President Trump has racked up a string of wins against colleges and universities in recent weeks, though the larger fights between his administration and higher education rage on, in many cases in the courts.
The ouster of the president of the University of Virginia, deals in the works with Columbia and Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania committing to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports teams are just some of the W’s Trump can claim in recent weeks.
But the pressure has not come without pushback, and only time will tell how long the cultural shifts Trump seeks will last.
“On the political front, I think [the Trump administration] accomplished a lot of what they wanted to accomplish. … They’ve won politically, because higher education right now is viewed unfavorably by a lot of people on the right, and so by attacking higher ed, they’re going to win even if courts say they can’t do everything they want to do,” said Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the CATO Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank.
“I think the Trump administration will succeed on some of what they want to do. I think universities will also have a wake-up call about things they need to be doing differently going forward, and hopefully the result is a win for everybody,” Gillen added.
The Trump administration has opened dozens of Title IX and Title VI investigations and pulled billions of dollars collectively against universities over allegations of antisemitism and civil rights violations.
The strategy to threaten university funding has brought college leaders to the table, resulting in direct and indirect success in shaping higher education through executive and legislative action.
Penn recently sent out an apology and rescinded the athletic awards of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in an agreement with the Trump administration. Columbia and Harvard are in discussions to reach deals with the president to restore their own federal funding, with Columbia already agreeing to changes in its disciplinary policies.
The Trump administration has also reversed the Biden administration’s Title IX revision and created a Title IX Special Investigations Team to investigate universities that allow transgender women to play women’s sports.
“In the first six months of the Trump presidency, we have seen monumental changes in higher education. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania, which famously allowed male swimmer Lia Thomas on a female roster, agreed to come into compliance with Title IX law and ban men from women’s sports,” said Savannah Newhouse, press secretary for the Department of Education. “Simultaneously, the Administration has worked hand-in-hand with Congress to successfully cement huge wins for college students through the One Big Beautiful Bill — including simplifying the overly complex student loan repayment system, addressing rising tuition costs, and bolstering skilled trades.”
Even schools that have not faced intense pressure yet have taken early steps to dissuade the Trump administration animosity, including in many cases scaling back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
“I think they’ve had broad success, both in their direct targets of institution and the indirect chilling effects that these cases have in reshaping how universities are thinking about DEI offices,” said Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.
“So whether you’re an institution that the Department of Justice, the Department of Education is looking at very closely because of DEI offices, or you’re just a university who doesn’t want to be subject to the next investigation, we’ve seen dramatic shifts in reductions in named DEI offices,” she added.
The University of Michigan and University of Virginia both earlier this year cut their DEI offices, while the University of California has sent out a letter to its campuses reminding leaders and student governments they cannot boycott Israel.
Columbia also swiftly ended a pro-Palestinian student protest inside its library this spring while in negotiations with the federal government, earning praise from the administration.
The “Trump administration’s successful efforts with prominent universities have been well observed across higher education, and universities are cleaning up their act before they become the next institution to have to capitulate,” said Adam Kissel, visiting fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
“Every college and university in the United States should be undergoing a civil rights audit, voluntarily, to clean up its act, because its investigatory number will come up sooner or later, either from the Trump administration or state actors or students who have been discriminated against,” he added.
Higher education advocates have encouraged universities to fight back, with dozens of institutions signing a statement against government overreach in university business.
Harvard has filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration, one for funding cuts and the other against a directive to strip the university of its ability to enroll foreign students.
The next hearing for the funding cut lawsuit is set for July 21. So far in the foreign students fight, Harvard has been winning in court, with a judge ruling the Trump administration’s directive illegal. Federal officials have appealed that ruling.
Lawsuits have been filed against cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which gives millions of dollars each year to research at universities.
And after multiple losses in court, the Trump administration reversed a decision to take thousands of foreign students off the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), causing panic the federal government was going to deport all those individuals.
But several pro-Palestinian foreign students who were involved in campus demonstrations are still fighting the Trump administration’s efforts to deport them. Judges have released many of them, such as Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, from federal custody while their proceedings continue.
The decisions in these cases will shape how the Trump administration can interact with universities and how much involvement it can have in school processes, but it could take months or years for final rulings to be made.
“They were very strategic in going after the elite colleges … because what they wanted to do was tell a message to the whole field by saying, ‘We’re going to have these powerful schools with large endowments, large research funding apparatus.’ And the fact that Columbia has caved, it helps to create a chilling effect where other schools and leaders will fall in line,” said Wesley Whistle, project director of higher education at New America. “Particularly low resource institutions … they don’t have large endowments or other resources to fight in the courts.”
The goal of the administration and conservatives is to see a lasting cultural shift on campuses, but Trump’s broad-ranging attacks have struck even some allies as going too far.
“I feel like there’s a lot of people who, even if they agree with the with the goal or the action, disagree with the method. And so, a lot of that is these procedural concerns of, well, you actually have to have done an investigation. You have to give a school an opportunity to respond to that. And all of that creates a paper trail that courts can then use,” Miller said.
It is also unclear if the changes higher education makes are ones that will become permanent or if universities will abandon this push when a Democrat takes over the presidency.
“I think the sticking point will be less around one particular culture war topic, and how much it ebbs and flows with a different presidential administration, but really the staying power of the precedent set by the Trump administration in the expansiveness of executive power,” Meyer said.
“I think the longer-term impact that we should be focusing on is the standards for executive and federal involvement in university institutions and management, and if we are fundamentally seeing a shift that any president or Republican could wield that power to shape universities in the vision that they have for higher education,” she added.
Source: The Hill
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