John Oliver has taken aim at everything from Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin to Trump’s friendship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein recently, but in Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight he explored a different kind of relationship: the financial stranglehold Trump’s administration is currently putting on higher education establishments like Harvard University in an attempt to get them to agree to a list of demands.
In the video above Oliver gives a summary of what’s happened so far, from Trump accusing Ivy League colleges of antisemitism and “radical left indoctrination” to a number of colleges caving in to the president’s demands in order to have their research grants restored.
“They want to turn back a clock that quite honestly had taken way too long to move forward, and restore the role of academia to being a training ground for those looking to uphold old systems of power instead of questioning them. And look, you can have problems with academia. You can think it’s too cloistered or too liberal, you can think it’s becoming too expensive or that its resources are misallocated, but the notion of the state suddenly executing a sweeping takeover of higher education to this degree is chilling,” says Oliver.
“And if this administration’s actions have taught us one thing so far, it’s that no capitulation will be enough, and they will never stop demanding more. So given that, I’d argue that to the extent they can, these institutions need to stop yielding, stand firm, and fight back.”
