Late last month, President Trump spoke at an event for Turning Point USA, a right-wing student rights organization that has spent years fomenting a culture war against higher education. Trump entered to his campaign song, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” and spent almost the entirety of his 90 minutes onstage ranting about the wall, socialism, his dislike of “the squad,” and what he calls the Mueller “witch hunt.” At one point an attendee even shouted, “Lock her up.”

This wasn’t some Trumpian aberration. TPUSA events have little to do with education. The group, which boasts 1,400 branches in colleges and high schools across all 50 states, is part of a larger right-wing political strategy organized around the most salient crisis facing higher-ed policy today: The effort to erode a patch of cultural common ground and reshape it in the mold of identity politics. This raises the concern that higher ed—until recently one of the few policy areas not mired in hyper-partisanship—will become just another political football.

It’s terrible timing. For years, both parties cooperated on the Higher Education Act, the comprehensive law governing all aspects of higher ed, from loans and federal student aid to Title IX, from for-profit regulation to free speech. The law sets critical regulatory standards, but it hasn’t been reauthorized in eleven years and expired in 2015. Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has worked closely with his Democratic counterpart, Senator Patty Murray of Washington. Alexander is terming out of his chairmanship and has dedicated himself to this bill, which he sees as his legacy. Until recently, assessments of negotiations have been optimistic, but thanks in part to GOP demands for riders protecting free speech on campus, talks have stalled and people close to them now express doubts.

To wit, one of the only policy-oriented points Trump mentioned Tuesday was his recent, symbolic, executive order about free speech on campus. “I’ve instructed federal agencies to hold public colleges and universities accountable,” said the president, adding, with authoritarian flair, that schools that seek “billions and billions of dollars” in federal aid won’t get it if they don’t comply with his administration’s dictates on speech.

“The forces of political correctness want to silence conservative students on campus,” he continued. “They want to make you feel alone, silenced, and marginalized.” This sounds ominously like another divisive campaign theme—but perhaps one where Trump thinks he can play both sides.