Donald Trump’s agenda for higher education in the United States is under the spotlight. Image: Wikimedia Commons“Professors are the Enemy” – Senator JD Vance, now the Republican nominee for vice-president, during his 2022 run to be a senator from Ohio.
On 20 July, at his first rally after formally becoming the Republican Party’s nominee for president, Donald J Trump tried to tamp down the firestorm caused by the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025) by saying: “I don’t know what the hell it is”.
Critics have responded with equally strong language, with MSNBC calling it Authoritarian How-To Manual, and Representative Robert Garcia (Los Angeles, California) saying that Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the manifesto written by a number of his former political lieutenants working for the right-wing Heritage Foundation was “Total BS”.
Developed over the past two years at the cost of US$22 million, Project 2025 lays out a plan for a total revamping of America’s government, though not one that is totally new.
“The Heritage Foundation’s gambit revives and creates a more detailed plan that in many aspects reflects earlier Trump administration plots for higher education,” wrote John A Douglass, senior research fellow and research professor for public policy and higher education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California-Berkeley, in an email to University World News.
“… [To] reduce the role of or eliminate the Department of Education, end the so-called accreditation cartel, reduce federal student aid programmes and end loan forgiveness programmes established by the Obama administration, suppress funding for research on climate change and the environment, and reduce dramatically the federal indirect cost payment that sustains science and other academic research,” wrote Douglass.
According to Douglass: “Ineptness by Trump and his appointees, and pushback by Congress, largely blunted this draconian power play that saw the higher education community as part of the ‘deep state’, WOKE-obsessed, and anti-MAGA”.
Echoes of Friedman
Basing her ideas on the economist Milton Friedman’s critique dating back 70 years that public schools were an illegitimate state-supported monopoly, the author of the Project 2025 chapter on education, Lindsey M Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, calls for the abolition of the Department of Education.
She also calls for the adoption nationwide of education savings accounts that, as is the case in Arizona, allow parents to enrol their children in private school and receive 90% of the funds that would otherwise have been assigned to the public school system.
Among the many criticisms of such systems is the argument that they fund private or charter schools that can discriminate among applicants based on ability – leaving the public system, which must accept all applicants, with the least academically able students, many of whom come from families unable to pay the extra 10% required by private or charter schools.
Even Olivia Troye, who had been an advisor to Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence, poured cold water on the idea that Trump was unaware of Project 2025.
“This is preposterous,” she told CNN on 7 July. “If you look at the collaborators and the authors of this plan, a lot of these people came directly from serving in his cabinet during his administration.”
Troye explained Trump’s attempt to keep the plan at arm’s length by saying: “Donald Trump knows that what is written in this plan is so extreme that it’s damaging to his possibility of getting elected. And that’s what he’s concerned about.”
Restructuring of higher education
Project 2025 proposes a root and branch restructuring of American higher education, starting with funding.
Burke calls on the federal government to turn over the business of making student loans to the private sector (from whence it was removed following the 2008 financial crisis) because, Burke asserts, albeit without evidence, that the “federal government does not have the proper incentives to make sound lending decisions”.
As to what a “sound lending decision” is, Burke writes that a system of private lenders “would allow for market prices and signals to influence educational borrowing, introducing consumer-driven accountability into higher education”.
Additionally, she calls for the ending of student loan forgiveness. Over the past four years, Biden’s administration has forgiven US$167 billion in student loans taken out by 4.75 million people, which Burke characterised as “mercilessly pillag[ing] the student loan portfolio for crass political purposes without regard to the needs of current taxpayers or future students”.
Burke writes, assuming, it’s worth noting, that Trump will be re-elected, that the secretary of education “should phase out all existing income-driven repayment (IDR) plans by making new loans (including consolidated loans) – that is, renegotiated existing loans – ineligible and should implement a new IDR” that would require all debtors (including those just above the poverty line) to pay 10% of their income toward their accumulated student loans.
Project 2025 also calls for colleges to have “skin in the game”, a sports term which in this case means that colleges would be responsible for part of a student’s loan if he or she was unable to pay it; the intent here is to incentivise colleges and universities to prepare students for the job market.
Narrowing of horizons
Project 2025 would undo one of the tenets of academic freedom in America: faculty control over the curriculum by imposing what Burke calls: “intellectual diversity”.
According to Burke, both federal higher education policy and “many institutions of higher education … are hostile to free expression, open academic inquiry, and American exceptionalism”.
Although Project 2025 does not define ‘American exceptionalism’, its authors, Republican politicians and operatives, as well as critics of Republican education policies in states such as Florida, know exactly what is meant: the belief that the United States is a specially chosen nation and that slavery, for example, was not essential to the founding of the nation nor the cause of the Civil War (1861-65).
Nor would it be correct, according to the proponents of American exceptionalism, to say that American history is replete with incidents of misogyny or ethnic cleansing of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.
To remove critical race theory, feminist and LGBTQ studies from America’s campuses, Burke proposes that Congress “wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programmes in universities ([established under] Title VI of the Higher Education Act [HEA]).”
Such programmes, Project 2025 asserts, “run counter to those [American] interests”.
More than half of the money saved by ending area studies programmes, Burke writes, should be devoted to programmes that accord with the Heritage Foundation’s neo-liberal ideology.
“The next administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40% of the funding [saved from area studies programmes] to international business programmes to teach about free markets and economics,” he writes.
Professor Jeffrey Cohen, dean of humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, said: “I think the reduction in the educational system that this is, is part and parcel of ensuring that students’ horizons are kept narrowed rather than widened. And that’s the exact opposite of what education should be attempting to do.”
Cohen added a moment later that many people in education are not taking Project 2025 as seriously as they should, because it’s so far outside the norm.
In an email to University World News, Kelly Benjamin, spokesperson for the American Association of University Professors, noted that if implemented, Project 2025 would “ironically turn higher education into what they [the Republicans] have falsely accused universities of being for years: ideological indoctrination centres”.
Federal monopoly
Project 2025 takes a leaf from Florida’s 2023 legal challenge to the college accreditation system that dates back more than a century; under it, regional organisations audit and then accredited colleges and universities.
The Higher Education Act of 1965 mandated that higher education institutions that seek access to federal funds must be accredited by one of several organisations, such as, in the case of Florida, the Decatur, Georgia-based Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
Florida has made two main constitutional arguments in court.
The first is a ‘state’s rights’ argument. Florida contends that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to require that colleges and universities be subject to a federal regime for accreditation since those colleges and universities are chartered by states.
The second is that the federal government does not have the constitutional authority to hand over accreditation to a third party over which the federal government has agreed to give up the exercise of “direction, supervision or control.”
Behind Florida’s legal argument is the culture war against the teaching of critical race theory, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programmes, which the state argues have been foisted upon it by the accreditation system.
Independent of this legal case, Florida has banned the teaching of critical race theory in its public schools and universities and this past January cut all funding for DEI offices and programmes.
Burke fingers the “woke diversicrats” in the “defacto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel” as one of the causes that American higher education needs to be overhauled.
Burke’s use of the word ‘cartel’ is not the first time it appears in Project 2025. It is used in the context of ‘drug cartels’ in an earlier chapter calling for restructuring of the Department of Homeland Security.
Defining ‘sex’
In a section that applies to kindergarten, high school and post-secondary education, Project 2025 urges the next conservative president to “use the earliest available legislative vehicle, for example, a law or funding resolution, to prohibit the department [of education] from using any appropriations or from otherwise enforcing any final regulations under Title IX [of the HEA] promulgated by the department during the prior Administration”.
Stripped of its bureaucratic language, this proposal calls for an end to the Department of Education’s investigations into sex-based discrimination at America’s colleges and universities.
Over the course of several subsequent paragraphs Burke goes further and calls for a restoration of the regulations promulgated by Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos that defined ‘sex’ under title IX of the HEA as meaning the “biological sex recognised at birth”.
A few pages later, Burke becomes more specific, writing that the next administration should abandon the rule that ‘sex’ means “sexual orientation and gender identity”.
The importance of this to the writers working for the Heritage Fund is clear from this exhortation:
“On its first day in office, the next Administration should signal its intent to enter the rulemaking process to restore the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulation, with the additional insistence that ‘sex’ is properly understood as a fixed biological fact.”
Elsewhere in Project 2025, Burke writes: “No public institution may require an education employee or contractor to use a pronoun that does not match the person’s biological sex if [doing so is] contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.”
In his email to University World News, Benjamin pointed to the proposal to “end all Title IX investigations and roll back protections for LGBTQ students and sexual assault survivors” as being part of the “blueprint of what these authoritarians want to do”.
Reporting of foreign gifts
The one proposal that many in higher education could agree with comes under the heading, “Confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Influence in Higher Education”.
As has been reported in these pages, the numerous American universities have received more than US$100 billion in gifts and grants from Chinese organisations with ties to the CCP, and the American government has been lax in enforcing the regulations around reporting foreign large foreign gifts.
In response to these facts, Burke calls for a reversal of the “Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce Section 117 of the HEA, which directs colleges and universities to report gifts from, and contracts with, sources outside the US worth US$250,000 or more.”
Further, she calls for colleges and universities “that fail to honour their Section 117 obligations” to be investigated by the Department of Justice.
Impact on historically Black colleges
One of the major consequences of abolishing the Department of Education concerns grants that are made to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled colleges.
Burke proposes that they be moved to the employment and training division of the Department of Labour, the mandate of which is workforce development and the administration of programmes such as unemployment insurance, and collection of labour market information – and not education.
Further, since Black, Native and Hispanic Americans are among the nation’s poorest and, therefore, take out more student loans, the privatisation of the student loan system and the increased interest rate would disproportionately and negatively affect these students.
In an email to University World News, Alí R Bustamante, director of worker power and economic security at the New York-based Roosevelt Institute, wrote: “Project 2025 is a collection of bad policy ideas that would harm all Americans, especially Black and Hispanic Americans who will face the brunt of the project’s fallout.
“From cutting taxes for the rich and corporations to defunding public schools and Medicaid, Project 2025 is all about making the one percent richer at the expense of everyone else.”
Alarm bells
Other parts of Project 2025 are equally alarming, notes Douglass, who goes so far as to call it a “plot”.
“It includes weaponising the Office of Civil Rights to go after universities and colleges believed to be too focused on DEI in areas such as admissions and the curriculum of institutions, employing what is termed the ‘unitary executive theory’ to reclassify federal scientists and others as political employees subject to firing, and empowering the President to impound funding for research and programmes deemed antithetical to MAGA priorities,” writes Douglass.
Implementing Project 2025 will require Trump’s election and the Republicans taking control of both the Senate and keeping their majority in the House of Representatives.
If all three comes to pass, American higher education, “will face a tumultuous future, featuring an aggressive and intrusive federal government, erosion in funding with no alternatives, a cavalcade of political litmus tests, and an erosion in the US’ science and technology capability”, Douglass told University World News via email.
He offered two further warnings.
“Trump’s vindictive plans to harness the Department of Justice to go after critics might be expansive enough to include academics and university leaders.
“One might also predict that the blue versus red state divide will also accelerate, with an appreciable further decline in the autonomy and vitality of public universities in Republican dominated states,” he wrote.
University World News
