Writing four centuries ago, John Donne memorably opined, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” He memorably concluded, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
The “bells” in Donne’s era were rung by the church upon the death of parishioners. This all came to mind in the aftermath of the presidential election, one implication of which is that higher education, no “island entire of itself,” is in for some tough reckoning.
Higher education, no “island entire of itself,” is in for some tough reckoning.In this year’s elections, the woke majority dominating America’s universities was a huge loser. As the election seemed to demonstrate, most Americans are not fans of the progressivism dominating American campuses, where most of the faculty, top administrators, and even student leaders are part of a ruling campus Woke Supremacy.
During the Biden administration, progressives supported antisemitic demonstrations on many prominent campuses and tolerated protests that impeded learning and frightened diligent students and faculty. They created and defended a morally suspect and constitutionally dubious campus DEI bureaucracy. It was in the one part of the federal government that Democrats did not control, the House of Representatives, that higher education sealed its fate with the American public. There, during disastrous hearings featuring top university presidents, college leaders steadfastly refused to denounce behavior that most Americans found reprehensible.
Moreover, the Biden Administration used its Department of Education in extreme ways to promote its woke agenda—with the tacit blessing of our universities. The fiasco of legally dubious attempts to forgive student-loan debt was the clearest manifestation of this, but it was far from the only one.
For example, Star Chamber justice in student disciplinary matters involving allegations of sexual harassment, already present during the Obama years, returned in the Biden era despite an increasing number of court decisions against universities for wrongly punishing males. The Trump Revival will hopefully put an end to that, at least for another four years.
What would a positive Trump agenda for higher education look like for the next four years? The dismantling of the Department of Education certainly deserves serious consideration. Bottom line: By most indicators, American education today is worse off than when the department began operations in 1980. For starters, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which meddles incessantly on behalf of woke obsessions such as equalizing student punishment rates, could be abolished, with legitimate collegiate civil-rights concerns handled by other agencies, such as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. OCR has long been the domain of leftist radicals who have used it, among many other things, to decree that colleges must adopt lopsided rules for adjudicating sexual-harassment claims. Eliminating OCR would remove a major source of contagion.
What would a positive Trump agenda for higher education look like for the next four years?President-elect Trump’s choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, has had a significant career as a disrupter and business leader with World Wrestling Entertainment, as well as government-bureaucratic experience at the Small Business Administration. Nevertheless, she has had little higher-education involvement. Eliminating an entire department is a big task and would probably work politically only as part of a major federal-administrative realignment, which, while desirable, is unlikely for a considerable period, even given the forthcoming Musk-Ramaswamy governmental efficiency efforts. In the immediate future, McMahon must be willing to eliminate the policies that interfere with educational quality, as well as subordinates who insist on them.
What would a reform agenda include, keeping in mind that most Republicans believe a decentralized system of education works best, with states playing the major role?
The most consequential matter relates to student financial assistance. Why not privatize the system, encouraging private investors to finance the education of promising students via income-share agreements? Less radically, why not force colleges to have “skin in the game,” serving as cosigners on loans and sharing in the responsibility of assuring repayment of loans in default? And, of course, there should be an immediate end to all of the constitutionally dubious gyrations to engage in student-loan forgiveness.
If the government will not completely exit the student-loan business, it should at least restrict the number of years for which students can receive assistance, install some minimal academic-performance criteria, end PLUS loans to the parents of students, and curtail federal loans for programs leading to high-paying professional degrees. In the absence of these overly easy loan programs, people will make better choices about their higher-education options.
Also, as long as the government continues student assistance, it should convert the Pell Grant program, currently largely administered by the universities, into a voucher program. This would give scholarships directly to students, usable towards tuition payments, with the scholarship size determined both by financial need and academic performance. Why shouldn’t the superb student receive some extra compensation for excellence?
Federal policy should focus on achieving improved outcomes in learning and research.The administration should also forbid universities that receive federal assistance from requesting information about students’ race on application forms, thus frustrating the efforts of racist administrators to select students on the basis of skin coloration or other morally dubious criteria. This would also make it more difficult for admissions officials to evade the Supreme Court’s decision against racial preferences.
Accreditation is another issue that should be on the table. State governments and accrediting agencies independently regulate collegiate behavior, but American higher education achieved its great international reputation in the era before a centralized regulatory body existed in Washington. The accrediting agencies approved by the federal government do little to ensure educational quality and have pushed schools into more “diversity” than they might otherwise have chosen. If schools had to stand behind their results by repaying the government if students couldn’t, there would be no further reason to rely on accreditation, anyway.
There are numerous other changes worth considering. For one, the Trump administration should reform the complex and expensive system of federal research-grant payments for overhead costs. Currently, each university engages in often complex negotiations with the government over the amount of indirect research support the university provides (in the form of building maintenance, administrative assistance, etc.). Perhaps instead we should use a flat, low, national overhead rate of, say, 25 percent.
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance will probably play an important role in higher-education policy, having graduated under two decades ago from two well-known universities, one a quintessential state school, Ohio State, and the other a top Ivy League institution, Yale Law. As a senator, he has already said that he wants to increase the modest federal endowment tax dramatically. The administration might push for that. It might also follow up on the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial preferences are not legal with a law against legacy preferences, thereby showing that our educational policy favors merit rather than identity.
Higher ed, usually on the periphery of American political attention, is now moving closer to the center of the action. It will not likely enjoy the enhanced attention. Indeed, the bell is tolling for higher education. Federal policy should focus on achieving improved outcomes in learning and research, including weakening or ending woke obsessions of the Left such as anti-meritorious DEI policies. Longer term, we should restore decentralized higher-education decisionmaking by returning regulatory oversight to the states.
Richard K. Vedder is distinguished professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, and author of the forthcoming Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education.