2 days ago
Why Pres. Trump will win his battle against elite higher education
President Trump escalated his war on Harvard, Columbia and illiberal academia this week by suspending foreign student visas at Harvard and challenging Columbia University's accreditation for consistently failing to protect Jews from hate crimes on campus. The president has already cut off Harvard's grants and contracts, while threatening the university's tax-exempt status.
8 Columbia University in New York City is at the center of Pres. Trump's attack on higher education. This past week the university was threatened with the revocation of their formalized academic accreditation.
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Predictably, heads exploded within the progressive elites, its lawfare commentariat, and the legacy media. They claim the president's actions are unconstitutional and retributive.
Even some of the most powerful critics of the DEI, such as Heather Mac Donald, have criticized the administration's actions for overreach.
8 Pres. Trump possesses both the moral and legal authority to demand a higher-education revolution.
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But the meta story that critics miss is that Trump is fighting a major decay within the university and public education system that is producing abysmal results academically and inculcating anti-Western ideologies that could do our civilization lasting harm.
8 Author Coleman Hughes has question the necessity of race-based preference programs such as DEI.
Public trust in universities is declining rapidly, and the continuing acts of racial discrimination across campuses, on which much of Trump's critique rests, stand on thin ice with the US Supreme Court. While the courts may chip away at Trump's offensive, the president has multiple funding spigots over which he has near plenary discretion. Harvard, Columbia and others have few pressure points other than the courts which have already, in the case of Harvard, slapped down some of its discriminatory programs. Accordingly, they should, and likely will, soon come to the table.
China's Chairman Mao ushered in the brutal 'cultural revolution' in the 1960s by first capturing the epicenter of culture: universities. His Red Guard tortured and killed dissident professors, students and others who challenged his orthodoxies. A softer form of Maoism soon found a warm bath for academics in the West.
8 Harvard has seen billions of federal funding stripped by Trump.
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Along with Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, Herbert Marcuse was the lion on the anti-Western academic left in the 1960s. 'Liberating tolerance,' he argued, 'would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.' Marcuse's ideas presaged a new era of progressive illiberalism on campuses.
Harvard has created an 'oppressively intolerant monocultural intellectual microclimate,' says writer Gerald Baker. Students and professors and professors regularly report an environment that punishes contrarianism. Only 3% of faculty identify as conservative. 'When your liberal ideas on campus are not challenged, your education is mediocre,' says noted Harvard professor Arthur Brooks.
8 During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Chairman Mao began his assault in intellectualism by first targeting universities.
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For years, Harvard had discriminated against some of the most talented Americans on the basis of skin color in service of what writer Coleman Hughes calls a neo-racist DEI theology that patronizes favored racial groups with substantially lower admissions standards under the perverse idea that they can't hack a level playing field. Many believe the University is still defying the Supreme Court's rebuke of these practices, in both admissions and hiring.
Universities across the country have also bathed the climate of hate. 'Harvard is an Islamist outpost,' says one of its more esteemed professors, Ruth Wisse. The university's own report on antisemitism concedes that the school turned a blind eye to threats and acts of violence against its own Jewish students — acts that it would never tolerate against blacks or other minorities. At least $60 billion in foreign funds have flowed to American universities in recent decades, including from adversaries like China and Qatar. All the while, academic standards seem to have plummeted.
8 Heather Mac Donald is one of many notable thinkers who've made the case for closing the education achievement gap as the primary objective of academic researchers.
'The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books,' thundered an Atlantic magazine headline. And we were all gob smacked by reports that Harvard would teach remedial math.
The ideologizing is also rampant K-12 public schools. Two-thirds of public school students lack reading and math proficiency. In the name of 'social justice,' teachers unions and an ever-bloated public school administrative bureaucracy try to eliminate excellence programs like AP courses and magnet schools.
In their place, they seek to impose 'grading for equity' curricula that dumbs down testing, homework and other performance measures.
8 The University of Chicago has opted to not take positions on political issues.
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Instead of illiberal leftism, universities should follow the University of Chicago model and refrain from taking institutional positions on politics. Together with banning menacing encampments, this would help stop the adolescent, narcissistic, performative protests that are embarrassingly uninformed on basic historical facts. In turn, that could actually encourage informed debate.
Universities should also draw a clear line against any kind of discrimination in hiring and admissions consistent with the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling. Instead, they could work with K-12 public schools to refocus on remedying the yawning racial achievement gap in primary and secondary education, as Professor John McWhorter and Heather Mac Donald have persuasively argued.
8 One of the many pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked American campuses — and become the ire of Pres. Trump.
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And following Arthur Brooks' admonition, they should seek greater ideological balance with faculty conservatives, not because the government demands it but because critical thinking does. Merit must be education's north star. So far, it's worked out for us pretty well.
I would like to see the education industry return to fundamentals and depart from the Marcusian ideological poison without the heavy hand of government. And if the elite universities and public schools want to stop the destructive path toward anti-Western self-immolation it should take these steps on its own without the heavy prod of the federal government.
