Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. President Donald Trump is negotiating with the college presidents and elite universities in general, places like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley. And he apparently wants them to make concessions in order for them to receive federal funds. They are resisting him, at least initially, they were. But as this duel enters the public domain, I think the university presidents are kind of worried because they know what they’ve been doing. We’ve discussed that. They were overcharging the government—maybe up to 50% surcharges, overhead—on federal grants. They had violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 civil rights rulings. They had racial preferences in hiring, promotion, admissions. Separate graduations, separate dorms, predicated on one’s race. There was an epidemic of antisemitism. They were bringing in 300,000 students, most of whom were from illiberal regimes in China and the Middle East. Etc., etc. They don’t want that to be known. And yet, if you look at the protest on campus, the students and what the faculty are saying, they don’t wanna back down. So, these presidents are saying, “Listen, we have limited funds. If we lose billions of dollars from the federal government, that’s one thing. If they tax our endowment income, that’s another. If we can only charge 15% surcharges on federal grants, that’s a third. And we’re gonna lose $400 or $500, $600 million a year. We’ve gotta cut a deal.” So, how do these presidents do it? They’re afraid of their students. They’re afraid of their Marxist faculty. So what they’re doing is, essentially, they’re talking to the Trump administration. And they’re going to go right back and they’re going to say, “You know, I did not want to do this. I really did not want to cut a deal. I want to keep going with DEI. I think we have a right to. But I can’t. Donald Trump’s a tough customer. If I don’t cut a deal with him, we’re gonna go broke. We’ll get no federal funds. We’ll get no federal grants. We’ll get an even bigger tax on our endowment. So, I’ve got to cut a deal. He made me do it.” In other words, Donald Trump will prove, if these presidents are smart, to be a useful vehicle. They will use him as the greater threat, so they can tell their own faculty and students—who would destroy the university, had their way—that the president has no choice but now to make moderate reforms on the prompt of Donald Trump or face the consequences later, which would be veritable bankruptcy. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post This Is How Elite University Presidents Will Cave to President Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.