Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and enter your name and email.
The American people voted, and Trump won. Higher ed wasn’t a focal point of his campaign, but reforming it is key to bending that “moral arc”—hopefully, we’ll go four years without hearing that phrase—toward freedom, open inquiry, and truth.
For years, our colleges and universities have been the place where intellectual diversity goes to die. Open inquiry is stifled, replaced by a push for conformity to leftism. Merit has been sidelined in favor of racial quotas, and our shared history has been rewritten to fit a narrative that paints America as rotten to its core.
Perfect was not on the ballot, but Trump’s victory opens the door for reform, and there’s no time to kick our feet up—there’s work ahead. Over the next four years, our colleges and universities need to return to the ideals of our republic, promote a true diversity of viewpoints, and create environments where open inquiry can thrive.
This won’t be easy. Yes, it involves tackling policy issues like administrative bloat, student loan reform, and rooting out the Chinese Communist Party’s influence—among many other issues. But it’s also about loosening the tight, leftist ideological grip on our universities, rebuilding them as places of genuine learning, and expanding our vision for education. This means using the next four years to spread our message as widely as possible.
So, let’s “turn the page.” Send me your essays, and I will do my best to make sure they’re changing hearts and minds.
“Donald Trump speaking at an Arizona for Trump rally, Desert Diamond Arena, Glendale, Arizona,” by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons. Background image “Graduate” by Chinnapong, Adobe Stock, Asset ID #273872364.
