Of all the policy obsessions of today’s Republican Party, none in my view is more perplexing than the enthusiasm for increasing the tax on the endowments of America’s wealthiest universities.

One value that until now had united conservatives of many stripes is respect for financial success — and especially investment skill. There may be legitimate grounds for criticizing some universities’ use of endowment cash for more luxurious dorms or shinier sports centers. And some MAGA populists have gone further, making common cause with prominent liberals including former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell who see rich universities’ failure to share their wealth with struggling ones as a scandal.

But the wealth of Ivy League universities did not bother the leaders of the Republican Party, many of whom are Ivy graduates, until recently. Nor was it a major issue for Donald Trump during his first term as president.

Why the change? Part of the reason is that in the 1980s and 1990s elite universities became home to liberal cultural causes and thus potential targets for right-wing culture warriors. And in one of those ironies that seem ever less ironic in the age of Trump, conservatives made common cause with Marxists like Michael Parenti who wrote in 1999 that “at the heart of postmodernism's cultural relativism is … an unswerving ideological acceptance of existing bourgeois domination.” Thus, for Parenti, university endowments were but another means of control of cultural institutions by capitalists.

Suspicion of science has surely played a part in the right’s distaste for elite universities, too. In issue after issue, from natural evolution to vaccine safety to climate change, academic science has led the defense of evidence-based analysis. And instead of standing up for science against the once exclusively leftist idea that science is inherently political, the right embraced the idea that science was just one more sneaky way liberals and their academic allies disrespected Joe Sixpack.

The federal tax of 1.4 percent annually on the assets of schools with endowments exceeding $500,000 per student came almost as an afterthought as part of the first Trump tax reform in 2017 — in 2023 it applied to only 33 schools and raised modest sums. But House Republicans have put a 21 percent tax, equal to the rate on corporate profits, on the table. And they may find allies among leftist emocrats including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who argue that only by taxing wealth (as opposed to income) can we begin to stop the rising tide of inequality in the U.S. Donald Trump, for his part, has suggested using the proceeds for a new “non-political” American Academy somehow free of the influence of pointy-headed elitists.

But there is no getting around the reality that taxation specifically aimed at centers of political opposition is in reality an anti-conservative tactic. Why should they be penalized for skillful stewardship of their assets?

Take the example of Princeton, the university with the highest endowment-to-student ratio in the U.S. Its rise to glory was led by a Wall Street genius, Dean Mathey, starting almost a century ago. As the Princeton Alumni Weekly reports:

In 1928 and even a bit before, he methodically moved the University out of common stocks that he considered overvalued and into a huge, diverse portfolio of large corporate bonds and a modest selection of preferred stock. The first week of October 1929 saw almost half of Princeton’s little remaining common holdings sold off just as the Dow hit its then all-time high, not to be reached again for 25 years.

When stocks slumped again after Pearl Harbor, Mathey began moving the endowment back into common stocks, riding the postwar boom until his retirement from the board in 1960.

Also, those who would suffer most from the endowment tax would not be the monument-builders or the tenured faculty with their love of Darwin, Fauci and their ilk, but the very middle- and working-class families to whom the Republicans wooed for electoral victories. Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, recently pointed out that it was the $4 million per student endowment that enabled the university to replace student loans with cash grants in 2001. And Princeton is not alone in this priority: all ten schools on U.S. News’s list of best value schools (ranked by net cost of attendance) are private universities with large endowments, led by Princeton, Harvard and MIT. Finally, note that the proposed 21 percent tax would clip the wings not only of the hated Ivy League but also of faith-based institutions including Boston College, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Brigham Young and Liberty universities.

I would add one more reason to spare universities from collateral damage in the culture wars. Americans, whatever their politics, need to sustain their great universities at a time when we can no longer take our lead from China in scientific and technological  research for granted. Supporting endowments by continuing to give them favored tax status means taking the long view. As Dean Mathey put it:

[I]t seems to me we sense how fleeting all things are, not only the things we build with our hands, but life itself and even our posterity. And along with this we also sense, subconsciously perhaps, that the great seats of learning ... some established as far back as the eleventh century — have withstood the ravages of time better than any other thing to which we ourselves may contribute.