Weekend Quotables

U of Chicago bows to Trump pressure. But cutting liberal arts isn’t streamlining education—it’s amputating its conscience.

“These changes would mean the end of my department, which is, by most considerations, the best program for South Asian languages and civilizations.” — Andrew Ollett, professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations.

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The Walker Museum, which houses U of C’s Division of the Arts & Humanities.

The University of Chicago, once a bastion of liberal arts inquiry, is slashing departments, cutting graduate programs, and scaling back language instruction. Administrators cite “historic funding pressures.” But this fiscal language hides a deeper political wound inflicted years ago by the Trump administration’s sustained assault on higher education.

Between 2017 and 2021, Trump’s Department of Education gutted support for public universities, slashed Pell Grants, and attempted to tax endowments at elite private institutions. His administration openly vilified academia as a “radical leftist indoctrination machine,” prompting cultural attacks that eroded public trust and philanthropic investment in institutions like UofC.

However, remember that the UofC is one of the financial titans of higher education. As of fiscal year 2024, the University of Chicago’s endowment stood at $10.1 billion, placing it among the top 25 wealthiest universities in the United States. That kind of capital should, in theory, insulate it from the types of austerity measures being imposed by Trump.

When a university with that level of financial muscle starts gutting its liberal arts core, it’s not just about money. It’s about priorities. It suggests a more profound ideological shift, one in which profitability and prestige are being redefined, and where the legacy of Trump-era hostility toward intellectual spaces still resonates in institutional decision-making.

Universities are not just corporations. They’re intellectual ecosystems. When departments disappear, so do entire lenses on human experience, ways of thinking, researching, and relating across borders and generations.

Trump's legacy is not just partisan division; it’s anti-intellectualism and anti-scientific knowledge. And now, even elite institutions like the University of Chicago are forced to choose between survival and integrity.

Weekend Quotables

Doctors Without Borders

“Humanitarian organizations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.” — Council on Foreign Relations

Sen. Bernie Sanders

“This is the reality: Having already killed or wounded 200,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, the extremist Israeli government is using mass starvation to engineer the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.” — Al Jazeera

Soumaya Ghannoushi, British/Tunisian writer

“This is not a relief effort. It is a siege conceived by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsed by US President Donald Trump, and inspired—in logic and layout—by the Nazi Hunger Plan.” — Middle Eastern Eye

Donald Trump

Trump made that statement on July 25, 2025, after the U.S. and Israel withdrew from ceasefire negotiations with Hamas in Qatar:

“Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die, and it’s very, very bad.” He added that Israel would need to “finish the job.” — JTA

John Anzalone, Democratic pollster

President Donald Trump’s approval rating remains underwater. However, Democrats are faring worse, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll released Saturday.

“Until [Democrats] reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”