"In the course of the past nine months, the Trump Administration has executed a highly effective assault on higher education. D.E.I. programs have been dismantled across the country. Columbia will pay more than two-hundred million dollars to settle allegations of antisemitism and violations of antidiscrimination law. The N.C.A.A. changed its policy on trans student athletes. And the President pushed Congress to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included major structural reforms to higher ed, affecting student loans and more."
"May Mailman, who until recently was a policy deputy in the White House, has been coördinating the Administration's efforts. She argued that many universities are too rich to deserve endless public largesse, and that they're failing in their mission, often producing, as she put it, "indebted students with useless majors who hate our country and like to go to riots." She also argued that the so-called woke features of campus life, such as D.E.I., violate federal laws by discriminating on the basis of race."
Administration officials have implemented sweeping measures to reshape higher education through regulatory, contractual, and legislative means. D.E.I. programs have been targeted and removed at multiple institutions. Large financial settlements and policy shifts, including a multihundred-million-dollar Columbia payment and an N.C.A.A. change on trans athlete eligibility, signal enforcement and cultural priorities. Federal leverage over universities has included revising contracting practices and proposing major structural legislation such as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to alter student loan and institutional funding. Officials express varied motivations, from concerns about university wealth and mission failure to legal interpretations of discrimination prohibitions.
Read at The New Yorker
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