Here’s who is pushing Trump to upend higher ed — and what they want
A new statement from a conservative think tank is shedding light on what critics of higher education want from the Trump administration — and who some of them are.
The push comes as President Donald Trump launches a series of attacks against colleges and universities, including at Harvard University, where $2.6 billion in federal funding has been pulled, and two lawsuits are in court . A potential deal between the federal government and Harvard is said to be in the works.
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the right-wing New York City think tank the Manhattan Institute , organized the statement, and it was signed by dozens of educators, politicians and activists.
The Trump administration has appeared to follow the direction of Rufo as he has called for the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion departments and the U.S. Department of Education and adjusting or cutting federal funding to institutions in an effort to change their ways.
Rufo has said higher education should be the first field of battle .
He notably led a campaign in 2024 against Claudine Gay, the former president at Harvard and its first Black president. After facing accusations of plagiarism from Rufo and following her congressional hearing on antisemitism, she later resigned .
Christopher Rufo talks to faculty and staff on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla. on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images)The Washington Post via Getty Im
“I’ve been working on these issues for five years. At the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting. And now, fast-forward five years, some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly become reality. They become policy. They affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds. And so that’s a great feeling. I think as an activist, there’s really nothing better than seeing the ideas that you fought for, against the odds, triumph and become reality,” Rufo told the New York Times .
The Manhattan Institute statement lays out a new contract for universities and colleges and calls for the Trump administration to adopt it. If institutions don’t accept the contract, that should result in the revocation of all public benefits, the statement suggests.
Despite support from some educators, Jon Fansmith of the American Council on Education said he believes the implementation of the policy could be devastating and would be illegal.
The contract is similar to what the Trump administration sent to Harvard in April, which demanded an overhaul of Harvard’s leadership structure, admissions and hiring. If it didn’t comply, the federal government warned the school that it could risk losing $9 billion in funding.
Linda McMahon, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, described the Manhattan Institute’s statement and contract as a “compelling roadmap to restore integrity and rigor to the American academy” in an X post .
Rufo told Bloomberg that he is optimistic about the plan becoming policy in the next several months.
Among those who signed onto the statement are Omar Sultan Haque, who works at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who was the former House Education and Workforce Committee Chairperson.
In that role, Foxx led the charge against Harvard University as she issued subpoenas in 2024, saying they’d failed to produce “priority documents” related to an ongoing investigation into campus antisemitism.
What is in the contract?
In the statement, Rufo and the signees state that American higher education has “long been the bright lights of our civilization” but that for the past 50 years, universities and colleges have “discarded their founding principles and burned down their accumulated prestige, all in pursuit of ideologies that corrupt knowledge and point the nation toward nihilism.”
This has occurred in waves through protests during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and the “celebration of the Hamas terror campaign” — referring to October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza, according to the statement.
As a result, institutions have capitulated to the “radical left,” turning them into places with narrow political agendas, the signees state.
In order for this to be fixed, a new contract with universities must be made.
The signees said universities, as part of the contract, should:
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control for academic fraud and merit-based decision-making
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cease direct participation in social and political activism
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adhere to colorblind equality in hiring, admissions, promotions and contracting and abolish DEI programs
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allow for freedom of speech and public dissent
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implement standards for civil discourse where students are suspended or expelled for disrupting speakers, vandalizing property, occupying buildings, calling for violence or interrupting the operations of the university
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publish data on race, admissions and class rank; employment and financial returns by major; and campus attitudes on ideology, free speech, and civil discourse
“Although some academics will balk at any kind of intervention, the reality is that American taxpayers subsidize the universities to the tune of more than $150 billion per year. In exchange, those institutions have a responsibility to follow the law and to uphold basic academic standards, beginning with the most important of all: an orientation toward truth,” Rufo wrote in an op-ed .
The principles set out in the statement are “good for universities, conducive to the public good, and consistent with existing law,” according to Rufo.
“The intention is to set a baseline of minimum standards that will rein in the worst instincts of the universities, empower administrators who want to prioritize academic excellence, and ensure that taxpayer funding is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, rather than ideological crusades,” Rufo said.
Why sign on?
Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars. He signed onto the Manhattan Institute's statement on higher education.Mike Styer Photography
Higher education has been criticized for decades, but the core values of liberal education have been “badly damaged” over the past 10 years in particular, according to Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, who signed onto the Manhattan Institute statement.
The association is a membership group of about 3,500 mostly academics whose mission is to promote liberal arts education with a focus on the pursuit of truth, academic freedom and the cultivation of virtuous citizenship.
“It’s been my long-term goal — that and also the goal of the National Association of Scholars — to try to win the attention of political leaders to the problem that higher education has betrayed its fundamental commitment to intellectual freedom and pursuit of truth and the upholding of important standards. For the most part, that complaint has gone unheeded,” Wood told MassLive.
“I think when Donald Trump was elected to his second term, he got the message that higher education, and not just higher education, but K-12 education as well, have been corrupted, and that it is a pretty strong imperative that he do something about it,” he said.
In higher education, Wood takes issue with the implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion as a means of lowering academic standards, not teaching certain topics in classrooms and said movements like Black Lives Matter intimidate large groups of people into thinking society is inherently racist, he said.
These topics are widely debated. To some, including Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey , DEI is seen as a means of providing equal opportunities to all students and eliminating stigmatization.
Wood believes higher education, as it stands, attempts to “commandeer higher education into a path of indoctrinating young people into a false set of beliefs about the country and our broader civilization,” he said.
As a result, there is a cohort of young people who, as they grow up, become committed supporters and voters for politicians who share their contempt for America, Wood said.
While Wood said some of Trump’s actions toward higher education have been “heavy-handed,” he also finds it difficult to see alternatives for creating reform.
“I don’t think that there is a single body of people who, in some organized fashion, have the ear of President Trump, or if there is, I don’t know what it would be. But there are many of us who are bidding for his attention and hoping that he takes the sorts of actions that he has been taking,” Wood said.
Wood said the Manhattan Institute, which is larger and wealthier than his association, has more avenues to the Trump administration.
Omar Sultan Haque works at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He signed onto the Manhattan Institute statement.Courtesy Photo
Sultan Haque, who works at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, referred MassLive to a Substack article he wrote about his criticisms of higher education and the need for the Manhattan statement.
In it, Sultan Haque argues that universities and colleges need reform but can only do so through external pressure.
“Self-aware and mature leaders would see the crisis for what it is, accept the need for external accountability, engage in negotiation, and find common ground reforms from any source, loved or despised, that makes progress more likely,” he said.
He describes academia as an “ideological monoculture” with substantially more liberal Harvard faculty than conservatives and ultimately a place that rewards and protects the status quo.
“Many of the reforms being demanded from the outside now are things elite universities themselves admit they should have implemented decades ago, but never got around to, and were actively resisted until external pressure and shame arrived,” Sultan Haque said.
Pushback on the statement
Jon Fansmith is the senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education.Courtesy Photo
Jon Fansmith, of the American Council on Education, said he takes Rufo at his word that he speaks to the Trump administration regularly — and acknowledges the potential sway he has on federal officials.
At the same time, he believes Trump is going after higher education not because of Rufo but because it is the topic that Trump’s voter base takes issue with.
It’s “one of these culture war issues” where Trump needed something to draw lines of distinction between what left-leaning people believe and what conservatives think — and higher education has only become more hotly debated as the price tag to attend increases , Fansmith said.
Trump’s actions aren’t intended to do what is best for higher education but instead are part of an all-out battle to defeat the current higher education system, Fansmith said.
At the end of the day, the Manhattan Institute’s statement isn’t anything surprising or new to Fansmith — they are similar criticisms he has heard over the years.
While he agrees with the statement in some ways, such as civil debate and a diversity of opinions on campuses as important, he believes that those practices are already happening on college campuses.
If the Trump administration implements the policy as laid out by the Manhattan Institute’s statement, Fansmith said it would be “bad for democracy” and “deeply concerning.” He said it would likely wind up in court, as it is “illegal,” he said.
The attempt at implementing such a policy feels contradictory to Fansmith, who said the signees might be up in arms if left-leaning politicians adopted a widespread federal policy that forced institutions to do what they wanted.
“It’s a very short-sighted view,” Fansmith said.
More Higher Ed
Read the original article on MassLive .
