Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute critiques the Trump team’s response to problems within American higher education.
The size, scale, and aggression of the Trump administration’s higher education agenda really is something new—though, crucially, it builds on precedents pioneered by the Obama and Biden administrations.
What to make of all this?
On one hand, the colleges had it coming. America’s four-year colleges embraced politicization and bureaucratization, smugly confident that the bill would never come due. Campus leaders expected taxpayers to underwrite research and a massive, money-losing student loan operation, even as they took partisan stances, embraced racial preferences, charged staggering overhead rates on taxpayer-funded research, created “bias response teams” that investigated pro-Trump sidewalk graffiti while excusing anti-Semitic harassment, and accepted enormous sums from shady foreign actors.
College leaders never really imagined they’d be held to account, brushing off concerns about ideological homogeneity, academic self-indulgence, and campus partisanship. …
… This moment could’ve yielded a higher education restoration, marked by a recommitment to institutional neutrality, heterodoxy, and free inquiry. A disciplined, law-based approach from Trump 2.0 might have accomplished that. We’ll never know, because we’re instead getting something more ad hoc and personality-driven. The Trump administration is skeptical that internal higher education reforms are sincere. There’s a conviction that higher ed is so far gone that intrusive, root-and-branch assault is the only way to drive real change. There’s the all-too-human desire for payback on colleges that gleefully persecuted conservatives while wading into the white-hot center of the culture wars.
And Trump’s more cynical lieutenants are convinced this is an asymmetrical game—that, when it comes to higher education, the Democrats have no hostages to take and no way to get payback. …
… But the primary concern is not the consequentialist one (e.g., that the left will respond in kind). In abandoning principled, procedural enforcement for something more ad hoc, the administration is smashing walls that limited Washington’s day-to-day sway over higher education. That’s not a healthy development.
