John Oliver torched the Republican party’s supposed years-long war on higher education, speaking specifically to how President Donald Trump is trying to reshape colleges and universities to be less “woke” and to remove curriculums and studies that he disapproves of. He also brought up that several Trump cabinet members including JD Vance and Stephen Miller share these beliefs.
“Trump has long held a grudge against higher education, and now that he’s in power, he’s acting on it,” Oliver said, adding that there are key areas of conservative criticism, including claims that taxpayer money is wasted on scientific research and that universities are “havens of liberal indoctrination.”
Oliver’s words come as Trump continues to move forward with his crackdown on higher education. Since taking office in January, Trump has signed an executive order to close the Department of Education, targeted schools with DEI initiatives and has announced policies that include proposals that would cut funding for universities that allow “illegal protests” following pro-Palestine demostrations on campuses.
“The more you listen to Republicans complain about what goes on on campuses, the clearer it becomes,” Oliver said. “They don’t want diversity of thought; they want one specific type of thought.”
In sharing an example of the current administration’s shared disdain for higher learning, Oliver called out Vance over comments stating his strategy is to take away any power the left has.
“We need a debathification program,” Vance said in an old interview in a clip played by Oliver. “Like a dewokation program. Basically, my strategy is deinstitutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right. It is very hard. It will require men and women of incredible courage.”
“JD Vance has repeatedly made that clear over the years with complaints like we are giving our children over to our enemies when we send them to college,” Oliver said. “He advocated for doing what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary to schools, which was, for the record, to consolidate power over what gets taught in universities. And that wasn’t all that Vance said. ‘We should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left.’”
Oliver pulled out another past interview as an example of GOP leaders’ push against higher education, this time one that featured White House Chief of Staff Miller, who was a student at Duke University when he appeared on Fox News. At the time, he was telling the news platform about several school refused to run an ad that directed people to an anti-Muslim website.
“A lot of kids on college campuses, they’re only getting one of half of the story,” Miller said at the time. “And when we’re in a situation where you have nuclear threats and biological threats, and we’re in a really dangerous time in history, you want everyone in America to have a key understanding of what it is that we’re facing.”
During Miller’s interview, one of the Fox News hosts asked Miller if he was a college student, to which he replied yes. After the clip ended, Oliver threw a jokey jab at Miller before going back into his points.
“I’m guessing ‘are you a college kid’ is a question Stephen Miller got a lot back then,” Oliver said. “Though that was probably less to do with his smarts and more to do with the fact that people just assumed he was a 45-year-old undercover narc trying to do an unsanctioned ’21 Jump Street’ on them.”
He continued: “It’s worth noting that for all his talk about censorship in college newspapers, as a Duke undergraduate, Miller had a newspaper column where he routinely aired conservative grievances … The very fact that Miller had a regular column does suggest that as hard as it is may be to believe, there was representation at Duke University for Republican points of view.
As he closed out, he said: “The point is, conservatives have long sought to orient universities sharply to the right.”
You can watch the full “Last Week Tonight” monologue in the video above.
