Conan O’Brien stood at the Harvard commencement podium Thursday evening and told the class of 2026 to embrace empathy. He cracked a joke about Justice Department spies in the audience—a wink at the federal government’s escalating campaign to freeze the enrollment of international students at the university—and he told the graduates that choosing good over evil makes them among the very best. The applause was loud because it is a relief to hear an institution of higher learning claim the high ground when the administration in power has spent the last three years actively draining the public pools that built this country in the first place.
Heather McGhee calls it “drained pool” politics. A public good is shared across the color line, and in response it gets systematically defunded: the pool is emptied, paved over, and the people who had been enjoying it lose access. The federal assault on higher education is a textbook case. In March 2025 the president ordered the closure of the Department of Education itself, an executive move that triggered an immediate operational stand-down. The Office for Civil Rights, left without its budgetary anchor, has since allowed thousands of civil rights complaints to be dismissed—an unprecedented rate of institutional self-harm that leaves students exposed to executive overreach without the constitutional safety net that used to catch them.
Derek Black reminds us that the argument casting public education as a Democratic-base sop is a post‑1990s invention. Fourteen Republican senators co‑sponsored the 1979 act that created the Department of Education. Our parents’ generation grew up in a country where Republicans helped build the agency; we are raising our children in a country where Republicans propose to abolish it. That is a generational betrayal with constitutional dimensions, and the campaign to block international students at Harvard is its most visible front. This is not about academic freedom. It is about severing the pipeline that brings global talent into American civic life and turning the university into a gated community—a fortress for the few the administration deems ideologically compliant.
Taylor Swift opens a door in “You’re On Your Own, Kid” where the title line becomes a kind of American mission statement. The song tracks the transition from a youth spent waiting for permission and institutional scaffolding to an adulthood where the speaker has registered that permission and scaffolding are not coming. That is what it feels like to watch the federal government treat Ivy League campuses as hostile territories: you realize the scaffolding was never going to catch you, and the people who control the resources in the room are happy that you finally noticed.
The policy‑level damage extends far beyond Cambridge. While Harvard’s faculty is casting about for structural fixes to grade inflation, the administration’s work in federal student‑loan policy completes the emptied‑pool mechanism by terminating the SAVE income‑driven repayment plan in favor of an administrative labyrinth that will triple payments for millions of borrowers. Just as the physical pools were paved over, the financial protections that kept a generation of nurses and teachers from drowning in debt are being stripped away. The Pell Grant, which covered roughly 80 percent of the cost of attending a four‑year public university when our parents were in school, now covers barely a quarter of that cost. And the IDEA funding shortfall continues to starve public schools of roughly $24 billion a year—a direct consequence of the federal government meeting only a fraction of the 40 percent mandate Congress legislated, passing the shortfall onto states and localities. It is the single biggest kitchen‑table spreadsheet crisis in American K‑12 education, and it gets handed down to every family wrestling with an IEP.
These are not separate outrages; they are the same policy. When you watch the administration send spies to commencements while gutting the student‑aid apparatus and leaving disabled children’s classrooms unfunded, you are seeing a coordinated project to convert higher education from a shared public good into a country club for the obedient. The AI‑generated commencement speeches that prompted boos elsewhere, the Rutgers speaker cancellation that drew free‑speech warnings, the relentless federal pressure on elite campuses—all of it serves the same goal: shrink the pool, gatekeep the water, and tell the people left outside that they failed to plan.
We are asked to perform empathy while the federal government systematically drains the resource pools that make empathy survivable. The Catholic Worker tradition teaches that the works of mercy and the works of justice are continuous; you cannot clothe the naked while simultaneously abolishing the school systems that keep children out of poverty. The legislative framework exists in plain sight: targeted grants to high‑poverty districts, full funding for IDEA, income‑driven repayment that functions as insurance rather than a debt trap. We have the math. We have the spreadsheet. The administration is closing the door from the other side. You’re on your own, kid, is no longer just a lyrical reflection on the millennial experience—it’s the new federal policy for the future of the American class.