Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Greatness on March 21, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
On Friday, March 14, Trump‘s Education Department announced an investigation into more than 50 colleges and universities for their continuation of racial preferences despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (“SFFA”), which found such practices both illegal and unconstitutional. The March announcement, which specifically mentioned race-based scholarships in a program called the “PhD Project,” was a follow-up to a February 14 “Dear Colleague Letter” by Acting Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights Craig Trainor, which told schools to get rid of diversity ideology—aka “DEI” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion”—or lose federal funds.
Things are getting real.
“Diversity” has been all the rage in business and academia for decades now. The word took hold in the 1990s when the prior terms “affirmative action,” “reverse discrimination,” “racial quotas,” and Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) were almost universally denounced as unjust and destructive. Though more pleasant sounding, “diversity” is actually just more of the same, the same wine in a different skin, as they say. A poisonous ideology that pits Americans against each other based on race or sex.
All these movements attack America, aiming to divide and conquer citizens by fomenting racial discord and creating a race industrial complex that enriches some—think the six-figure salary of “White Fragility” author Robin DeAngelo or the million-dollar homes purchased by BLM founders—while leaving most others demoralized or puzzled. After all, obsession with race crowds out consideration of real aptitude and talent for jobs, scholarships, and school admissions.
With talent yielding to race politics, mediocrity becomes the norm. (Professional athletics, where champions like Tom Brady or LeBron James shine, would never put up with it!) Mediocrity then becomes ruin; the recent DC plane crash, for example, was immediately connected to “diversity hires.” Ignoring or even penalizing real competence guarantees this result.
But Trump has other plans.
Trainor’s Feb 14 letter pulled no punches, stating unequivocally the administration’s zero tolerance for toxic identity politics: “The Education Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: Treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals, such as “diversity, racial, balancing, social justice, or equity, is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.”
Indeed, the Supreme Court basically discarded the specious notion of “diversity” as a public good or an educational benefit, much less a constitutional value that suddenly appeared 220 years after America’s founding. It stated, “The question whether a particular mix of minority students produces engaged and productive citizens or effectively trains future leaders is standardless … [and presupposes] that [such minority students] express some characteristic minority viewpoint”—an instance of racial stereotyping that federal and constitutional law has long prohibited.
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So, the Trump team is serious about enforcing Supreme Court precedent and the even-handed administration of laws. It stopped $400 million in federal contracts at Columbia University for the school’s arbitrary enforcement of civil rights, where black and Hispanic students are protected from harassment, but white and Jewish students are not. It then paused $30 million in federal funds at the University of Maine because of policies conflicting with Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education. Maine’s policies promoted gender ideology, including male transvestites playing on women’s sports teams, even as both a Trump Executive Order and federal courts have found this violates Title IX’s own guarantee of equal opportunity for women.
But the March 14 announcement shows Trump’s actions will be even more sweeping to root out not just DEI offices and administrators but all federal grants and programs that peddle this divisive ideology, including grants for teacher preparation and for scientific research at both private elite and larger state schools. One might wonder how these divisive concepts find their way into such programs in the first place—or why well-heeled institutions with billion-dollar endowments even get so much federal money—but they do. Of special note is the new policy by Trump’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), which now caps indirect “administrative overhead costs,” of research grants at 15%, much more in line with international standards.
Predictably, university administrators and faculty are crying foul: “If the federal government can show up and demand a university department be shut down or restructured, then we don’t have universities in this country,” said one Columbia professor.
Actually, we don’t seem to have universities in the country right now—at least not by the traditional understanding of a university.
Historically, universities were places to transmit knowledge, to engage inquiring minds, to read the best that has been written and to cultivate informed and virtuous citizens. But by these metrics—by most reasonable metrics, in fact—the university is either a colossal failure or is long gone.
Survey after survey shows that college graduates are increasingly ignorant—they even lose knowledge while on campus—in basic areas such as history, geopolitics, and American civics. They’re even more illiterate in math and science. Both reading comprehension and writing skills are in decline, and basic understanding of finance is also abysmal, as the student loan crisis shows.
On that point, the student loan crisis should be not only a wake-up call to Americans about the dysfunction of our higher education system but also a source of humility for those running it.
Incredibly, calls for taxpayers to bail out indebted graduates—which is really a way for schools to continue business as usual—has not chastened the system in the slightest. Instead, administrators seem to say, “Yes, subsidize us even more! We’re about the public good, don’t you know—the experts. So just keep the cash flowing.”
No thanks.
In the real world—the world Trump & Co. inhabit—when you fail the way higher education has failed, you no longer call the shots.
Bankrupt debtors, for example, get supervised by receiverships or court oversight. And they have to show they’ve changed somewhat before they get credit again. American higher education desperately needs to be treated like a debtor filing bankruptcy—how else to characterize the demand for bailouts and continued subsidies? The system is an actor with a failing record that needs a thorough audit and then… adult supervision.
Trump appears to be starting just this process.
So, let the reckoning for higher education begin. Finally.
Image: “President Trump at a Roundtable about Education Choice” by Trump White House on Flickr
