What Poland’s election teaches us about Trump’s war on Harvard

Anyone wondering what motivates the ferocity of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education and scientific research in America might look at the numbers behind this past weekend’s victory of the Trump-aligned presidential candidate in Poland.

Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist who narrowly defeated liberal the pro-European Rafał Trzaskowski, is no ordinary conservative. The former boxer and football hooligan with alleged ties to organized crime is backed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023 with a Trumpian determination to mutate the country’s hard-earned democracy into authoritarianism. So he is backed by Trumpworld.

During its stint in government, PiS did all it could to neuter the independent judiciary, attack independent news media, consolidate political control over the civil service and undermine civil society. Nawrocki is now positioned to block the fixes being attempted by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk and engineer his replacement.

Why would anyone want an all-powerful, unchecked government, which could easily tip into fake democracy and dictatorship, as Russia has done? How is it sold? The answer usually lies, to a degree, in the culture wars – the effectively weaponized demonization of all criticism as “wokeness,” the opposition to gay marriage, and the appeals to white nationalism. But there is a secret sauce.

Because who tends to buy it? Exit polls in Poland showed the following: Among voters with higher education, Trzaskowski won by 63 to 37 per cent; Among those with only elementary education, Nawrocki led by a crushing 52 to 16 per cent. Trzaskowski also won backing from two-thirds of senior managers and most business owners. Nawrocki’s base was largely rural, working-class, and poorly educated. These groups are easiest to pry away from the institutions that protect them – and sustain liberal democracy, a.k.a. democracy.

In Poland as in many other places, including the United States, education was the single strongest predictor of support for democracy and rule of law (and the European Union).

In Romania, voters two weeks ago rejected, just barely, the far-right demagogue George Simion, electing as president pro-western academic and Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan. He won by a whisker – roughly the mirror image of what happened in Poland, on the strength of overwhelming support from urban and university-educated voters. Simion, a Putin admirer who had already begun bragging about his plans for political arrests, drew strength from rural areas and from those will lower levels of education.

In neighboring Hungary, the nationalist, pro-Putin Viktor Orban was easily reelected in 2022 by a base of voters with only primary or vocational education, while pro-democracy opposition parties dominated among graduates, particularly in cities like Budapest.

The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom followed the same pattern. Areas with higher concentrations of university graduates overwhelmingly supported remaining in the European Union, while less-educated regions favored leaving.

Anticipating this and pandering to his base, pro-Brexit minister Michael Gove famously declared, “People in this country have had enough of experts” – the ones who were warning of an economic shock that has indeed materialized. The line clarified the strategy: Brexit was never just about sovereignty but about rejecting the institutions, knowledge structures, and elite consensus that had guided Britain’s postwar alignment with Europe. The economic fallout, the reduction in labor mobility, and the trade disruptions were seen by many as worth it — because the vote was framed as a rebellion against elite control.

This growing divide between educated electorates and populist demagogues is not coincidental — it’s causal. And it helps explain President Trump’s increasingly aggressive campaign against universities and scientific research in the United States. In just over four months in office, the Trump administration has:

• Slashed funding for university research, especially institutions promoting diversity.
• Proposed ideological screening for federal grants.
• Called for abolishing the Department of Education.
• Worked to defund or defang scientific institutions seen as “elitist.”
• Gleefully gone to war against Harvard, Columbia and other elite schools, attempting inter alia to sabotage their ability to accept foreign staff and students.

These moves aren’t just about “wokeness.” They reflect a deeper strategic goal: disempowering the institutions that generate expertise. The administration is attempting to reengineer the role of universities in American society, prioritizing funding only for those that demonstrate ideological alignment with its agenda — effectively creating a loyalty filter for public research grants.

Administration officials are pushing to eliminate tenure protections that shield academics from political retaliation. And incredibly, the administration has proposed tying all scientific grant funding to political approval via a new oversight board, bypassing traditional peer review. This would chill basic research, especially on climate change, gun violence, and reproductive health — topics where data often contradict Republican dogma.

In this way the US risks following the trajectory of autocratic states like Hungary, where academic independence has been gutted in the name of Orban’s political agenda – and to please his base. Orban’s government forced the respected Central European University into exile, placed entire academic institutions under the control of loyalist boards, and banned whole disciplines like gender studies. His party, Fidesz, demonized intellectuals as out-of-touch “elites.” The result was a brain drain – an own goal and a boon for other countries.

While efforts to promote ideological diversity in higher education are defensible, this level of politicization is sure to deflate innovation and drive potential innovators out of and away from the United States as well. But that’s a feature, not a bug: disempowering the institutions that generate expertise and eliminating educators who care about them deeply, because these also tend to create voters that oppose the destruction of liberal democracy.

It is pretty simple, really: If you make knowledge itself suspect, you open the way for rule by instinct, impulse, and ego. So when experts say tariffs are destructive, Trump doubles down. When scientists recommend public health measures, he mocks them. When pedants note that Trump capitalizes the wrong words in his tweets, his supporters are delighted.

But even supporters of this madness may be dismayed when the resulting dictatorships come after them, and there are no “unelected judges” left to offer protection.

Educated elites, when functioning responsibly, create systems to protect liberty, individual rights, and reasoned governance. Modern populists seek to tear them down by convincing voters that these are their enemies. Once academic, scientific, and journalistic institutions are discredited, truth itself becomes negotiable, and the only remaining authority is popularity, manufactured through grievance and outrage.

So it bears repeating, time and again: democracy, as it has developed since the Enlightenment, is not merely the rule of the majority. It is a system of guardrails — constitutional checks, independent courts, free media, and rule-bound institutions — often designed by the educated classes precisely in order to prevent the tyranny of the majority. From the US Constitution to the east European post-communist frameworks, democracy’s architects understood that freedom must be protected from mob rule.

Poland’s election is a warning. An educated citizenry remains the last bulwark against authoritarians. That is why Trump and others like him are so committed to their war on education, and to dismantling the very idea that knowledge matters. We should be trying to broaden education to reach as many as possible – not spread ignorance so that leaders of bad faith can oppress us with impunity.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

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