Comedian Bill Maher defended President Trump’s fight against higher education, saying college campuses have become “indoctrination factories” in need of a wake-up call.
In the latest episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host said he doesn’t agree with the president’s approach, but he said he agrees with some of the criticism motivating the effort.
“I’m not totally against it. Academia needed a hot poker up the ass,” Maher said. “I’m not saying— not everything, the way he’s doing it, of course, is the right way, You know, to defund scientific research is not the way to do it,” Maher said.
“But, I mean, our universities have been out of control for a long time. They became indoctrination factories,” Maher added. “There’s absolutely no diversity of thought.”
Trump has long pledged to get rid of “woke” culture in America’s colleges and universities, which Republicans accuse of being a bedrock of “leftist ideology.”
Prestigious schools including the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Cornell University and others have all seen their federal funding hit by Trump over either their alleged inaction on antisemitism or their policies regarding transgender athletes.
The Department of Education has also issued a letter to colleges saying if DEI wasn’t eliminated federal funds would be cut from their institutions.
Maher pointed to students on some college campuses who celebrated the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel — before Israel had begun its retaliatory invasion of Gaza.
“You don’t have to be Donald Trump to think that there’s been something rotten on campuses for quite a long time. When you cannot speak the other side of the coin, when conservative thought — whatever you think of it — is just verboten, which is basically what happened,” Maher said.
“And some of the ideas — I mean, why do you think they erupted, so many of them, in cheers or what happened on Oct. 7? Why do you have professors coming out there and saying they were exhilarated by this mass massacre of people? Okay, that didn’t happen overnight,” Maher continued, referring to the institutions as “ivory towers” that are “just very anti-America.”
