Academia: Shhh — Trump May Really Decolonize Higher Ed!

Sixteen months ago, I argued to “decolonize Academia now” by cutting all federal funding to colleges and universities. Did Donald Trump take my advice?

The solons of Academia have begun to panic over the idea. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the leaders of higher ed have suddenly gone silent, hoping that the war waged by Trump on federal grants and subsidies will remain at USAID. The end of DEI has already raised fears of losing income streams, and they’re just hoping to ride out the storm:

As the administration orders the end of diversity programs and imposes cuts to foreign aid, university presidents and their lawyers fear that millions of dollars in federal funding could ultimately vanish. Some research projects, including many connected to the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been suspended, and program directors have made plans for layoffs.

But universities have largely been quiet. Professors and administrators alike seem wary of provoking a president who has glorified retribution and has already started to tighten the funding spigot. Staying out of the spotlight, some reason, is prudent.

Those who have spoken have often relied on carefully calibrated letters and statements, noting that they are watching but hardly offering any overt opposition. In some instances, researchers and campus leaders have been pressured into silence by a government that has demanded they not speak to reporters as money remains bottled up.

Before we move on, just mull over the delicious development that “universities have largely been quiet” represents. Universities haven’t been quiet about anything in the public-policy realm for decades, especially not when it comes to their own gravy trains. Universities have spent my lifetime roaring about their values and their supposed value, demanding that politicians abide by their rules, and largely acting as a political indoctrination industry. 

The silence is a measure of how much has changed in a few weeks. And it’s also a measure of how much it may change in the next several months, or at least how Academia fears it might change. For the first time in memory, they no longer have any real influence or grip on power, and that has them “paralyzed”:

“It’s a hard time and it’s an uncertain time and the combination is nearly paralyzing,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which counts more than 1,600 colleges and universities in its membership.

For now, anyway. Don’t count on Academia remaining paralyzed for long when Trump and Elon Musk start issuing the EOs to dismantle what can be ended by executive authority at the Department of Education. 

It’s unclear whether the student-loan program is vulnerable to that type of action; the Obama administration took it over entirely from the private sector, and Congress got involved in that. But Trump has enough authority to suspend its operations and order audits of the lending and the grants, and certainly can gum up the income stream from Academia for a while. Student grants and scholarships are less likely to be protected by statute, and research grants — an important revenue stream for Academia — almost certainly has no statutory protection. And I’d bet that DOGE will start delving into those just as they did with the USAID grants, exposing the ridiculous nature of such spending and looking for as many cases of fraud as possible. 

That’s certainly a good opening approach. However, it will stand better politically to just end all such federal support regardless of context on the real and factual basis that the federal government has no jurisdiction over education in the first place. And in the long run, that will benefit a reformed and streamlined Academia, as I originally argued:

Colleges and universities can still operate how they wish, as they should. But they will no longer have an income stream from federally backed student loans, and that means they will no longer be able to afford to operate with impunity. When the student loans stop, the student stream will as well — and it will suddenly matter who’s on the payroll, and just how much tuition they can charge in a market where pricing signals have been fully restored.

That in itself will provide a certain amount of clarity. This will benefit schools in the long run too, even if they object in the short run. By cutting off all federal funds, the mountain of mandates on colleges will largely disappear as well, allowing for the dismissal of the administrator class in Academia. It will also force new and streamlined administrations to focus on the disciplines clearly needed in society: STEM certainly, medicine, the law, and other specialties. The rest of the nonsense will dry up and blow away as students who pay their own way through college won’t waste that money on progressive indoctrination disciplines that will leave them with a worthless four-year degree. …

This decolonization of Academia will either destroy it or force it to return to actual classic education rather than its current model of radical indoctrination. Either way, it solves the problem, plus the decolonization will remind people that the federal government had no business colonizing higher education in the first place. That six-decade experiment has utterly failed, and the detritus of terror worshipers and debt slaves left in its wake is compelling evidence that it needs to end immediately.

It certainly appears as if Trump agrees. Psst: Pass it on!