Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on former President Donald Trump’s atypical plan for an aggressive federal role in education policy if he is elected in 2024. Some of Trump’s proposals would require congressional action. Others could be on tricky administrative ground. But if he wins the White House again and truly wants to trump higher education, Trump has all the authority he needs from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, or the OCR.

Historically, Republicans and Democrats have had sharply divergent views of the role of the office. To Republicans, it’s an office solemnly charged with ensuring statutory compliance to the letter of civil rights law. To Democrats, it’s a forward operating base for culture war aggression. For example, as the OCR assistant secretary under former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, Catherine Lhamon has used her office to coerce colleges to establish kangaroo courts for allegations of sexual assault, force K-12 schools to adopt dangerously lenient discipline policies, and force people to call men women.

Trump could revert to classic Republican form and simply undo all of this. Or he could punch back — more than twice as hard. Here’s how.

Billionaire Bill Ackman recently published anonymous comments from Harvard faculty containing the shocking — shocking! — allegation that Harvard discriminates against white males in faculty hiring. Harvard knows this is illegal. They just think they can get away with it. But not if the next Republican president cares to do something about it.

The OCR could initiate a “compliance review” investigation of Harvard and the other Ivy League schools under Titles IX and VI to investigate their racist and sexist hiring practices. It could demand a decade’s worth of documentation for all faculty hires from Harvard and — why not? — the whole Ivy League. If these Ivy League colleges don’t want to lose their federal funding, they’d have to agree to continue to provide all hiring documentation to the OCR for the next decade.

As a further bonus, once these investigations are closed, all documents will be accessible to the public via Freedom of Information Act requests. One investigative initiative could subsidize civil discovery for race discrimination litigation that could open the Ivy League up to tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in liability. Goodbye, racist hiring practices.

Goodbye, ideological litmus tests, too. Colleges are increasingly adopting “DEI statements” for faculty hiring and promotion. These are thinly veiled political allegiance tests, predicating employment less on academic merit and more on critical race theory adherence. One can be sure enough that DEI statements act as a mechanism to facilitate anti-white hiring practices. The OCR could issue a “Dear Colleague” letter saying that it will investigate DEI statements under Title VI on disparate impact grounds. Make colleges choose between retaining these political tests and retaining their federal funding.

DEI in general? Sayonara. The OCR could issue another “Dear Colleague” letter stating that it holds that DEI programming creates a racially hostile environment under Title VI. After all, there’s no way that the Biden administration would allow college administrators to decry the evils of “Blackness.” So, why should a Trump administration allow them to deride “whiteness”? Again, force colleges to make a choice: kKeep your DEI or keep your federal funding.

As to racial discrimination in admissions? Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) recently proposed establishing an office to investigate colleges that are violating the prohibition on racial discrimination in admissions.

But Trump wouldn’t need to wait for Congress to pass a law. He could investigate a college — say, Yale — and threaten to cut off federal funding at the first whiff of discrimination. If Yale wanted to keep its federal funding, it could sign a “voluntary” resolution agreement with the OCR.

In principle, the OCR should keep its conditions tightly tailored to the offense. But Democrats have opted instead to force significant policy concessions. Why not force Yale to choose? Either lose your federal funding, or lose all admissions discretion and admit students purely based on a blind weighted lottery solely reliant on GPA and standardized test scores.

College presidents probably don’t adequately appreciate what Trump would have the power to do to them. He has the power to restore integrity to their institutions. And that should terrify them.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.