“We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” Vance said in a 2021 speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Now poised to become vice president if Trump wins the election, Vance may be in a position to act on those convictions. What exactly that could mean for higher education remains to be seen, but many in academia worry his ascent could usher in a period of heavy-handed government intervention.

Vance himself said in an interview with CBS in May that “there needs to be a political solution” to the ills of higher education.

What might that look like? He said that Viktor Orbán, the right-wing authoritarian leader of Hungary who recently seized control of his country’s universities, “has made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.”

In other public remarks, he has gone further. Vance told The European Conservative, a right-wing journal: “I think [Orbán’s] way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give the[m] a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.” In 2021, Orbán’s government placed the country’s public universities under the control of foundations led by Orbán’s political allies.

“I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done,” Vance told CBS. “What I’m advocating for is for taxpayers to have a say in how their money is spent.”

The Republican Party has made higher education a focus of the presidential campaign. The GOP platform promises to “reduce the cost of higher education” through the “creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year college degree.” And after an academic year marked by turmoil including protests against the Israel-Hamas war, the Trump campaign has promised to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.”

Many of Vance’s criticisms echo right-wing attacks on universities. Like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and conservative activist Christopher Rufo, Vance said that diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies have run amok; that professors are teaching critical race theory and painting an excessively negative picture of American history; and that academics have allowed science to be corrupted by ideology.

But Vance pairs those critiques with his own populist sensibilities, which can sometimes make him sound as much like Senator Bernie Sanders as Donald Trump. “If you are a lower-class person in our country of any race and you want to live a good life, very often the story that you’re told is that you must go to a college or university,” he said in the 2021 speech. “Who benefits from being told they have to go and acquire $60, $70, $80, $200,000 of student debt to live a good life in our country?”

Many university professors have grown alarmed in recent years as DeSantis and other Republican leaders have intervened in the management of public colleges and universities by abolishing DEI programs, regulating certain kinds of speech and instruction, and installing political allies in leadership roles.

Even before Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate, some in academia saw a link between those maneuvers and the crackdowns on higher education in countries with authoritarian governments.

“Universities in Turkey, Poland, Venezuela, and elsewhere have been bullied into silence,” Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor of government, said in January when Harvard was facing intense criticism and congressional investigations from Republican lawmakers. “The far right of the US openly admires authoritarian policies in Hungary.”

Benjamin Hett, a history professor at Hunter College and the City University of New York, said universities are an easy target for right-wing politicians because they “tend to be full of people who lean politically liberal or left.”

Academics are easily painted as “dangerous subversives pouring devastating ideas into the impressionable minds of young people,” he said. “We’re not a popular lot. So that makes us a good target for demagogic politicians like Vance.”

The title of Vance’s 2021 speech, “The Universities Are the Enemy,” is a reference to a comment President Richard Nixon made to his national security adviser Henry Kissinger in 1972. “Professors are the enemy,” Nixon said in an audiotaped conversation. “Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

One target of Vance’s critiques is universities’ DEI programs, which he sees as a ploy by administrators to mask the ways that universities advance the interests of the elite at the expense of the common people.

“The universities tell us that so long as we’re trailblazing on diversity, equity, inclusion, it doesn’t matter if normal people get screwed. . . . They care more about identity politics . . . than they do their own society and they do the people who live in it,” he said in his speech.

Dareen Basma, an associate dean of diversity, inclusion, climate & equity at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, said, “To some degree I could even say that I see where he’s coming from because there has been a performative aspect [to some DEI programs] in recent years. But what he’s missing is DEI is designed to create inclusion and community for everybody. It is not just targeting specific groups and students.”

Timothy Patrick McCarthy, a Harvard University historian, sees the right-wing critique of DEI as a backlash against universities’ efforts to educate increasingly diverse student bodies. “White politicians like Vance and [Republican Representative Elise] Stefanik, who claim affinity to the working class, want to close the gates of the schools that educated them for the same reason they want to build the wall on the border of the country that raised them,” he said. “Theirs is not a righteous revolt against elites. It is a racist resistance by elites.”

Vance, who grew up poor in Appalachia, as he wrote in his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” met his wife, the daughter of Indian immigrants, at Yale Law School, the pinnacle of elite higher education, producing Supreme Court justices and politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Some say it is hypocritical of an Ivy League-educated politician to bash higher education.

”It is unfortunate, and ironic, when individuals who have benefited greatly from a college education, and continue to reap those benefits, are the most vocal critics of higher education,” said Rob McCarron, chief executive of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.

As a freshman senator, Vance has taken aim at universities through legislation. Last December, he introduced a bill that would withhold federal funding to universities if they failed to adhere “to the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI prohibitions on racial discrimination or racial preferences,” according to a press release from his Senate office. The introduction of that bill followed the Supreme Court’s decision last summer banning the use of affirmative action in college and university admissions.

He also introduced a bill last December that would increase the tax rate on income from private university endowments from 1.4 percent to 35 percent. (Endowments under $10 billion would be exempted, as would religious universities.) Senate Democrats blocked the legislation in December.

“Universities are part of a social contract in this country,” Vance said in the CBS interview. “They’re not meeting their end of the bargain.”

Globe correspondent Ava Berger contributed to this report.

Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com. Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.