"No amount of evidence will ever convince an idiot."
The line isn’t from Mark Twain—even though it’d suit him. Twain never said it, and there’s no trace of it in his writings. But whoever coined it understood power all too well: facts alone are meaningless to those determined to ignore them. And in 2025, that truth is playing out in plain sight across American higher education.
The facts are everywhere—reports, audits, testimonies, and the lived experiences of students and educators. None of it matters to people who have decided not to care.
At Columbia University, a settlement with the Trump administration came with strings attached—strict oversight, curriculum controls, and banned diversity language—to restore frozen research funds.
UCLA found itself in the same position. Federal grants were suspended until administrators agreed to policy overhauls, including limitations on transgender student protections.
George Mason University is under investigation for alleged antisemitism, discriminatory hiring, and biased scholarships. The board responded by cutting many DEI programs despite protests from faculty and students.
At the federal level, the Trump administration is using its power to dismantle diversity programs and demand race-neutral admissions reporting. Hundreds of schools are under scrutiny, forced to comply with executive orders that critics say are tools of political coercion.
Meanwhile, Brown University and UPenn face antitrust investigations over suspected collusion in tuition pricing. The House Judiciary Committee is demanding records and threatening legislative action.
And elite institutions like Cornell, Yale, and Northwestern are pouring record sums into lobbying to defend their interests while the ground shifts under them.
The facts will never be enough for those committed to pretending. They will twist them, bury them, or dismiss them entirely. And when cornered, they will change the subject.
So the fight has to be more than proof. It has to be naming names and following the money. It has to be connecting the data to real lives—students losing hope, educators barely surviving, towns left hollow. It has to be relentless pressure from coalitions that cannot be ignored.
You cannot win an argument with someone whose position is built on denial. But you can make that denial costly. You can bring the harm into the light where it cannot be hidden. You can outlast the spin.
If evidence alone won’t move them, then the truth has to be carried in voices too loud to be silenced.
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