By Jarrett Stepman, The Daily Signal | March 10, 2025
A reckoning is coming for higher education. On Friday, the Trump administration announced that it would pull $400 million in grants from Columbia University on Title IV grounds that the school has failed to protect students from repeated cases of antisemitism.
As a follow up in a weekend of bad news for Columbia, one of its students faces deportation for supporting the Hamas terrorist group.
It sounds like this may be just the beginning. Many other schools could soon see hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars evaporate. And some Republicans in Congress are considering doing even more to put the screws to higher education with proposals to tax their gargantuan endowments to pay off student loans.
This isn’t the same old GOP that complains about the radicalism and increasing uselessness of academia but does nothing.
For really more than half a century, conservatives have warned about the leftward drift of elite universities. Many have practically pleaded with higher education to reform and at least introduce a small amount of intellectual diversity to their campuses.
Those demands fell on deaf ears.
If anything, America’s most elite schools are today more monolithic than they’ve ever been. And it’s not just because the professors and faculty lean to the left. School administrations are typically even more radical.
In the last decade they’ve added an enormous amount of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to the ever-expanding mushroom of bureaucratic bloat. I’d argue that the ideology behind DEI is the reason for increasing antisemitism, not the answer to the problem, as some have claimed.
Even with the massive cultural vibe shift to the right since the reelection of President Donald Trump, there’s little evidence that academia is going to engage in an internal reset. This despite the fact that university leaders now face a very different and entirely hostile Republican Party that is willing to wield political and financial power against them.
In many cases, schools have attempted to recreate DEI departments under different names to dodge the Trump administration’s use of civil rights law against them. Many have simply slow walked any changes perhaps in the hope that the anti-DEI backlash will blow over.
That’s an awful lot of work to continue their designs to discriminate, isn’t it?
But it makes sense when you understand that higher education in America is of, by, and for the Left. These aren’t institutions committed to an open exchange of ideas or creating a forum for diverse views to be debated. Instead, they operate to reinforce left-wing dogma, to ensure that adherents of that dogma make their way into influence and power, and to effectively lock out those who challenge the prevailing campus worldview.
In a poorly argued but nonetheless enlightening article published by The Harvard Crimson on Friday, human rights professor Mathias Risse wrote that actually there are tons of “conservative” faculty at Ivy League schools.
Yes, really.
But his definition of what counts as a “conservative” was absurd and included categories such as “status seekers” as evidence that there are actually lots of them at as school. He made it clear that the man in the Oval Office—and assumedly his supporters—weren’t included in the acceptable list.
At our nation’s woke madrassas all are welcome, except the president and the majority of Americans who voted for him.
This is the pervasive attitude in higher education. They really don’t believe conservatives who may challenge their core worldview—an increasingly narrow one that is held by a shrinking minority of people—have a right to exist in spaces and institutions they control.
Now the Right is finally taking the right steps to adjust to the reality that elite institutions—especially colleges and universities—are hostile to their existence. Conservative leaders are pulling public support, stripping woke schools of taxpayer money, ejecting them from their ability to gatekeep ideas and decide the winners and losers in our society.
And those efforts need to continue until the institutions are wholly changed or new ones are built. Because the true believers on the inside have no intention of changing. They aren’t interested in listening to the other side, and they certainly aren’t interested in allowing their institutions to deviate from their larger left-wing project without a struggle.
The higher ed swamp is being drained and not a moment too soon.
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past."
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