US universities brace for education policies overhaul under Trump

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly talked about shutting down the United States Department of Education. Vice President-elect JD Vance has called universities the “enemy” and “hostile institutions”.

And while Trump’s pick for education secretary, former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, stands out primarily for having no apparent experience in the field of education, advocates are anxiously waiting for what many believe will be an all-out war against universities under the incoming administration.

While the federal Department of Education has repeatedly been threatened, it is unlikely that the incoming Trump administration will be able to shut it down, as that would need congressional approval – including a supermajority in the Senate, which the Republicans do not have.

But the president-elect still has the ability to affect the education sector.

Trump has threatened to pull accreditation and federal funding from schools and colleges promoting “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content”, as he put it. He has also pledged to ensure schools are “free from political meddling”.

But some conservative groups are planning to do just that, and hoping to seize on Trump’s second presidency to push for a broad overhaul of the higher education system, seeking to restrict universities’ autonomy on multiple fronts, from student selection and faculty hires, to what can be taught and how.

Trump is especially expected to go after “diversity and inclusion”, or DEI, an umbrella term encompassing a broad range of policies meant to ensure equitable access and opportunity to all people, particularly those historically excluded from them. Conservatives have long derided the policies as “wokeism” and rallied against diversity-focused curricula and hiring practices that they claim are part of an alleged liberal agenda to sow division and discriminate against white Americans.

Overhauling liberal education

Among the proposals Trump or his backers have floated are the shuttering of all diversity and equity offices across the federal government and the removal of chief diversity officers, the targeting of other offices that have traditionally served underrepresented groups, a repeal of reporting requirements on diversity and inclusion, and the scrubbing of policies, regulations, and materials referring to a growing list of terms from “privilege” to “oppression”.

“President [-elect] Trump is talking about entrance exams, exit exams, eliminating accrediting bodies, starting for profits, deregulating … It goes on and on in terms of the ways in which they truly will dismantle as opposed to reform higher education,” Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), told Al Jazeera.

“While they want to get rid of a DEI bureaucracy, they want to create their own illiberal bureaucracy that controls the curriculum in ways that will go against this distinctively American tradition of liberal education.”

What the incoming administration will prioritise remains to be seen, and there appear to be opposing approaches among Trump’s advisers, Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College whose research focuses on conservative attacks on higher education, told Al Jazeera.

“On the one hand, they’re saying the federal government should be out of state education,” he said. “[On the other], they’re flipping and saying the federal government should actively punish institutions that don’t take the policies that they prefer.”

Anxious about the prospect of a crackdown, but unsure of what form that will take exactly, many university administrations “are taking a wait and see attitude”, John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow with the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, told Al Jazeera.

“[But the university administrations may not have] a full appreciation for the potential tsunami that may come in an expansive redefinition of the executive branch and a cavalcade of policy edicts and threats directed at American higher education,” Douglass added.

Some states, like California, are preparing for the incoming administration by “lawyering up in the hope of blunting infringements on institutional autonomy and threats of mass deportation”, Douglass continued.

But other, Republican-led states, like Texas, Florida, and Alabama, have already implemented policies targeting higher education that analysts expect to offer a blueprint for the Trump administration.

An ‘anti-woke’ agenda

Trump’s expected attacks on universities are part of a years-long, organised effort by well-funded conservative groups to reshape US higher education, said Kamola, the political science professor.

“It’s not enough to just police what faculty are saying, they fundamentally want to change the institutions, so that they teach what the political operatives prefer,” he added.

For his part, Trump already gave a glimpse of what is to come in his first term in office.

Following the racial justice movement that began after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a police officer – and the conservative backlash that followed – Trump signed an executive order late in his first term, seeking to “combat race and sex stereotyping”.

The order was blocked in court and President Joe Biden quickly withdrew it, but some conservative states wrote similar directives into state legislation, effectively curtailing classroom discussions on racism and sexism.

Copycat “educational gag orders”, as the measures have become known, have been introduced in 46 states. Texas led the charge against DEI last year with legislation that forced institutions to close their diversity offices and led to the removal of words like “race”, “gender”, “class” and “equity” from course names and descriptions.

In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who has made the battle against diversity and inclusion one of his defining issues, signed a bill last year to block federal and state funding to programmes promoting DEI at public universities.

“DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” DeSantis said when he signed the bill into law. “That has no place in our public institutions.”

Pasquerella, of the AAC&U, said when Trump lost the 2020 election, many state legislatures, governors and governing boards “took up where he left off in terms of his intrusion into academic integrity and institutional autonomy”.

A flurry of state-level legislation sought to “restrict the capacity of institutions to make decisions around the curriculum, tenure and promotion, shared governance”, she said, noting that those prerogatives are “fundamental to American higher education, which in part derives its strength from the fact that what gets taught, who teaches it, how it’s taught, who gets admitted, are free from governmental intrusion and undue political influence”.

Under Trump 2.0, the federal government will likely get behind and boost those efforts.

“What we’re expecting with the next administration is a resurgence of the efforts to restrict training courses or instruction on racism or sexism,” Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Racial Justice Program, told Al Jazeera.

Already, the targeted terminology has expanded to include “diversity and inclusion”, as well as any references to “privilege, oppression, intersectionality, sexual orientation, and kelamin identity”, Watson noted.

“There’s just a wide-range effort to censor those completely in a variety of ways,” she added. “Once you’re focussed on eliminating these so-called woke ideologies, it really becomes an all-encompassing thing.”

Holding the line

Because diversity and inclusion is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of initiatives, and because its terminology and approaches have been adopted in an equally broad array of settings, Trump’s anti-DEI agenda risks swallowing up all kinds of university programmes, advocates warn.

“Colleges and universities in the US have swept up a vast array of largely student support services under the moniker of DEI,” said Douglass, citing for instance services for transfer students from community colleges. “Many programmes once had the title simply of Educational Opportunity Programmes without the language of ‘equity’ that seems to indicate an equal distribution of a highly sought good, like admission to a selective university or a faculty position, without regard to merit.”

Rather than capitulate to conservatives’ demands to dismantle DEI, or overcorrect by scrapping programmes and policies before they are required to do so by law, universities should not back down, said Watson, of the ACLU.

“It’s important for them to hold the line on preserving the academic freedom that allows professors to teach free of government interference,” she added, noting that legal precedent is in the universities’ favour. “Students have a right to learn information and they have a right to learn information even when the government doesn’t agree.”

“It is a very scary time for universities,” Watson added. “But universities have to continue to preserve academic freedom and the right to learn – those are critical to them fulfilling their mission.”

As universities prepare to fight back, some education advocates have expressed hopes that gutting education may not be the first item on the agenda for the incoming administration, which has also pledged to launch a mass deportation campaign on day one, and has a long list of other policies and agencies Trump has pledged to target.

Others hoped the incoming administration would be too dysfunctional to pull off its ambitious, if destructive, plans for higher education.

“It will take time to launch attacks from Washington,” said Douglass. “And one can assume much chaos in the initial year of Trump’s return.”