Five years ago, President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, stood all but alone against the Democratic drive for student loan forgiveness. The conventional wisdom at the time was that free-college-for-all was a sure-fire winning issue for the Democrats. Why wouldn’t Trump’s education secretary simply allow a polite, quiet surrender?
How the times have changed. America has spent the past four years under an administration that governed according to university-created woke ideology. In the past year alone, college presidents kowtowed to pro-genocidal campus quad glampers. All of this has totally flipped Republicans, and so many people in general, against our universities. No one is wondering whether Trump’s new education secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, will politely and quietly surrender to the college cartel. Everyone instead is wondering how the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive will give them the body slamming they deserve.
There are so many moves that McMahon could pull to rein in America’s universities. Here are just a few.
Cutting off federal funding
First, let’s start with what Congress could do to higher education finance. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to raise taxes on Ivy League university endowments. If you or I were lucky enough to make $500,000 a year, we’d pay a federal tax rate of 37% Yet universities pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from their multibillion-dollar endowments pay 1.4%. Universities should pay their fair share — the same share everyone else pays.
Similarly, universities get an insanely cushy deal on research grants from the federal government. Research grants tend to cover both the direct costs of the research project and “indirect” costs, which are supposed to cover overhead expenses but are actually used as a slush fund for diversity, equity, and inclusion and who knows what else.
Congress used to cap this slush-fund share at 8%. Billionaire foundations tend to cap them at 15%. As the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene has documented, right now, for every dollar colleges can get for research, they get about another 60 cents for a slush fund account. The taxpayer shouldn’t get a worse deal on research grants than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Capping overhead costs at 15% would save billions a year.
The most interesting actions, though, wouldn’t require Congress. To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.
Columbia was, perhaps, the worst offender in indulging the pro-Hamas campus radicals. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights should initiate a compliance review of every single decision Columbia made. To do that, OCR would need the identities of every single foreign student who supported the protests, actions the Trump administration could deem material support of a terrorist organization. Border czar Tom Homan could then revoke every single one of the foreign protesting students’ visas.
If Columbia doesn’t cooperate, McMahon could cut off its research grant funding.
If they do cooperate, she’ll surely find the evidence necessary to cut off its Title IV funding. That would mean that Columbia would become ineligible to receive federal research grants and subsidized student loans, which would jeopardize nearly half of its revenue.
Removing foreign money from higher education
Speaking of foreign influence, McMahon could also pick up where DeVos left off in scouring the finances of Columbia University for every single cent of unreported foreign donations, and levy the maximum penalty for every dollar on the university.
And while the Trump administration is looking into Columbia, the Justice Department should thoroughly explore indicting former Columbia President Lee Bollinger for fraud if he, through commission or omission, played a role in Columbia’s submission of inaccurate data to US News and World Report. Bollinger submitted the data to boost Columbia’s rank in the report. Once the true data were reported, Colubmia’s rank fell from second to 18th.
College presidents regard Bollinger as perhaps the greatest college leader of the 21st century. He should be regarded as the worst. Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.
The second target should be the University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA’s pro-Hamas mob physically took over the campus, calling for the genocide of Jews while physically barring them from entering the quad. When UCLA was sued, it argued in court that it had no duty to prevent the pro-Hamas mob from physically excluding Jews. It would be fascinating to find out if UCLA President Michael Drake holds that position as a consistent institutional standard, or whether it reflects illegal discrimination.
The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights could do a compliance review seeking an answer to one simple question: If a mob of white supremacists took over the quad, called for the lynching of black students, and physically barred black students from walking freely, would Drake have directed his lawyers to insist that this was fine and he had no duty to stop it?
If Drake were willing to attest, under oath, that he would have permitted white supremacists free rein, then that would be one thing. If he wouldn’t be, then, clearly, his institution treated anti-Jewish racism differently than it would have treated antiblack racism. If UCLA wanted to keep its federal funding, it could settle that investigation by firing Drake.
That shouldn’t be all for UCLA, though. As the Washington Free Beacon has documented, UCLA prioritizes race over merit in medical school admissions. This could literally cost untold lives. Allowing UCLA to continue to govern admissions to its medical school is a public health hazard. It should no longer be permitted to make its own admissions decisions.
Enforcing Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard
This brings us to the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision banning affirmative action, which Trump has promised to implement to the hilt. The first step should be forcing Harvard University to comply. Right after the decision was issued, Harvard all but publicly vowed to do everything in its power to violate the spirit of the Supreme Court’s ruling and the 14th Amendment on which it was based.
McMahon should initiate a never-ending compliance review to ensure that Harvard follows the law. She should assign Office of Civil Rights employees to the Harvard admissions office and direct the university to hold no admissions meeting without their physical presence. The Office of Civil Rights should be copied on every email correspondence, and Harvard should be forced to provide a written rationale for every admissions decision to ensure nondiscrimination.
If OCR finds a shred of evidence of racial discrimination, Harvard should lose its Title IV funds. If Harvard wants this monitoring to end, it can voluntarily agree to relinquish all discretion over its admissions process. It can select students by a weighted lottery based on standardized test scores and grade point averages. After all, Harvard swore that if it couldn’t discriminate based on race, the “diversity” of its class would plummet. It didn’t. Either Harvard misled the Supreme Court or it’s violating the law. Either way, it has lost the privilege of picking its own students.
And so many other universities have essentially forfeited the privilege of picking their own professors. So-called DEI statements have become ubiquitous in faculty hiring and promotion. These are, facially, ideological litmus tests. They are also, nearly as obviously, tools used to discriminate against white faculty applications. Institutions such as the University of Washington and the University of Illinois Chicago have been explicit about discriminating against white faculty members. This is illegal under Title VII.
What can the Trump administration do?
Well, the Biden administration notoriously forced the city of Durham, North Carolina, to settle on a racial discrimination claim because it tested prospective firefighters on whether they knew anything about firefighting. More black applicants failed and weren’t hired. The Biden administration declared this was illegal racial discrimination and forced Durham to pay nearly $1 million in back wages and hire 16 firefighters who couldn’t pass the test. This was, of course, an absurd legal abomination.
But it would be a reasonable and just application of federal civil rights law to do the exact same thing to universities. DEI statements have no logical or rational connection to job performance and are straightforward tools for racial discrimination. The University of Washington and UIC should be forced to pay back wages to every single white applicant they declined to hire over a DEI statement and hire as many as would still like to work there.
It’s not like those two universities are unique in any regard other than that they were caught red-handed by journalists. The Trump administration wouldn’t have time to investigate and sanction every college that discriminated against white faculty members. However, it could demand all documents and correspondence on hiring in every university faculty department that implemented DEI statements. It could then train an artificial intelligence model to sort through the records and flag likely discrimination. Trump staffers could then send internal, FOIA-able correspondence regarding hot spots of likely discrimination.
This would effectively subsidize discovery for civil litigation on employment discrimination. Enterprising trial attorneys could team up with starving adjunct professors, and universities could be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement fees. That would teach them a painful lesson: Hiring based on race rather than academic merit comes at a very high cost.
How Trump can destroy DEI on campus
If Trump wants to fulfill his promise to totally dismantle the power of radical Marxists on campus, he can implement Students v. Harvard in a way nearly no one appears to have anticipated: He can use it to totally destroy DEI on campus. Here’s how.
Take a look at that decision and “control-F” for “stereotyp[ing].” You’ll find 43 mentions of how the government can’t engage in that practice or with DEI’s odious “assumption that ‘members of the same racial group … think alike.’” DEI is literally nothing except for institutional stereotyping. Whiteness, blackness, “white privilege,” “antiblackness” — it’s all stereotyping. DEI violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment when stereotyping is institutionalized and promoted in an educational institution receiving federal funding — or so the Trump administration should hold and enforce.
This would do several amazing things.
First, it would force colleges to disband their DEI apparatuses. To be sure, many colleges would just try to do the same thigns under a different label. But the label isn’t the legal question — the stereotyping is. You can’t do DEI without stereotyping, so if you can’t do stereotyping, you can’t do DEI.
Second, McMahon could also prohibit colleges from requiring DEI coursework for graduation. As Speech First has documented, two-thirds of colleges require students to take DEI-infused courses to graduate. To do well in these courses, students must parrot the stereotyping tenets of DEI.
To assure compliance with the 14th Amendment, McMahon could task accreditors with ensuring that students aren’t forced to take DEI-infused courses to graduate. This would, essentially, take Florida’s policy of removing DEI from general education requirements national. When students aren’t forced to take these courses, far fewer will, and the radical Marxists will lose students and influence.
Third, almost all college orientation programs that include DEI violate the Constitution. About 90% of college orientation programs promote DEI, whereas only about one-third even mention free speech. The OCR could initiate a slew of compliance reviews, forcing colleges to cut their DEI-infused orientation programs and replace them with programming on the First Amendment and the Constitution.
McMahon could also champion college students’ First Amendment rights by forcing colleges to dismantle their so-called “Bias Reporting Systems.” More than half of colleges encourage students to snitch on each other for saying something “biased,” and students suspected of wrong speak are then hauled in front of a campus tribunal of DEI administrators.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas declared that the Supreme Court should have taken up the question of whether these systems violate students’ First Amendment rights last term. They obviously do, and the Trump administration should not wait for the Supreme Court to say so. McMahon should simply force colleges to disband these systems by threatening to withhold money unless they do.
McMahon can not only make campus speech free again — she can make college fun again. Who could forget the iconic photo of the University of North Carolina fraternity brothers defending the flag from pro-Hamas protesters? Yet, fraternities have come under sustained legal and administrative assault from their universities. College administrators want to destroy every vestige of community camaraderie and replace it with the faux “inclusion” offered by DEI departments.
This has been particularly apparent at Stanford University, which confiscated property from campus fraternities. McMahon should initiate an investigation of Stanford’s unconstitutional DEI administrative bureaucracy and threaten to withhold Title IV and research grant funding until it returns the property it expropriated from fraternities.
Shaking up college accreditation
Back to more dry matters, Trump has called college accreditation his “secret weapon.” Accreditors serve as gatekeepers for federal funds. They serve no particularly useful function in terms of academic quality control but have effectively prevented new colleges from launching and have imposed DEI on existing colleges.
Trump suggested he would simply fire all the existing accreditors. That could prove prohibitively difficult. But Trump could easily decimate the worst of them: the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
Florida recently sued the Biden administration, claiming the accreditation system was unconstitutional because it effectively gives the power of the purse to a nongovernment actor. More states under the SACS could join the case, and then the Trump administration could settle it by expediting approval for any college under the SACS to join another accreditor. The SACS would fold, and other existing accreditors would be scared straight.
Trump could also easily expedite the approval of additional accreditors. These accreditors could provide a much more streamlined, cost-effective, outcomes-oriented paradigm than the existing set. They could also specialize in helping to launch new colleges, such as the University of Austin, and even newer ones that no one has dreamed up yet. Musk University? Thiel Technical College?
A new kind of public college
What about the American Academy?
Experts laughed when Trump proposed launching a new, federally backed college. But former President George Washington wanted one.
Moreover, the best argument against inserting a “public option” into a marketplace is that it will unfairly crowd out existing competitors. That’s exactly what we should want to happen in the higher education market.
At absolute minimum, the American Academy could offer a two-year, high-quality core curriculum, and sympathetic states could mandate their flagship universities accept transfer credit. The Universities of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and the like could hoover up students who might otherwise have spent far bigger bucks on a private university with a similar prestige level. Think about the choice families would face: Spend $250,000 to get a degree from George Washington University, or take two years of courses for free at the American Academy and finish up at the University of Florida at an overall sticker cost of $13,000.
How many students will pay $237,000 more for zero status or economic value-add? Sorry, professors, what you’re sure to deride as Trump University could actually prove an existential threat to your cartel.
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These are just some ideas, and they’re just mine. And, of course, there’s far more the next Trump Education Department should and can do — it just wouldn’t be prudent to broadcast those ideas ahead of time, lest universities take defensive measures.
I don’t know what McMahon’s team is planning, but I think it’s safe for colleges to plan on facing an administration that will govern on what it campaigned on. Promises made, promises kept. Hopefully all of the above — and more.
Max Eden is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.