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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.
I can sum it up in four sentences:
1: Purge OCR — Create “rubber rooms” if necessary, give them a lucrative early retirement buyout (it would be worth it) but clean out the regional offices. Let them go shuffle papers in the DC office if they want to but GET EVERYONE OUT OF THE REGIONAL OFFICES — THEY ALL GO AWAY.
2: Have each regional office run by a political appointee much like every US Attorney’s office is run by an appointed USA.
3: Hire outside of the civil service. Have MAGA regional hiring committees and hire both retirees and people who aren’t qualfied on paper because they are the only sane people who would be interested in it. You’d have to combine credit in state retirement programs and TIAA/CREF with the Federal system because your ideal candidate is going to be 5-7 years from retirement and won’t have social security if they were in a state retirement system. You can’t ask people to commit financial suicide.
4: Let them enforce the civil rights laws the way they are written.
About the third time a big named college is denied the ability to receive Federal funding, things will change OVERNIGHT. This could be done strategically — to a well-endowed college and only for a year — Harvard would take a *big* hit if it were done to them, they’d survive but they’d change damn fast…
Actually, about the first time — and the Trump AGO would have to be ready to defend it in court. Or Congressional leadership talking about not reauthorizing the Higher Ed Act — and not refunding the old one either.