A New Administration Could Use Civil Rights Laws to Reshape Higher Education
“Americans can decide in 2024 whether to allow our universities to remain structurally anti-Semitic.”
The American public is waking up to what has been done to higher education in America in recent decades. If Trump wins in November, he should make higher ed reform a priority.
From City Journal:
Dismantling Leftist Indoctrination on Campus
Americans rightly see former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as an intellectual lightweight who ascended to her position because academia now values identity over merit. Gay was the avatar for the governing ideology of American higher education. Until Gay’s downfall began with the now-infamous congressional hearing in December 2023, campus diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commissars saw their positions as morally and administratively unassailable. Even after her ouster, Gay’s colleagues have every right to feel secure in their posts. Sure, Americans, acting through their elected representatives, can exert enough pressure to get Harvard’s president replaced. But with so many anti-Semitic ideologues inside and outside DEI bureaucracies, whacking a mole or two won’t make a systemic difference, right?
Wrong. Americans can decide in 2024 whether to allow our universities to remain structurally anti-Semitic. Consider the case of Middlebury College. Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that shortly after Hamas murdered more than 1,000 Israelis, raped an untold number of women, and beheaded babies on October 7, 2023, Jewish students at Middlebury asked the college to host a vigil for the victims. Shockingly, Middlebury refused to permit the students to hold the event in the campus chapel, refused to provide police protection, asked them not to display Israeli flags, and insisted that they not identify the victims as Jewish. All in the name of “inclusivity.” (The vigil ended up being held outside.)…
The Biden administration announced last week that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) had opened an investigation. To the uninitiated, that may sound impressive, but the most likely outcome is that OCR’s top official, Assistant Secretary of Education Catherine Lhamon, will do with this investigation what she usually does: leverage them to mandate more left-wing administration on campuses. The last thing Middlebury’s Jewish students need is more DEI funding, but that’s about all that the college need fear from the Biden administration.
Higher education would have much more to fear, however, from a second Trump administration. Earlier this month, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a 3,000-word essay on the policy agenda that Donald Trump might pursue. Somehow, neither the author nor anyone he quoted seemed able to imagine President Trump playing a natural trump card: defunding a university for violating federal civil rights law.
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Comments
A better idea still: end the federal student loan program.
Which makes it more affordable to most young people (because most of them are doing part time jobs) but does nothing whatsoever for anything related to what this article discussed.
Government is not a radical new concept, it has existed since before western civilization, in western civilization the concept of government dates to the Greek Dark Ages, and government has in every society had a major influence on society, it has historically had a major influence on American society, pretending otherwise does not make government non-influential it just means only the left gets to use its influence.
If you will not use the influence of government for good (in this case by literally enforcing laws as intended by the writers instead of as intended by the left) the left will be using it for evil.
This Ron Swanson Larp got us where we are with the left in control of every institution and it frankly has to die.
It certainly does relate to what’s discussed in the article. Without those loan dollars flowing into their coffers, colleges would have to cater a lot more to the market. And I think that means a return to traditional education, because that’s what the people, who make things work and can support such an institution on their own, want. The people who want DEI are generally useless slugs who excel at leveraging and diverting other people’s money, and we should dry up those streams.
You mean catering to the market of “I want to become a doctor and there is no other way to do it”?
Or did you mean “I want to be an engineer and there is no other way to do it”?
Or “I want to become a lawyer and there is no other way to do it”?
Universities becoming cheaper does no such thing to that market.
Your solution is only a solution to the problem of price of admission and attendance and does nothing to stop DEI.
Considering medical schools are doing the DEI thing…….yes these are things we need to use existing laws and new laws to deal with, no lowering costs won’t help.
I agree the DEI commissars have no worthwhile skills, just as the Soviet commissars didn’t. Lets remove the commissars from education instead of shoving our heads in the sand.
Actually lets do all of it, lets use civil rights law as intended, pass new laws protecting education, and make university cheaper by getting rid of loans.
Government is not a bad word and using it is not evil, you are not Ron Swanson.
Someone said recently “Without those loan dollars flowing into their coffers, colleges would have to cater a lot more to the market. And I think that means a return to traditional education …”
rather than being able to fund all their diversity departments and diversity administrators. What’s your opinion on that?
Why “protect education”? There’s so much rot there, it has to be cleaned out first. As for becoming an engineer or a doctor, some way will be available, because society needs those things and someone will pay for those products.
Artichoke again the market is exactly for universities.
There is no other path towards being a doctor
There is no other path towards being a physicist
There is no other path towards being a chemist
There is no other path towards getting into veterinary school
There is no other realistic path towards becoming a lawyer
I could go on but your idea that colleges don’t have a built in market of dollars flowing towards them whatever they do and they will have to axe dei without student loans is without merit.
Lowering the cost of attendance is a positive good by itself so I agree no more loans.
The idea that what college is offering isn’t highly in demand now and will be highly in demand if it is cheaper is pure BS.
The reason people attend today isn’t DEI it is because college is their only path towards a career they desire.
It will still be so if you eliminate the loans, and no they won’t be eliminating DEI.
Look I support cheaper college, a part time job should be enough to pay for it.
Colleges however ARE providing the service the market wants, unless you are going to explain to me which medical school will let you in with no college straight from high school.
The market doesn’t care that dei is attached to the opportunity to become a doctor, nobody is going to give up their career as a doctor because of the indoctrination it comes with.
Colleges ARE catering to the market.
The market just doesn’t give a dam about ethics or what is good and decent.