What are the next steps for university leaders and donors after the Trump administration’s slew of executive orders on removing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies from American life, identifying and removing hostile foreign students, and protecting Jewish students? 

Some necessary measures are a simple matter of compliance. Traditionally, universities faced with threats complain loudly about the end of the world, hide the ball — in this case, rename DEI activities, including policies, offices/personnel, and courses — and claim they have complied with mandated changes while hiring Washington lobbyists to establish diplomatic relations with the new administration. 

But in the age of the Department of Government Efficiency, as Elon Musk‘s super nerds are rooting out billions of dollars of waste and fraud from the nooks and crannies of the federal budget, this approach is unwise. Equally unwise is to embrace the fantastically bad optics of “resistance” from the federal bureaucracy, (formerly) federally funded nongovernmental organizations and media, and the Democratic Party. All of these helped President Donald Trump get elected in the first place. 

Examples of resistance backfiring are proliferating. The National Institutes of Health’s announcement that it would only pay universities a flat 15% rate for indirect costs on research grants was met with cries that American science and children are being killed. It also revealed that universities are charging the government anywhere from 40% to nearly 70% for indirect costs. The investigations into the United States Agency for International Development have shown that tens of billions of dollars have been spent at home and abroad, funding thousands of NGOs and initiatives as well as media outlets and left-wing foundations, with a minimum of transparency.

In the wake of these and other revelations, their craven responses to pro-Hamas protests, and the generally collapsing public faith in their politics and costs, universities have never been more vulnerable. Some suggestions regarding how to reform them, from the immediate to the long term, may therefore be made. 

First, pressure must be kept up. Investigations are needed on many fronts, including:

• The Department of Justice should take over civil rights investigations of universities that have allowed pro-Hamas protesters to deprive Jewish, Israeli, and other students of their rights from the Department of Education. Foreign students who are shown to have violated the law, including depriving American citizens of their rights, should be expelled and deported;
• The Office of Management and Budget and DOGE should announce investigations of DEI-related policies past and present to understand the misuse of funds and violations of new federal guidelines; 
• Congress should continue public hearings on university policies related to DEI and antisemitism. Biased hiring and firing and promotion and tenure policies should be exposed to the public, along with the ideological content that passes for education; 
• Following DOGE’s lead, Congress should impose transparency on all aspects of federally funded universities, especially the massive growth of administrative costs that constitute looting by middle and upper management; 
• Law enforcement should investigate the connections between the massive U.S. Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure (Council on American-Islamic Relations and others) and campus pro-Hamas protests. Foreign funding of these organizations should be investigated and prosecuted; 
• No Qatar on campus, covertly funding programs to the tune of billions, much less in K-12 education, and no Al Jazeera on American airwaves. The White House and Congress must act, hopefully as part of a downgrading of relations with Qatar; 
• Pro-Hamas foundations and dark money funds, such as the Tides Foundation and Arabella Advisors, that trace back to the Democratic Party should be investigated and, if appropriate, stripped of tax-exempt status, along with pro-Hamas and pro-Chinese Communist Party groups such as the People’s Way and Code Pink. The tax code should be revised to eliminate the dodge of “fiscal sponsorship” that allows front groups such as WESPAC to transfer funds to National Students for Justice in Palestine while the true donors remain anonymous. 

Most fundamentally, the U.S. desperately needs to reevaluate what a university is and what it is for. Five decades of universities striving for relevance has had the effect of politicizing the humanities and social sciences. But as faculties have become politically monolithic, students interested in exploring traditions and themselves have been alienated, causing a feedback loop of shrinking disciplines and intensifying politics. A utilitarian vision of the university as a place to acquire skills dominates. The most popular majors are business and health professions. Majors aimed at personal growth, such as art history, and those in the hard sciences, such as electrical engineering, are among the least popular. 

A top-down driven change in philosophy is desperately needed from university leaders and the American political class. A conception of the liberal arts and sciences should be promoted in which the primary goal of learning is individual growth and exploration and the goal of research is the conservation and expansion of knowledge and thought. Scholar-activism in the sense of politically aligned teaching and research or social justice in the sense of remaking society through undemocratic means cannot be goals, nor should they be publicly funded. 

Consistent with this, practical and procedural changes must be demanded from universities that receive public funds, including:

• Universities should be required to publish detailed explanations of their administrative structures, including the rules and organization for faculty hiring and firing, promotion and tenure, internal funding, and academic governance. Any institution that receives federal funding must be completely transparent about how it spends those funds and how it operates. Everything except perhaps the most sensitive personnel procedures should be open to public oversight;
• Universities, meaning trustees, must assert control over key processes, above all admissions. The DEI/progressive chain starts in admissions, and everyone involved should be replaced with people who are aligned with the university mission; 
• Student governments, a key node in funding Hamas supporters on campus, should be cut off from university-collected funds. Student activity fees represent a diversion of student (and, to some extent, federal in the sense of loans and grants) funds over which students have no say. Clubs and other organizations should be self-funded; 
• University and foundation endowments should be taxed. Tax exemption is a mid-20th-century innovation that is an explicit public subsidy to institutions. 

Breaking the echo chamber of faculty and graduate students is critical. Aligning faculty with the philosophical and pedagogical goals of the institution is key — namely, a revised vision of the liberal arts and sciences and explicitly not the idea of “scholar-activism.” This is, of course, a long-term project. Changes should include:

• Graduate admissions everywhere should be halted or dramatically limited pending overall budgetary reassessments, including regarding federal funding. Underperforming graduate students should be removed. Promising graduate students should be given clear time limits on degree completion and supported until they do so without them needing to be exploited as a subaltern teaching cadre to survive; 
• Right-size the ratio of faculty to students through retirements and buyouts. Return faculty to their primary teaching roles and end the indentured servitude of graduate students and adjuncts. Graduate student unions would become unnecessary; 
• Tenure should be ended and replaced with fixed-duration contracts that are renewable. 

HOW TRUMP’S PROMISE TO ABOLISH THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION WOULD WORK

Radical times call for radical solutions. With enrollments about to plummet and public support at an all-time low, universities have a rare opportunity to redeem themselves. This can only be done by recommitting to a vision that promises to elevate all students, not simply for material ends but for personal growth and for the good of the nation that pays for it all. 

Alex Joffe is director of strategic affairs for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Asaf Romirowsky is the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.