For many years, Republicans portrayed colleges as bastions of leftism, awash in bias against conservatives and impervious to change.
With Donald J. Trump’s victory to a second presidential term and a Congress potentially under unified G.O.P. control, Republicans are now poised to escalate their efforts to root out what they see as progressive ideology in higher education.
The return to power of Mr. Trump comes at a vulnerable moment for higher education. Universities have been under increasing pressure from lawmakers, while public confidence in colleges has fallen. Last year, two Ivy League presidents resigned following their widely panned performances before Congressional panels that grilled them about how they handled pro-Palestinian activists on their campus. Other top university leaders have resigned amid criticism over protest responses.
Mr. Trump has said he thought that colleges needed to be reclaimed from “Marxist maniacs,” and his running mate, JD Vance, has described universities as “the enemy.” (Both men attended Ivy League institutions.)
Republicans have often trained their focus mainly on highly selective campuses, but their proposed policies could have a wider impact. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — an outline for Mr. Trump’s second term that he has tried to distance himself from — calls for sweeping changes, like privatizing all student loans, rolling back protections for transgender students, and paring back diversity efforts on campus.
“This is a moment of enormity for American higher education,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “Many of President Trump’s top advisers are the architects of Project 2025, which seeks to dismantle higher education, not reform it, and to replace what they perceive as woke Marxist ideology with their own conservative ideology.”
Some items on Republicans’ wish lists, like eliminating the Department of Education, will be challenging to achieve. But their plans include a slew of other ideas that worry universities.
The administration could wield control over the arcane but crucial accreditation process, which Mr. Trump has described as his “secret weapon” to force ideological changes. The president-elect has spoken of expanding the taxation of university endowments. And the new administration could scrap President Biden’s expansive student-debt forgiveness efforts and loosen regulation of for-profit colleges.
Mr. Trump did not make higher education a major focus of his first term. His focus on the sector in his second term may depend partly on who he chooses to lead the Education Department.
Still, advocates for colleges worry that Republicans will push their plans aggressively, with an emboldened Mr. Trump and an army of conservative activists who have honed their strategy and amassed a striking run of recent victories.
“There’s a gathering force here,” said Steven Brint, a public policy professor at the University of California at Riverside. “They feel — and rightly, actually — that Americans have lost confidence in higher education.”
Much about how Republicans may attack higher education in the new Trump term remains unclear, according to Robert Kelchen, an education professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. But Republicans will no doubt use the bully pulpit, as they did during Congressional hearings over the last year, to ramp up efforts to reshape higher education at a moment when colleges and universities are politically and culturally weaker.
“If I was the president of a selective private college, or even a big blue-state public university, I would be very concerned,” Dr. Kelchen said, “especially if I was a woman or person of color, because that’s who was disproportionately brought in for hearings.”
Universities have been under pressure to crack down on student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, which Republican and some Democratic lawmakers have described as supportive of terrorism and veering into antisemitism. Civil rights complaints filed with the Education Department related to antisemitism have proliferated since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel.
Mr. Trump’s Education Department could play an important role in trying to curb student and faculty protesters. In a 2019 executive order, Mr. Trump embraced a definition of antisemitism that included claims that Israel’s existence was a “racist endeavor,” a move that advocates of academic freedom said would chill speech.
The Biden administration did not reverse Mr. Trump’s executive order, and universities have expressed confusion about exactly what the Education Department required of them on the issue. Now, supporters of academic freedom worry that a new Trump administration will have a more aggressive interpretation of what constitutes antisemitism, one that could further stifle speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There is nothing resembling a consensus about how universities should be preparing for a new Trump administration, partly because it remains an open question how much of the president-elect’s rhetoric will be turned into reality.
Dr. Brint said colleges should start by making a better case to the public that they are not partisan. They should commit to institutional neutrality — the practice of avoiding making statements about the political issues of the day — and should reconsider some aspects of their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he said have become divisive.
“Colleges have become a little too closely tied to the policy objectives of one of the two political parties,” Dr. Brint said.
Fewer college presidents seem to be weighing in on the election of Mr. Trump in 2024 than did in 2016. One who has spoken out is Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, who said in a statement the day after the election that he would double down on the university’s equity and inclusion office.
“President-elect Trump has threatened the largest deportation in American history, and we have students and faculty and staff who will be threatened by that,” Dr. Roth said in an interview. “I want them to know that the university will do what it can to support them.”
He was more forceful in an opinion essay published shortly before the election.
“The folks who brought us the fraudulent Trump University,” he wrote, referring to Mr. Trump’s failed for-profit venture, which resulted in a payment of $25 million to former students to settle fraud claims, “now threaten to dismantle a higher education ecosystem that is still (for now) the envy of the rest of the world. We must not be neutral about this.”
Among the ideas Mr. Trump floated during his campaign was a new university: the American Academy, a tuition-free online university that the president-elect said would compete with existing colleges and dole out bachelor’s degrees that would be recognized by all government agencies and federal contractors.
This new institution — which he said would be “strictly nonpolitical” with “no wokeness or jihadism” — would be paid for by another proposal by Mr. Trump: Expanding taxation of university endowments, a notable departure from his broader focus on cutting taxes.
Dr. Kelchen said such a new university would be “exceedingly unlikely,” though he added a caveat: “I’m just expecting the unexpected at this point.”
The endowment tax increase could stand a better chance of becoming reality because of universities’ weakened political position. Mr. Trump signed a bill in 2017 that levied a 1.4 percent tax on the income from the wealthiest university endowments. Some Republicans want to sharply increase that tax rate, or expand it to apply to more institutions.
Some colleges depend heavily on their endowments to pay for student financial aid. At Colby College, a small liberal arts college in Maine, the endowment’s annual income of roughly $60 million covers about 20 percent of the school’s annual budget, according to David Greene, the university’s president.
The gain for the Treasury from expanding the endowment tax would be “less than a rounding error,” Dr. Greene said.
“So it’s simply a punishment,” he added. “A political tool. If you do that, you have to realize who you’re actually punishing. And it’s going to be students.”
Another way of applying financial leverage would be to go after the way colleges and universities are accredited, and therefore become eligible to participate in federal student aid programs.
The current system is overseen by nongovernmental organizations that are approved by the federal government. Mr. Trump has talked about opening up the process and allowing states to accredit universities directly. He might also decide to approve new accrediting agencies that would be friendlier to for-profit colleges, similar to actions taken during his first term.
Other major policy priorities, including imposing tariffs on imports, may occupy the president-elect’s bandwidth before he turns to higher education. And some industry leaders have not abandoned hope of finding an accommodation with the new administration.
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, a higher education trade group, said he worried that the administration would use federal funding to force ideological conformity and promote conservative program preferences. But he also hoped for common ground.
“Income inequality, job preparation, a belief in strong civic values — these are all things that we depend on higher education to deliver,” he said. “And together, we can — but we need to start from a point of partnership.”
The post Colleges Wonder if They Will Be ‘the Enemy’ Under Trump appeared first on New York Times.
