DEI Is Ruining Education, and Trump Is Trying to Fix It
He signed several executive orders aimed at removing racial discrimination from education.
If it’s “status quo,” Donald Trump is disrupting it. That goes for our esteemed institutions of higher learning, which have become indoctrination centers run by faculty that skew 10-1 far left. A new series of executive orders takes the next step in the battle against what the administration calls “ideological overreach” in the form of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
Already in Trump’s second term, he’s taken on the Ivy League, especially over rampant anti-Semitism. He’s used federal funding as a negotiating tool rather than an entitlement to extract concessions from Columbia and to provoke a legal battle with Harvard. Princeton, Brown, Penn, and Cornell have been in the crosshairs, as well.
During Trump’s campaign, he promised to “fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
On Wednesday, he began keeping that promise. Trump signed an executive order titled “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education.” In short, it takes on the DEI machinations of roughly 60 federally approved higher education accreditors by using what Trump calls his “secret weapon” — using federal funding (read: taxpayer dollars) as the carrot and stick.
“Accreditors routinely approve institutions that are low-quality by the most important measures,” the order posits, citing rising six-year (as opposed to four-year) graduation rates and a “negative return on investment” for many degrees, all while there has been a “spike in debt obligations.” Instead of focusing on these problems, Trump’s order says, “Accreditors have remained improperly focused on compelling adoption of discriminatory ideology, rather than on student outcomes.” It explicitly points to DEI as the discriminatory ideology.
Having laid out the problem, the order proceeds to the solution:
American students and taxpayers deserve better, and my Administration will reform our dysfunctional accreditation system so that colleges and universities focus on delivering high-quality academic programs at a reasonable price. Federal recognition will not be provided to accreditors engaging in unlawful discrimination in violation of Federal law.
Given that the federal government dispersed more than $120 billion in loans, grants, and work-study to nearly 10 million students last year alone, this is a wise move toward good stewardship of taxpayer dollars. “Revoking accreditation is an existential threat for these universities,” said the Cato Institute’s Andrew Gillen. “If you lose Pell grants and lose student loans, for most colleges that means you’re done.”
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi will be tasked with investigation and enforcement, and McMahon will ensure that standards are improved. “Instead of pushing schools to adopt a divisive DEI ideology,” the secretary said, “accreditors should be focused on helping schools improve graduation rates and graduates’ performance in the labor market.”
What a novel concept.
Trump signed seven total orders Wednesday aimed at disrupting the Left’s chokehold on education. Two others were particularly geared toward eliminating race as a primary consideration — one on the supposed “disparate impact” approach to civil rights, and the other a restoration of “common sense school discipline policies.”
The two are related. Barack Obama’s administration began the trend of digging up “racism” by pointing to statistics showing that blacks or other minorities were disproportionately disciplined, regardless of the behavior that merited the discipline. Rather than acknowledging that a myriad of familial and cultural factors led, at this historical moment, to more misbehavior from minorities, Team Obama called it “disparate impact” so as to make Americans ashamed at how “systemic racism” had infected every facet of education.
Trump is changing that, too, by “ensuring school discipline policies are based on objective behavior, not DEI.”
“Under my Administration,” his “disparate impact” order says, “citizens will be treated equally before the law and as individuals, not consigned to a certain fate based on their immutable characteristics.” Or, as Martin Luther King put it, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Isn’t it odd and revealing that leftists define “racism” as focusing on merit and equal opportunity rather than being obsessed with racial outcomes?
