On Wednesday, June 4, President Trump’s Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, responded to questions, comments, and predictable partisan digs from House Education and Workforce Committee members for over three hours. She was a cool cat throughout.
McMahon is a successful, tough-and-tumble businesswoman from the world of professional wrestling. For her, handling sometimes petulant politicians is probably no big deal.
As for higher education matters, she was asked about campus free speech, student loans and repayment plans, as well as foreign influence and national security. Her answers were principled and included illustrative examples. On the dangers of foreign money and foreign students on campus, she cited the recent FBI arrest of Chinese nationals bringing pathological fungi to the University of Michigan, a serious risk to America’s safety, security, and also to our food supply. When she wasn’t sure about an answer, she promised to get back to members with responses.
Equally impressive was McMahon‘s awareness of campus administrative bloat and antisemitism, as well as the shameless capture of colleges and universities by the hard political left, which she diplomatically called a concerning “lack of viewpoint diversity.” Indeed. Today, professors are almost all registered Democrats, and regardless of official school policy promoting “diversity,” this aspiration emphatically does not extend to political or cultural opinions, especially when schools make hiring decisions. The de facto practice is that Republicans need not apply. In fact, many college departments lack a single registered Republican. Diversity for race but not for thought.
Interestingly, this grotesque political imbalance is illegal for many state boards of regents, which oversee state universities. State legal codes in places like Iowa, for example, require that no more than five of the nine members of the Regents Board belong to a single political party. Legal provisions like this are significant since they recognize the importance of political balance—or the importance of avoiding political imbalance—in higher education.
But this value of political balance, representation, and accountability has been flouted by most state universities. It turns out that the political left is not interested in balance, tolerance, or give-and-take. Instead, they view academia as their turf, and once ensconced there, they favor control over thought, speech, and behavior. Witness the proliferation of so-called Bias Response Teams, in which students report on each other to school authorities if someone says something deemed offensive. This is the opposite of free inquiry and, therefore, the opposite of education. Secretary McMahon is right to be concerned.
The committee hearing was not the place to examine any single issue in depth, but McMahon‘s appreciation of the education stakes was obvious. It’s also a prerequisite for course correction.
Some conservatives worry that Trump’s actions, especially recent ones against Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, are too rash or somehow too shocking to the system.
But America’s higher education system is very much in need of a shock. It is a bloated, rapacious, and totalitarian operation that is enriching itself while impoverishing students who are often more ignorant after college than before.
And that’s just for starters.
Many Administration critics seem to have forgotten the level of bad faith, self-interest, and general bad action by so many schools to the profound detriment of so many young people, not to mention dissident faculty or staff. The National Association of Scholars actually created a database for all the casualties of cancel culture, which was most egregious in the higher education space, considering that college is where free thought is supposed to be welcome—indeed, necessary—for higher learning.
Shouldn’t we say, “Shock away!”
Perhaps one qualifier, however, for businesswoman McMahon: she and many other conservatives tend now to see higher education solely in commercial terms. “ROI” is a favored term, for example.
But a liberal arts education should be a means of fostering virtuous citizenship and also a way to cultivate the life of the mind, a good in and of itself. Reducing this to dollars and cents is wrong.
Someone, somewhere in the Education Department, needs to remember that.
That said, credit is due for President Trump and Secretary McMahon for getting serious about cleaning up the mess that is American higher education. The hour is late, the task urgent, and the work apparently thankless.
Teresa R. Manning, JD, is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University. She authored the 2020 Report, Dear Colleague: The Weaponization of Title IX.