Trump Administration Can Save American Education - Here's How

By Matt Burgess

As I have argued elsewhere, the Trump Administration has an opportunity to do a hard reset on America and the rest of the Western world. This is why I asked Matt Burgress to give his take on what the incoming administration can do to fix American education. Matt is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. He writes about economics, environmental issues, and political polarization at Guided Civic Revival on Substack. Views expressed here and elsewhere are his alone.

---

President-elect Donald J. Trump has a clear mandate to reform higher education in his second term, for two reasons.

First, Vice-President Kamala Harris’ association with unpopular ‘woke’ ideas emanating from higher education was one of the biggest reasons Trump won the election. Some of these ideas merely offended the average American’s moral sensibilities—like the idea that America is fundamentally bad; that people should be judged, admitted to college, and hired on the basis of their race or gender; or that there is moral equivalence between Israel (the Middle East’s only democracy) and Hamas (an openly genocidal terror group that uses its own citizens as human shields). Other ideas—like ‘defund the police’, open borders, and no cash bail—inspired policy mistakes that caused major quality-of-life issues in Democrat-run cities. Voters in those cities shifted towards Trump (or moved away from the cities) faster than any other group.

Harris didn’t help herself by responding tepidly and equivocally to a full year, post-October 7th, of near-constant antisemitic—sometimes explicitly pro-genocide and pro-terror—agitation on many college campuses. Only four years ago, Joe Biden claimed he was inspired to run for President by a single far-right antisemitic rally in Charlottesville, which showed him that we needed to battle “for the soul of this nation”. But a full year of nightly far-left Charlottesvilles on campus somehow doesn’t threaten the nation’s soul?

Second, these bad ideas have created public-trust problems for universities which are no longer deniable. U.S. universities have lost trust over the past decade in lockstep with the rise in symptoms of their woke takeover. Polls suggest this is not a coincidence (see the chart below). Enrollment has declined over the same time period, driven largely by a sharp decline among men, who increasingly reject wokeness. The enrollment decline may have accelerated this past year. Even left-leaning outlets like the New York Times have started publishing embarrassing stories about university leaders subordinating their research and teaching missions to woke fads, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the process. Employers are increasingly shunning graduates from elite schools, whose brands have been tainted by extremism and antisemitism, and shifts away from merit in admissions. The public has had enough, and rightly so. “We asked for it,” Case Western English professor Michael Clune observed in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Trump has promised a crackdown on both wokeness and antisemitism on America’s colleges and universities. We need and deserve this. But it needs to be done carefully, both to avoid further entrenching our current problems, and to avoid creating new ones.

Left: The Great Awokening in higher education (measured here in terms of scholars targeted for discipline for their views, from the left, and the frequency of the word “equity” in National Science Foundation, NSF, abstracts, but there are many other possible measures) coincides with declining college enrollments—especially in the humanities—and loss of trust, especially among moderates and conservatives. All variables are measured as a fraction of their 2015 levels. Right: reasons given for having low confidence in U.S. higher education, from Gallup. Political agendas (i.e. one of: “indoctrination/brainwashing/propaganda”, “Too liberal/political”, “Not allowing students to think for themselves/Pushing their own agenda”, “Too much concentration on diversity, equity and inclusion”, or “Too socialist”) were the most common reasons given.

Mistakes to avoid

Counterintuitively, Trump’s first term was great for wokeness on campus and elsewhere, as I and others have written about before. The woke left was able to rile up the center and moderate left about the threat of Trump, and then cast itself as the answer to Trumpism. The center, the right, and even the Trump administration (until the very end of his term) underestimated the pervasiveness of the woke ‘march through the institutions’.

There are two big mistakes the Trump administration should avoid this term. First, they should avoid pursuing quick fixes or symbolic victories that are too easy for the next Democratic administration to undo. Second, they should avoid unpopular overreactions that delegitimize their reform project, get struck down by the courts, and/or cause more new problems than they solve.

During the campaign, Trump promised to use accreditation to fix universities. He would fire the current accreditors and replace them with new ones that would force universities to “defend the American tradition and western civilization”, protect free speech and remove administrative bloat, especially in the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) area, he said.

This is a quick fix that would be easy to undo. What’s stopping the next Democratic administration from firing Trump’s accreditors and re-installing the previous ones or new ones like them? The Biden administration similarly scrapped Trump’s first-term reforms to Title IX guidance (which had ensured due process for students accused of sexual misconduct)—probably Trump’s biggest first-term higher education achievement. Pursuing accreditation reform through Congress—especially if it can win bipartisan support—is more promising. Forcing accreditors to remove DEI requirements that may violate the First Amendment and other existing laws is more promising too. (More on this below.)

Speaking of the First Amendment, it would probably also prevent a federal requirement that universities must defend the American tradition and western civilization, even though I agree that western civilization does not get a fair shake in much of today’s academe. The First Amendment prohibits the government from compelling political speech.

Similarly, the First Amendment prevents the government from punishing universities based on their researchers’ viewpoints, and it can’t punish individual researchers for their viewpoints, no matter how odious these viewpoints are. Parts of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act were struck down by courts for this reason. So, the Trump administration should avoid using policies to directly punish bad ideas in universities, and leave that to the markets. (More on this below, too.)

Large across-the-board funding cuts might also backfire, even though universities certainly suffer from administrative bloat. Governments typically don’t control how universities allocate their general funds. So, cuts inspired by wasteful administration may get allocated to non-wasteful parts of the university. For example, how many universities allocated post-COVID funding cuts to their faculty while expanding their DEI offices? (Answer: many of them did.)

More importantly, broad funding cuts risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Most universities have badly strayed from their core missions over the past decade, but universities are still hugely important to American prosperity and success. Our universities still lead the world in education and research, and American college graduates still enjoy benefits like higher lifetime earnings, better health, and higher life satisfaction. The fact that we have most of the world’s best companies is related to the fact that we have most of the world’s best universities. With the economy becoming increasingly high-tech, and China nipping at our heels in research, now is not the time to defund or dismantle higher education. (Just like defunding the police was the wrong response, on the left, to police brutality.)

As a personnel matter, the problems in higher education largely exist in the very-politicized bureaucracies and the very politicized disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Elsewhere, my experience has been that most professors do good, rigorous work, prefer to keep their heads down, and have gone along with politicization of their disciplines out of fear or a desire to avoid conflict more than out of true belief in woke ideology. For this same reason, I expect that Trump’s higher education reforms, if done right, will face much less pushback from the silent majority on campus than off-campus conservatives might think.

What should the Trump administration do to reform higher education? I suggest they focus on three major initiatives.

Crack down hard on law breaking

The biggest problems on campus don’t need new laws or policies to address. They can be curtailed with very aggressive enforcement of existing laws. I can’t stress the “very aggressive” part enough, though, because current enforcement efforts aren’t cutting it.

The government needs to understand that many universities don’t just break the law, they mock it. They repeatedly, knowingly, and flagrantly break laws and their own policies when it serves their ideological goals, and when they think they can get away with it. If they get caught, they often try to bury the evidence and hope the incident gets memory-holed rather than apologize or do an about face publicly. They often continue a more opaque version of the illegal practice afterwards. I documented this type of behavior regarding race and gender discrimination in faculty hiring at my previous university, for example. There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many other examples of similar behavior at other schools.

The most common laws that universities break in the name of woke ideology are anti-discrimination laws (prohibiting race and gender discrimination in hiring and admissions), the First Amendment (protecting free expression and prohibiting compelled political speech), contract laws (requiring universities to follow their own stated policies and procedures), and laws preventing tax-exempt public and nonprofit entities (which most universities are) from engaging in partisan political activities.

The way to stop this law breaking is to force all universities receiving public funding or financial aid (which is essentially all of them) to adopt and enforce policies similar to the Chicago Trifecta from the University of Chicago: free expression (the Chicago Principles), institutional neutrality on social and political issues (the Kalven report), and hiring only on academic criteria and nothing else (such as race, gender, or politics, etc.; the Shils report). The Trump administration should implement this mandate in three steps.

First, they should issue a Dear Colleague letter on day one to all colleges and universities, explaining the mandate and how it follows almost entirely from existing federal laws, rather than new Trump administration policies.

The First Amendment requires free speech to be protected, prohibits discrimination on the basis of political beliefs, and prohibits compelled political speech, at public universities. Therefore, requiring DEI statements for hiring and promotion almost certainly violates the First Amendment, and should be expressly prohibited. Granting agencies should be prohibited from requiring DEI statements in proposals for the same reason. Public-university programs should be prohibited from requiring courses that force students to take particular positions on contested social and political issues, such as the UCLA medical school’s health equity class exposed by whistleblowers. DEI statements and requirements for grants and hiring also often serve as fig leaves for illegal race and gender discrimination. Most private universities have policies protecting free expression, meaning that contract law protects free expression at these universities, too.

Titles VI, VII, and IX of the Civil Rights Act prohibit hiring discrimination on the basis of race and gender, even for the purposes of affirmative action, at both public and private universities. The recent SFFA v. Harvard decision extended these anti-discrimination protections to admissions. Title IX permits universities to have sex-segregated programs (racially segregated programs are illegal), under certain circumstances such as sports. But the large number of existing women-only scholarships and educational programs rarely survive legal scrutiny when challenged.

As public entities and/or tax-exempt nonprofits, most universities are required to refrain from partisan political activities. Currently the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) interprets the restriction on partisan activities as only prohibiting activities that favor particular candidates for public office. The Trump administration should pass new policy and/or law expanding this restriction to mirror the Kalven report—prohibiting universities receiving federal funds (public and private alike) from compelling political speech or taking institutional positions on contested social and political issues aside from those directly affecting their operations. But the rights of individual faculty and students to take such positions should, importantly, be protected, as long as they don’t compel such positions from their students. The Dear Colleague letter should outline both of these intentions.

Second, the Trump administration should appoint a monitor, who is a federal employee (not a university employee), for a fixed two-year term to audit and oversee enforcement at each campus. These monitors should audit university practices, flag instances of law breaking to the federal government, and publish the evidence. Once the audit is done, within two years, the monitors’ position would sunset (like the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE).

Two concerns people might have about federal monitors are that they add bureaucracy and that making them federal employees is too intrusive or heavy handed. The reason the monitors can’t be university employees is that most universities already employ monitors who are supposed to police race and gender discrimination, and yet the pervasive law breaking persists. In my experience many university equity officers are happy to go along with the DEI-motivated discrimination and First-Amendment violations, as long as they think there is a low chance of material blowback.

Monitors would indeed be more bureaucracy. But I’m honestly not sure there’s another way. The reason universities have gotten away with so much illegal behavior for so long is that lawsuits and Congressional investigations are currently the main bulwarks against this behavior. These require plaintiffs or whistleblowers willing to endure high-profile media scrutiny and/or long legal processes. The courts and the media also don’t have the bandwidth to crack down on almost all universities at once for the same discriminatory behavior, which is probably a good approximation of what needs to happen. Sunsetting the monitors after a two-year term prevents the bureaucracy from being permanent.

Third, the Trump administration should put universities found by the audit to have violated the above laws and policies under the equivalent of a consent decree, whereby they would have to affirmatively and publicly demonstrate their legal compliance within a short period of time (e.g., six months or a year) or lose their federal funding. The federal monitors’ terms could be extended to include this probationary period to ensure full compliance.

As much as possible, findings of responsibility and threats of funding loss should occur at the smallest relevant university unit. For example, if a specific department is caught breaking discrimination laws, that department alone should be threatened with loss of funding, rather than the whole university. We don’t want physics departments to be punished for Ethnic Studies departments’ misdeeds, for example. But if a university as a whole is breaking the law—as is common with hiring discrimination (see the examples linked above)—then the university as a whole should have its funding threatened.

As I said above, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I suspect that a threat of funding loss will be enough to get all but the most ideological departments or universities to clean up their acts. Those that don’t—even under a consent decree—deserve to lose their funding.

Invest big in what’s missing

One of the biggest problems caused by the lack of ideological diversity on campus is absence of research and teaching in fields important to our national interests. Military history is an example of this. It is vanishing from our history departments, yet it is vital to training our future military and political leaders. Another example is the study of western civilization—which is explicitly demonized on many campuses, especially within disciplines like history, anthropology, and classics that are supposed to teach it. Many of western civilization’s achievements—in terms of wealth, freedoms, and rights of women and minorities, for example—are unparalleled in world history. We therefore need academic disciplines studying how these successes came about, so that we can safeguard and replicate them, in addition to the disciplines studying our society’s flaws and areas for improvement.

The Trump administration can address these gaps by making big investments in new centers, grant funding streams, and perhaps even new universities (like the new University of Austin). These funding streams shouldn’t be politically discriminatory—that would be illegal and wrong—but the disciplines they fund would naturally attract a more politically diverse professoriate than the current professoriate in the social sciences and humanities. Several investments of this type have already been made at the state level, such as the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership.

These types of new schools and programs would attract back some of the talented prospective students and faculty that campuses are currently losing due to their ideological monocultures. They would also make the universities’ faculties as a whole ideologically balanced, which would probably improve the campus climates.

The Trump administration could also provide funding incentives to universities that have been reforming on their own. For example, the University of Wyoming, where I currently teach, has adopted the Chicago Trifecta policies (free expression, institutional neutrality, merit-only-based hiring) over the past year, and has made free expression and constructive dialogue a major theme on campus. We have more political diversity among our students and faculty, and a far better climate for civil discourse, than any other campus I have worked at, studied at, or visited in my twenty years in higher education in North America. There are other universities that have been taking similar steps—Vanderbilt, University of Virginia, Purdue University, and, of course, the University of Chicago, being a few examples. Building up universities that are already doing the right things would be much easier and faster than building new ones, or tearing others down in hopes of building them back up.

By using carrots (in addition to sticks) as part of their higher-education reform strategy, the Trump administration can both maintain American universities’ global leadership (i.e. keep the baby while throwing out the bathwater), and blunt the arguments from the administration’s critics that they are against ‘science’ or ‘education’.

Help markets punish bad ideas in universities

Belief in the power of free markets is a core conservative principle. I think this principle is more relevant to higher-education reform than some conservatives currently appreciate. Higher education costs students tens of thousands of dollars per year. Employers have tens of thousands of dollars or more on the line in recruiting and cultivating good high-skilled employees. So, if college programs aren’t providing their students useful knowledge, skills, and habits of mind; or, worse, they are inculcating destructive habits of mind, employers and prospective students will punish them for it.

The government’s job, then, is to make sure there are enough choices available for the market to be able to punish bad ideas and programs. In most fields, choice already exists. For example, a 2024 Forbes survey of employers found they were souring on Ivy League graduates, due to a combination of extreme student and faculty politics and the move away from merit-based admissions. Enrollment in humanities majors has plummeted during the woke era. Overall college enrollment, especially among men, has declined (see the chart above). In other words, a financial reckoning is already coming to programs and universities that have lost their way, regardless of what the Trump administration does.

What the incoming administration can do is accelerate this market correction by investing in what’s missing and cracking down on law breaking, as I suggest above. Investments in neglected programs and lines of inquiry will expand student and employer choices. Cracking down on law breaking may accelerate the decline of universities, departments and disciplines whose ideological commitments to illegal practices are beyond reform.

Disciplines with tightly regulated credentials or guilds that control entry—especially doctors, teachers, and lawyers—may require further intervention. Although the government has no place interfering with specific schools’ or professors’ academic freedom, the government absolutely does have a duty to oversee credentialing standards for our society’s most important professions. Ensuring that programs granting these key credentials aren’t compelling political speech nor forcing students to learn and regurgitate dangerous misinformation, and that they are not using illegal non-merit-based criteria for admitting students, are appropriate roles for the government.

Other countries need better free speech and nondiscrimination laws

As I was thinking through how the Trump administration might fix higher education, I was struck by how far the First Amendment and non-discrimination laws can get us in the U.S. As an immigrant from Canada, I was also struck by how big of a challenge it will be to reform higher education without such laws in other countries. In Canada, race and gender discrimination is legal in most provinces—as long as it works against ‘privileged’ groups—and it is practiced widely and openly in academia. In the U.K., there is no free speech guarantee. People can get arrested for retweets, and a Member of Parliament recently called for the country to adopt literal blasphemy laws, with little pushback from the Prime Minister.

So, if you’re a higher education reformer living in Canada, the U.K., or another country lacking robust free speech or non-discrimination laws, you should lobby your government to adopt such laws. If you’re a higher education reformer in the U.S., you should recognize how large of a comparative advantage our free speech or non-discrimination laws give us, and push higher-ed reforms that exploit this advantage. If we can solve the problems on campus first, it will only accelerate America’s leadership in the knowledge economy.

The end of an ugly era in academia

Whatever the Trump administration does, future historians will be very unkind to the ‘woke’ era of the past ten years in academia, which seems to be on its way out, one way or another.

In the name of helping America’s most disadvantaged communities, universities became the intellectual epicenters of bad ideas that caused crime to spike, capital to flee, and quality of life to erode in America’s most disadvantaged communities.

In the name of ending bigotry and promoting emotional well being, universities became hotbeds of bigotry, paranoia, ethnonationalism, protected-class discrimination, sympathy with history’s worst mass murderers (terrorists, Nazis, communists), and mental illness.

I have been lucky enough to avoid the worst of this in most of my circles of academia. But even in some of the circles I have traveled in, the banality of the bigotry of the past ten years has been disquieting. Like graduate students telling department leaders to their faces that their opinions don’t matter because they’re white. Or dean-level administrators saying that predominantly race-based faculty hiring is OK if we only do it for two or three years as opposed to five or six. Or mixed-race job candidates being ruled out because they aren’t “black enough” to count towards diversity. Or colleagues ruefully describing their white husbands getting a job as an example of how racist and sexist the system is, rather than as something to celebrate. Or colleagues casually talking at professional functions about how sad they were when they discovered they were having sons, because masculinity is toxic. Their own husbands. Their own sons. Or friends describing how many of their kids’ friends in ultra-progressive K-12 schools were suddenly adopting new LGBTQ identities because they didn’t want to be straight and white. Or that they know when their mixed-race kids are learning something crazy about white people in school because they suddenly start adopting caricatured, tokenized versions of their minority identities. Or people ending friendships and research collaborations if you question any of this stuff. How can we have allowed our hearts to be infected by such ugliness? How have we not done everything we can to protect our children from it?

Our higher education institutions have destroyed public trust that they had built up over centuries in a single decade. This loss of trust is a threat to public health and other areas where evidence-based policy and trust in experts are critical.

Now, the Trump administration is set to take a swing at higher education with a big metaphorical hammer. I hope that they use a sharp metaphorical scalpel instead. But whatever form the big disruption of the next four years comes in, we will deserve it and most Americans will not mourn.