Education has been at the forefront of right-wing culture wars for years now, and with a right-wing government empowered by all three branches of government, the tools are in place to remake schools according to a MAGA vision. A particular point of focus in the next presidential term may very well be higher education, which Trump has pledged to take back from “Marxist maniacs.”
With protests erupting on college campuses over the war in Gaza, conservative lawmakers have been leading the charge in eroding national faith in higher education. In addition to making national headlines for months, multiple college administrators were brought before Congress to testify over their handling of protests, where they were routinely grilled by Republican senators.
“There’s a gathering force here,” Steven Brint, a public policy professor at the University of California at Riverside, told the New York Times in a new analysis. “They feel — and rightly, actually — that Americans have lost confidence in higher education.”
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“This is a moment of enormity for American higher education,” Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, explained. “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.”
Project 2025 calls for dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating DEI programs, privatizing student loans, and erasing protections for trans students. In general, the mandate seeks to replace scientific and expert consensus with Christian nationalism wherever it can, and the implication therein for university education is dire.
Although institutions of higher learning are independent, there are ways in which the federal government can exert pressure to get colleges to crack down on protestors, scrap diversity programs, and eliminate subjects deemed too ‘ideological.’ One of the most straightforward is to bully them.
“If I was the president of a selective private college, or even a big blue-state public university, I would be very concerned,” Robert Kelchen, an education professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville said, “especially if I was a woman or person of color, because that’s who was disproportionately brought in for hearings.”
Trump himself has also floated the idea of changing the accreditation process, which determines which colleges can join federal student aid programs. Another key plan is to raise the tax rate on endowments, which many colleges rely on to fund financial aid.
According to David Greene, president at Colby College in Maine, the money gained from an endowment tax could be devastating to smaller colleges and would hardly make a difference in the national budget. “So it’s simply a punishment,” he said. “A political tool. If you do that, you have to realize who you’re actually punishing. And it’s going to be students.”
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