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 CampusAmericans 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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