Since January 2025, the Trump administration has engaged in an ambitious campaign to reform higher education. This campaign elicited some case resolution agreements with a handful of universities. Yet America’s institutions of higher education (IHEs) largely have rejected the reform campaign. Several elite IHEs declined to sign the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which would have granted them enhanced access to federal funding. Even those colleges and universities that signed case resolution agreements cannot be regarded as committed to reform, as there is every indication that they will fail to comply with their agreements if they believe they can do so with impunity.

America’s education establishment appears determined to double down on racial discrimination, illiberalism, and rejection of civic responsibility. America’s colleges and universities are defying the Trump administration’s campaigns for American ideals and interests. They apparently believe that what worked with previous American administrations will continue to work.

America’s education establishment is proceeding on three false premises:

False Premise #1. The American people still support higher education’s social justice agenda. The Trump regime is an aberration. If the universities lie low for a few years, they will be able to return to their primary task of reshaping American society.

False Premise #2. American colleges and universities, though feeling a little pinched right now, have the material resources and the broad social support to thrive even as they do battle with the Trump administration.

False Premise #3. Trump isn’t smart enough, serious enough, or attentive enough to pose any real challenge to the education establishment. Neither are the education reformers working in government and civil society to forward the Trump administration’s goals. All he and they want to do is collect a few nominal victories, boast about them, and move on to the next opportunity to grandstand.

American universities are grievously mistaken. Trump’s political party has turned decisively against the status quo in higher education. The other political party is burdened with disaffected students and graduates upset by education’s skyrocketing costs. They will be faint friends to the colleges and universities in any sustained political confrontation. The Trump administration’s current initiatives do not delimit the scope of possible reforms to higher education. They are the last moderate offer that colleges and universities are likely to receive from their opponents. Should the education establishment reject even this limited amount of reform, education reformers are likely to turn to sustained and systematic reform of higher education.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has not endorsed systematic reforms on the scale that may soon challenge the universities. We would prefer that universities engage voluntarily in reforms needed to depoliticize the universities. Since our founding in 1987, we have called on America’s institutions of higher education to end racial discrimination, illiberalism, and rejection of civic responsibility. But if the education establishment perseveres in obduracy, then education reformers will be justified in an external campaign of systematic reform. If the education establishment perseveres in obduracy, we believe that a majority of the American public and policymakers will support such a campaign of systematic reform.

NAS personnel have been listening to ideas that are circulating among those who are frustrated by higher education’s efforts to ignore or evade reform. We recognize that some of these proposals would profoundly damage the settled place of higher education in our society. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be proposed. If they are proposed, they may well be enacted into administrative regulation and into law.

NAS’s White Paper: Systematic Reform of American Education catalogues 21 of those ideas for systematic reform, which generally have not yet been proposed by the Trump administration. These include:

• Remove Tax-Exempt Status from Universities that Practice Race and Sex Discrimination.
• Tax University Endowments at the Same Level as Corporate Income Taxes.
• Eliminate Indirect Cost Reimbursement Rates for Universities.
• Remove Medical Teaching Schools and their Revenues from Universities.
• Apply Disparate Impact Theory to College Bureaucracies and Faculty.
• End Permission for Foreign Participation in American Universities.
• Defund Sanctuary Campuses.
• Remove Qualified Immunity from IHE Personnel.
• Establish Private Rights of Action Against IHEs.
• Hold Presidents and Boards of Trustees Personally Liable for Negligence.

Systematic Reform catalogues possibilities for systematic reform that are considerably beyond the Trump administration’s current agenda. But it also catalogues practical possibilities. American policymakers are capable of instituting all these reforms. The Trump administration—a Vance administration, a Rubio administration, a DeSantis administration—is perfectly capable of translating these sketched goals into language as detailed and effective as that of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Federal and state policymakers will not lightly undertake such thoroughgoing reforms. But if IHEs remain adamant in their defiance of the law, policymakers can be expected to consider seriously whether to engage in reform of this scope. The education establishment would be well-advised to discard its commitment to discrimination, illiberalism, and rejection of civic responsibility before policymakers conclude that reforms of this nature are the minimum necessary to restore academia to its proper functioning. If policymakers do decide that reforms of such scale are indeed necessary, the catalogue of suggestions in the NAS’s Systematic Reform White Paper is a plausible sketch of how they might go about the difficult but necessary task of restoring academia to its proper ideals and procedures.

The higher education establishment risks very rough treatment of colleges and universities by education reformers if it insists on obduracy. Systematic Reform is a map of what policies education reformers might choose to enact.

NAS strongly urges the higher education establishment to choose the path of voluntary reform, and to choose it now. The Trump administration’s proposed reforms are the best deal they can get.

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