Trump’s First 100 Days: Higher Ed Trying To ‘Rope-a-Dope’ Crackdown On Civil Rights Violations And DEI

Trump’s First 100 Days: Higher Ed Trying To ‘Rope-a-Dope’ Crackdown On Civil Rights Violations And DEI

April 30, 2025 will be 100 days since Donald Trump’s second Inauguration. There are lots of news outlets covering the 100 days, including as relates to the war declared on DEI through numerous Executive Orders and administrative actions.

I was interviewed by Fox Digital as to the significance of these 100 days and what it means moving forward for higher education. The video is 11 minutes long – which will leave you feeling either better informed and thankful, or muttering to yourself ‘those are 11 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.’

Here is an excerpt from the write up at Fox Digital, Trump’s crackdown on Harvard, ‘woke’ colleges will take more than 100 days to leave lasting reform: professor (archive)

The first 100 days of the Trump administration have made higher education institutions a central front in its broader battle against “woke” policies and discriminatory practices linked to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.
As both federal funding and immigration enforcement tools are being wielded, universities are feeling unprecedented pressure to reform or face serious consequences.

“The Trump administration is going after the sources of funding that enable the DEI industrial complex,” Cornell University Professor William Jacobson told Fox News Digital….

One of the administration’s key strategies involves using federal funding as leverage. Institutions like Harvard University have already seen billions of dollars in grants put on notice.

Jacobson said that many universities are in “a state of denial,” hoping they can “rope-a-dope” their way through the Trump presidency without making substantive changes….

Harvard, which Jacobson notes has systematically purged conservative, pro-capitalist, and pro-Israel voices from its faculty, faces intense scrutiny over alleged discriminatory practices in hiring and admissions.

“Higher education, particularly at the so-called elite level, has really dug themselves a hole,” he said.

Jacobson said that it is “extremely difficult” to get hired in the humanities and social sciences if you have “anything conservative, pro-Israel, or pro-capitalist” on your resume.

“Their independence has resulted in a system which has perverted the notion of education. It has turned it into ideological indoctrination,” he said….

Despite early victories by the administration in its crackdown on campus DEI, Jacobson warned that reforming higher education is a marathon, not a sprint.

“This is going to take more than 100 days,” he said.

(If video does not load, listen here.)

Transcript

(Auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity, video previously edited.)

I think the universities are in a state of denial. I think they think they can wait this out, that he’s got a few years in office and they can just rope-a-dope it and outlast him. I’m not so sure that’s true.

The first a hundred days that we’re coming upon have been extremely impactful. The Trump administration, Civil Rights division and Department of Education have not achieved everything they want, but we’re only in the middle of the fourth month of a four year term.

The Executive Orders, which are being challenged and will work their way through the courts,  are extremely impactful because they go to the source of the funding. We didn’t realize, as much as I’ve been doing this for years at criticalrace.org, equalprotect.org, legalinsurrection.com, we’ve been covering this for a decade. I don’t think we fully appreciated how much of what’s going on, which is frequently referred to as woke is, but whatever you call it, critical race theory, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, was actually funded by the federal government. We didn’t know that.

We knew that there were major foundations behind it. We know the teacher’s unions are behind it. We know a lot of state governments, but I don’t think we fully appreciated that. The consultant class when it comes to education, which has really destroyed so much of K through 12 and higher education, is funded or was funded by the federal government, either directly or indirectly.

So the fact that the Trump administration is going after those sources of funding, as to some of them they’ve been successful so far, some are being tied up in court, but that goes to the heart of the problem.

We have created an industrial complex of consultants and non-profit organizations and so-called non-governmental organizations whose entire purpose is to go after the education system. And almost every problem we’re seeing in society is a result of the loss of the education system to the far left and increasingly to the anti-American left, to the anti-capitalist left, and of course to the anti-Israel left.

So I think this first 100 days has been extremely impactful, but I always want to emphasize to people do not think it’s over just because Donald Trump signed some Executive Orders. We are dealing with a bureaucracy and with an industrial mechanism, I call it the DEI Industrial Complex, which is deeply, deeply embedded throughout the education system. I think people don’t really realize from kindergarten through medical schools, now through professional schools, there is an entire bureaucracy devoted to pushing critical race theory in its various forms. to pushing critical theory, pushing leftist ideology, and really trying to poison the minds of our children.

People should not think this is a three month or even a three year fight. If the Trump administration is successful in cutting off the source of funds for a lot of these organizations and is successful in eliminating DEI positions throughout the government and to some extent throughout higher education and the education system, that will have a tremendous impact. But if it only lasts two or three years, they will come right back.

The way I describe it is the DEI Industrial Complex are like survivors clinging to a lifeboat. And their lifeboat right now is the federal judiciary. Their hope is not that they’ll defeat the Trump administration ultimately, but they can delay things long enough for a rescue and the rescue would come in the next midterms or in the next presidential cycle.

If all Donald Trump ends up doing is disrupting the DEI industrial complex for two to three years, while that’s important, I’m not saying it’s not important. While that’s important, it will come right back. If that is now a four to eight year pro process, if it’s a four to 12 year process depending who the next president is, then it will deal a fatal blow to this ideology. But that is going have to be sustained.

So I want people to look at this one hundred days and say, yes, a lot has been accomplished in a hundred days. A lot more will be accomplished once these cases make their way through the courts, which could take six months to a year or more. And then we will see the true impact. But the ‘shock and awe’ tactic, I think has been very effective.

One thing that we’re seeing at equalprotect.org is a lot of the schools are preemptively taking down a lot of their programming. Now does that mean they’re getting rid of it or they’re just hiding it better? Our suspicion is it’s a combination of the two. I think what has been done with regard to Columbia, with regard to Harvard, to a much lesser extent with regard to Cornell and a few other schools, is having an impact. I think that a lot of the educational leadership who thought they were immune to reprimand, that they were immune to consequences, are now realizing there might be reprimand and consequences.

And of course, what we’re talking about here is simply moving them back into compliance with the civil rights laws, moving them back towards the center, not moving them to the right. Nobody thinks that we’re all of a sudden going to have a conservative educational establishment, but perhaps we can have some sort of diversity of viewpoint. Perhaps we can move things from the far left, more towards the center.

I think Harvard’s reaction to the conditions the Trump administration is trying to impose is very telling. The one thing they’re fighting harder than anything else is their so-called independence. They do not want the federal government, in exchange for giving them money, to tell them how to hire, how to have viewpoint diversity, how to do anything.

I think that higher education, particularly at the so-called elite level, has really dug themselves a hole. They have purged the campus of conservatives. They have purged the campus of open pro-capitalist professors. They have purged the faculty of openly pro-Israel faculty. If you want to be hired in higher education nowadays in the humanities and social sciences, and you have anything conservative on your resume, anything pro-Israel on your resume, anything pro capitalist on your resume, it’s not impossible to get hired, but it’s extremely, extremely difficult.

So their independence has resulted in a system which has perverted the notion of education. It has turned it into ideological indoctrination. And so leaving them alone is no longer an option. They were left alone for over a generation and they turned their campuses into monocultures of leftism, monocultures in many ways of anti-Americanism, and of course anti-israelism. They’re creating Zionist free zones on campuses. They don’t even try to hide it.

When you do that, you are one excluding Jewish students who are 80 plus percent supportive of Israel from participation in campus life. And that’s a concept that developed under the Biden administration, not the Trump administration, what they referred to as ‘shared ancestry’ discrimination. So this is not new, it’s just the Trump administration is being more aggressive in enforcing it.

When people look at the campuses and they say, why are we so concerned about the antisemitism on campuses? Well, one, it’s a civil rights violation, but two, the antisemitism on campuses is a reflection of a much, much deeper problem in higher education and increasingly K through 12 via the teacher’s unions. It’s a deeper problem of a system which no longer teaches students that they should love their country, no longer teaches them that they should support our allies, no longer teaches them that western civilization is worth saving. If you look at Columbia and that student who came here from Syria and spent two years trying to intimidate other people on campus, and now of course he’s a hero to the left and a hero to the Islamist, the group he ran stated that their goal was the destruction of Western civilization.

So I think the Trump administration in many ways, by trying to reform higher education, trying to save elite academia from itself is in many ways, is doing a positive thing. And it’s no surprise that the people who have run amok, the people who have purged their campuses of conservatives, capitalists, pro-Israel faculty, don’t want to change that.

The problem with higher education, particularly now, is there is no internal opposition left. There is nobody to try to reform it internally. Higher education cannot be reformed internally. Reform can only come from outside pressure. And that’s what the Trump administration is trying to do. So I may not support each and every little item in their agenda, but overall they’re trying to do the right thing.

Academia, particularly at the elite level, is imploding. It’s self imploding. It is.

They’re always telling us that things need to look like America. Well, you know what doesn’t look like America? Elite college campuses. Because in America, 37% of the people identify as conservative. Among the faculty at Harvard, it’s 3%. And that’s typical. In America, only about 25% of people identify as liberal on campuses at Harvard. Among the faculty, it’s over 80%.

So the campuses do not look like America, yet they want America to fund them. And I think what you’re seeing is a clash of cultures where people in the United States are saying, wait a second, why are we funding this? If they hate us so much, why are we giving them our money?

If Harvard wants to go the way of Hillsdale College and not take any money, they have a lot more leeway. But as long as they’re taking money from the federal government, they are subject to the political process and they are subject to the civil rights laws, and they need to abide by that.

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.