Bill Maher calls universities ‘indoctrination factories,’ partially backs Trump efforts to reform them

Bill Maher slammed America’s elite universities as “indoctrination factories” and shared support for President Donald Trump’s plans to reform them, saying they need a “hot poker up the a–,” on HBO’s “Real Time” on Friday. 

“Academia needed a hot poker up the a–… our universities have been out of control for a long time. They became indoctrination factories… There’s absolutely no diversity of thought,” Maher said in response to a viewer question about Trump’s efforts to reform American universities. 

Trump has been waging war against the country’s top colleges over antisemitism, DEI and lack of diverse thought. Trump has withheld billions of dollars in federal research funds from Columbia, Harvard, Yale and other top schools in efforts to get them to reform their campuses. 

Antisemitic incidents have sharply spiked at colleges across the country since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Additionally, studies show that intellectual diversity is in decline at universities, with liberals outnumbering conservatives.

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Trump restored research funds to Columbia after the Ivy League school settled with the administration, paying over $221 million to resolve various federal civil rights investigations against it. The deal includes $21 million to resolve antisemitism complaints. The Trump administration hailed the deal as the largest antisemitism settlement in history. Columbia also committed to several reforms to combat antisemitism and discrimination on its campus. 

Maher conceded that he didn’t think withholding scientific research funds wasn’t the right course of action, but countered that universities had become profoundly anti-American. He also said that professors, cloistered in their “ivory towers,” had become disconnected from basic moral decency.

“Why do you think they erupted so many of them in cheers for what happened On October 7th? 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, you know, they’re ivory towers, and also they’re just very Anti-America,” Maher said. 

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Cornell University Professor Russell J. Rickford called the Hamas terrorist attack “exhilarating” and “energizing,” just days after it took place.

“It was exhilarating, it was energizing. And if it weren’t exhilarating by this challenge to the monopoly of violence – by this shifting to this balance of power – then they would not be human. I was exhilarated,” Rickford said. He later issued an apology.

The “Real Time” host slammed colleges for lacking free speech on their campuses, and said that something had been “rotten” about American higher education for quite some time. He slammed universities for not permitting conservatives to speak on campus. 

“You cannot speak the other side of the coin, when conservative thought, whatever you think of it. It’s just verboten, which is basically what happened,” Maher said.