Over the past four years, colleges and universities have violated the civil rights of Jewish students. Transgender ideology has proliferated, threatening women’s sports. And diversity, equity, and inclusion have increasingly trumped merit in the hiring and accreditation processes.
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, will be tasked with addressing those problems and more. A litany of education experts spoke with the Washington Free Beacon to discuss how.
“The bottom line is that the next secretary of education will inherit a role that’ll feel a lot like cleaning up a bankrupt, dysfunctional Fortune 500 company,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Lawmakers and policy experts who spoke to the Free Beacon outlined the key challenges.
Combating Campus Anti-Semitism
The response of university administrators to anti-Semitic protests and encampments has left Jewish students vulnerable. Such protests exploded on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel. At many elite schools, however, student participants faced either no discipline or minimal discipline, according to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
It was mostly lawmakers on that committee, rather than the Department of Education, who held elite university leaders like Harvard University’s Claudine Gay to account. Outgoing education secretary Miguel Cardona “did little to nothing to counter the disgusting anti-Semitic behavior that was fueling across U.S. campuses,” said Parents Defending Education senior adviser Michelle Exner.
McMahon can reverse that posture. For one, she could take a more aggressive stance toward the department’s civil rights investigations into schools accused of discriminating against Jewish students. While the Biden-Harris administration has 92 active investigations, several have been open for years with no resolution. Those that were resolved resulted in insignificant changes like employee training and anti-discrimination statements.
A more assertive approach would allow the Education Secretary to withhold federal funding and student loan access from schools that fail to protect Jewish students. The University of California, Los Angeles, for example, argued that it had no responsibility to protect Jewish students and their religious liberty after anti-Semitic protesters blocked them from accessing portions of campus. When a federal judge admonished the school and ordered its leaders to maintain equal campus access for all students, UCLA appealed the ruling before backing down.
McMahon can also push schools to adopt clear, enforceable codes that outline strict penalties for encampments and other campus disruptions, said American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Michael Poliakoff.
“If institutions want to have an environment that is free of racism, then let them bring an environment that’s free of anti-Semitism,” Poliakoff said. “If you take off the table the opportunity for students to encamp and obstruct in order to change the investment portfolio of the institution, you are actually going to change campus discourse in a wholesome way.”
Schools should require students and faculty alike to sign codes of conduct that clearly outline unacceptable behavior, Poliakoff added, “particularly pertaining to campus disruption and obstruction of legitimate speakers, and what the consequences will be.” Encampments and other disorderly protests, he said, should be grounds for suspension or expulsion without exception.
“This is the way you preserve order. And there is no such thing as a quality education without order,” Poliakoff said.
Title IX
The Biden-Harris administration has pushed updates to Title IX that would replace sex with gender identity, a move that critics say will pave the way for biological males to play women’s sports, use women’s locker rooms, and even make the misuse of a gender pronoun a form of sexual harassment. The rule change was slated to take effect Aug. 1 but is on hold in 26 states while lawsuits play out.
Reversing those changes would protect both women and free speech and provide due process to students, experts said.
“Secretary Cardona will depart the Department of Education with a failed legacy marred by blunders and incompetence,” Exner said. “He was one of the architects of the anti-female Title IX policies that aimed to destroy female sports and compromise the safety and security of women.”
Trump unveiled his own Title IX changes during his first term. His version required colleges and universities to hold live hearings for sexual misconduct cases and allowed for the cross-examination of complainants. Trump’s rules also barred institutions from using the so-called single-investigator model, in which one school official serves as both investigator and adjudicator in cases of misconduct. The Biden-Harris administration rescinded those revisions.
A return to Trump’s rules, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) lead counsel Tyler Coward said, would protect “free speech on sex and gender issues on campus.”
“The current administration is using a blatantly unconstitutional definition of what constitutes harassment in a way that really restricts speech on these important, provocative, and controversial issues,” he told the Free Beacon. “Returning to that standard will be very welcome.”
Accreditation
Another broken system ripe for reform? College accreditation.
Without accreditation, colleges and universities are not eligible for federal financial aid, including student loans, and employers are less likely to see a degree from an unaccredited institution as legitimate. While university accreditation is meant to hinge on a school’s education quality, accreditors—who are overseen by the Education Department—increasingly consider other factors, like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, experts said.
“Accreditation doesn’t need tweaks around the edges,” said Poliakoff, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni leader. “It needs an overhaul.”
“For most schools, losing access to federally funded student loans would be the kiss of death financially, and it’s a club that accreditors can wield over schools,” he continued. “They can bully them into submission over things that are none of their business.”
In 2022, the Association of American Medical Colleges—one of the two groups that oversee the accrediting body for all U.S. medical schools—released a set of DEI “competencies” to guide curricula. The guidelines emphasize teaching students how to identify “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” and to integrate a “knowledge of intersectionality” into clinical decision-making.
Accreditors “facilitated the nation’s colleges’ systematically discriminating against faculty of a different political orientation. They also ritually violated free speech and dramatically dumbed down curricula,” said Peter Boghossian, a founding member of the University of Austin.
“Linda McMahon is an unconventional and excellent choice for secretary of education. She has the business acumen and administrative experience necessary for the position,” he added. “Her policy objectives align with President-elect Trump’s vision of dramatically decreasing federal oversight and returning control to the states.”
Removing DEI
More broadly, McMahon should forbid colleges from implementing DEI initiatives, education experts told the Free Beacon. The Manhattan Institute’s director of higher education policy, John Sailer, said the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights could chip away at those initiatives by investigating DEI efforts that include “legally questionable racial preferences.”
At the University of Illinois, Chicago, for example, several departments set quotas for “underrepresented” scholars, promising to use funding from a program to exclusively hire minorities, the Free Beacon reported last month. Office of Civil Rights investigations could prompt schools to shut down such programs out of fear of violating federal law.
“For just about any ideologically charged university program, it’s very likely that, behind the scenes, institutions engaged in legally questionable racial preferences. The department has various powers to investigate schools and universities, for instance, through its Office of Civil Rights,” he said. “Pulling back the curtain is guaranteed to reveal a culture that has flagrantly violated nondiscrimination law.”
FIRE’s Coward suggested McMahon prohibit universities from requiring diversity statements.
“One thing we’ve been worried about is ensuring that universities aren’t using so-called diversity statements, where they’re asking people to pledge fealty to diversity in order to be considered for a job or for students to be considered for admission. And we think those are unconstitutional,” he said. “They’re very explicitly intended to weed out dissenting views on these topics. Asking somebody to, in detail, express their views on a socially and politically fraught topic also violates their freedom from compulsory speech.”
Student Loans and Affordability
College affordability is another top issue, with the average tuition at a public four-year college up 141 percent over the last 20 years, according to the Education Data Initiative. The Biden-Harris administration’s promises and attempts to forgive student loan borrowers have made matters worse, critics said.
“For four years, Secretary Cardona has tried to stretch existing law to a breaking point in order to make good on the Biden-Harris administration’s far left wish list,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the House Committee on Education and the Workforce chair. “The most obvious example of this is the student loan schemes. Despite the courts repeatedly confirming that their moves are illegal, they’ve tried every trick under the sun to force taxpayers to foot the bill for others’ debt.”
When the Supreme Court blocked President Joe Biden’s effort to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt in 2023, Biden promised to find other paths forward. So far, he has forgiven more than $175 billion for some 4.8 million Americans. And while the Trump administration paused loan payments at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden extended the suspension until October 2023—years after the country stabilized.
Economists have argued that any forgiveness scheme exacerbates the affordability problem by incentivizing schools to raise tuition. Those schemes can also provide perverse incentives for future undergraduates, encouraging them to delay loan repayment in anticipation of eventual forgiveness that might never come.
Instead, McMahon could overhaul how the Education Department scrutinizes the quality of college programs. Basing federal funding on benchmarks like an average graduate’s first-year earnings—rather than factors like curricula—would make it easier for new colleges with innovative approaches to enter the market, the Manhattan Institute argues. The increased competition would drive tuition costs down.
McMahon could also target public universities’ bloated DEI bureaucracies that cost millions of dollars annually. A New York Times Magazine investigation published in October found that the University of Michigan’s DEI program, one of the most expansive in the country, cost more than a quarter-billion dollars over the last 10 years, with more than half being spent on staff salaries and benefits. The school’s board of regents is now considering a major overhaul of the DEI program’s budget.
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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