The infamous 887-page policy manual linked to Donald Trump and JD Vance aims to take Ron DeSantis’ war against liberal arts education nationwide.
This article was originally published by Washington Monthly.
On Jan. 6, 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis orchestrated a right-wing takeover of New College of Florida (NCF) in Sarasota, the state’s only public liberal honors arts college—and, as it happens, one highly rated by the Washington Monthly’s annual college guide as well as U.S. News’.
DeSantis appointed six new members to the college’s board of trustees who were hand-picked right-wing activists in culture wars over education, including Christopher Rufo, best known as the architect of the anti-“critical race theory” movement, and Charles Kesler, a member of the Claremont Institute who helped create Trump’s 1776 Commission that promoted a sanitized version of American history.
The new board promptly replaced the New College’s president and voted to eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion office and gender studies program. Last month, they closed the Gender and Diversity Center and destroyed its books. “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash,” posted Rufo on social media.
What’s happened at New College of Florida is a dry run for what MAGA conservatives plan to do to higher education nationwide if they win the November elections.
Conservatives have long waged campaigns to take control of K-12 education, including establishing charter schools and funneling public money into private religious schools through vouchers. More recently, they have attempted to remove books from school libraries and ban the teaching of race and gender in public schools. They are now targeting higher education.
Their plans are laid out in Project 2025, the infamous 887-page manual of right-wing policies meant to guide the presidential administration of Donald Trump should he win a second term. Authored by the Heritage Foundation think tank with the support of over 100 far-right organizations, Project 2025, from pages 319 to 361, envisions a transformed higher education system in which the federal government strips resources from traditional liberal arts colleges and universities, politicizes college curricula, privatizes student loan programs and weakens protections against race discrimination, sex discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual assault.
First, Project 2025 needlessly pits liberal arts education against vocational training in a zero-sum game. The plan calls for shifting federal dollars away from liberal arts colleges and toward vocational training to “focus far more on bolstering the workforce skills of Americans who have no interest in pursuing a four-year academic degree.”
In addition to starving liberal arts institutions of funds, Project 2025 proposes the president an executive order stating that a college degree shall not be required for any federal job unless the job’s requirements specifically demand it. Theoretically, such an order could expand opportunities to a wider pool of workers. But in the hands of a president openly hostile to higher education, it would likely be used to deny opportunities to qualified college graduates and degrade the value of a liberal arts degree and “minimize bachelor’s degree requirements.”
It also takes a sledgehammer to the current system of accreditation, with a strategy of filing antitrust claims against college accreditors, especially the American Bar Association. The secretary of education would also refuse to recognize current accreditors and encourage the appointment of new accreditors. The authors explain, with absurdly conspiratorial language, that “rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.”
Second, Project 2025 falsely attacks what is taught at “traditional colleges and universities” as politically motivated and even anti-American to justify an imposition of conservative ideology on college curricula.
Congress is urged to pass education reform legislation that would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas,” including diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, and “wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities.” Area studies focus on specific regions’ cultures, languages and societies, such as Latin American studies, Middle East studies, Southeast Asian Studies and Caribbean studies.
But, according to Project 2025, while area studies are “intended to serve American interests, sometimes [universities] fund programs that run counter to those interests.” Instead, Project 2025 would require the education secretary to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to “international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”
Heritage’s policy architects would expressly prohibit the teaching of “critical race theory [CRT],” which is disingenuously described as the belief that “racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary even.” The conservative authors argue, without evidence, that “the theory disrupts America’s Founding ideals of freedom and opportunity,” in part by justifying classroom “assignments in which students must defend the false idea that America is systemically racist.”
To achieve their goals, Project 2025 calls on the next president to issue an executive order requiring “an accounting of how federal programs/grants spread DEI/CRT/gender ideology.”
Beyond curricular changes, Project 2025 hopes to discourage students from even attending traditional colleges and universities by eliminating programs to help low-income students pay for college.
“It is not the responsibility of the federal government to provide taxpayer dollars to create a pipeline from high school to college,” according to the manifesto.
Lending programs would be privatized, including unsubsidized PLUS loans, which serve graduate students and parents of undergraduates. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which prioritizes government and public sector work over private sector employment, would be terminated. So would the Parent PLUS loan program, which has been a crucial way for lower- and middle-income families to pay for college, thereby pushing people into the private loan market.
For students who already have loans, Project 2025 calls for an end to the Biden Administration’s loan forgiveness program and changing student loan repayment programs to multiply costs for borrowers, increase defaults and end existing programs that allow them to earn cancellation, according to a report from the Center for American Progress. Project 2025 would shift responsibility for student loans from the Education Department to the Treasury Department and insists on “treating taxpayers like investors in federal student aid” because “taxpayers should expect their investments in higher education to generate economic productivity.”
Finally, Project 2025 aims to weaken and remove long-standing civil rights protections. The authors would reverse the Department of Education’s historic role in enforcing civil rights laws by “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” and instead enforcing civil rights “based on a proper understanding of those laws.” These changes would narrow the meaning of “sex” in Title VII to mean biological sex rather than gender to end Title IX protections for LGBT students and allow schools to discriminate based on gender stereotypes about what male and female students should learn and do. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice would be directed to “spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” including affirmative action and DEI policies.
Instead of protecting students’ civil rights, Project 2025 demands new exemptions for publicly funded religious colleges and universities to discriminate based on sex and race. This would “protect faith-based institutions by prohibiting accreditation agencies from requiring standards and criteria that undermine the religious beliefs of, or require policies or conduct that conflict with, the religious mission or religious beliefs of the institution.” They would even keep this discrimination secret by removing from government websites what they call “the list of shame”—the list of colleges and universities) that have applied for religious exemptions to the non-discrimination requirements of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal funds. Such exemptions would allow schools to use taxpayer dollars to discriminate against female students based on religious beliefs that women should be subordinate and submissive to men.
Another Project 2025 objective that erodes civil rights protection is a recommendation to rescind the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations that strengthen protections against sexual harassment and assault in schools. Instead, it would reinstitute the Trump administration’s rules that provided extraordinary “due process” rights in school disciplinary hearings for men accused of sexual harassment and assault while requiring victims to submit to cross-examination by the accused. Project 2025 would allow Title IX enforcement only through litigation filed by the Department of Justice—a costly, time-consuming and inefficient way to enforce the law.
To implement this extreme agenda, Project 2025 proposes breaking up the Department of Education, which they describe as “bolstered by an ever-growing cabal of special interests that thrive off federal largesse,” and eliminating many of its programs. They would distribute surviving programs to various other departments and agencies across the executive branch, including the Departments of Labor, Justice, Treasury and Commerce. Equally concerning, Project 2025 would move the collection of education data to the Census Bureau and require the collection of data by family structure, which must be made available to the public, presumably to stigmatize single parents who are disproportionately women.
By withdrawing support from liberal arts education, dictating curricula, making college education more expensive and dismantling civil rights enforcement in education, Project 2025 seeks to weaponize colleges and universities to promote right-wing ideology and “bolster economic growth.”
“They don’t want people to be educated for critical thinking, but only educated to be compliant,” says my colleague Smith College professor Loretta J. Ross.
Trump desperately tries to distance himself from Project 2025, but his running mate has touted Project 2025’s vision for higher education. In a 2021 speech titled “Universities are the Enemy,” JD Vance said, “We must aggressively attack the universities in this country.” He suggested, “Maybe it’s time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.”
If the Trump-Vance ticket wins, higher education as we know it may be no more.
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