and company.
Yarvin concludes by lamenting that while American academia achieved global dominance in the 20th century, its liberal democratic orientation failed to reflect the political aspirations of conservative elites. Figures like Professor Allen, who publicly debated Yarvin, exemplify that dominant ideology.
Yet the apparent divide between liberal democrats and neoconservatives is superficial. Both camps remain rooted in the capitalist values that have saturated academia for more than half a century. Whether it’s Trump, JD Vance, or Yarvin, each molded by Ivy League institutions, they now seek to “revolt” against the very foundations that formed them. Their neoconservative uprising merely reconstitutes state-capitalist influence over intellectual life to consolidate political power and extract profit from knowledge in novel ways.
Historically, one can trace this “revolutionary” capitalism back to the emergence of neoliberalism itself. In the late 1960s, universities staged real resistance to government overreach. The Bayh-Dole Act, in retrospect, appears as an instrument to neutralize that resistance by reprogramming subjectivity: it reframed students and researchers as units of human capital. This reconfiguration was reinforced by the post-’90s “end of history” positivism, which accepted the university–state–market triangle as the default model.
Today’s reactionary climate, especially in the U.S., has seen renewed efforts to fuse public and private power (government run like a corporation, in Yarvin’s own jargon). With the traditional autonomy of universities already eroded, the new conservative elite poses the ultimate question: What should we do about the woke liberals in Cambridge? As Trump’s administration explores funding cuts and other attacks on higher education, it is attempting to redesign the existing academic-capitalist model, one no longer useful to the ideological goals of the neoconservatives. Ironically, Trump is not doing anything new; he is merely responding to the realization that earlier efforts to subdue critical thought, like the Bayh-Dole Act, are no longer sufficient for this new “revolutionary” moment.
What’s most alarming is that techno-feudalists like Yarvin and Peter Thiel now provide the ideological framework for a full-scale assault on knowledge itself. Rather than reforming academia’s relationship to capital, they advocate for its outright destruction. This anti-intellectual project appeals to the new conservative aristocracy, figures like Vance, Yale-educated but ideologically opposed to the institution. It’s time to douse their fire with something stronger than exhaust fumes.
Much ink has been spilled romanticizing Trump’s “radical” postures and the “bad-boy” stylings of alt-right thinkers like Yarvin and Nick Land. But when we examine their dark accelerationist vision, set against the long arc of neoliberal capture of the university, we see continuity masked as rupture. This is not a revolution; it’s a reaction.
In conclusion, the U.S. crisis of political representation, a void easily filled by aggressive Republicans, now plays out most acutely in education. Trump’s war on academia isn’t spontaneous; it is simply the sharper edge of a double-edged sword forged by five decades of neoliberal policy. Those of us still committed to authentic knowledge must ask: how do we reshape learning to escape its current corrupted form, and cut into the rot without harming ourselves in the process?
References
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- Bayh Dole Coalition. (2025, February). Impact of the Bayh–Dole Act and academic technology transfer. Retrieved June 10, 2025, from https://bayhdolecoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Impact-of-the-Bayh-Dole-Act-and-Academic-Technology-Transfer.pdf
- Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. (G. Burchell, Trans.) New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Feher, M. (2018). Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. (G. Elliott, Trans.) Zone Books.
- Moldbug, M. (2009). A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations
- Reagan, R. W. (1987, April 10). Executive Order 12591 – Facilitating access to science and technology. Retrieved April 8, 2025, from www.archives.gov.
- University and Small Business Patent Procedures. (1980, December 18). Retrieved April 8, 2025, from www.govinfo.gov: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title35/html/USCODE-2011-title35-partII-chap18.htm