WHEN AMERICAN presidents announce education policies, they are inevitably flanked by a phalanx of pupils. The executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 20th was no exception—the children even held up their own mock executive orders after practising their autograph. Except that this was not an order to reform curricula, increase testing or even to expand school choice: it was an order that the education secretary put herself out of a job by closing down the federal Department of Education.
This will not end education as we know it in America. The department has been a Republican bugbear ever since it was created during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. It was seen as a meddlesome nanny-state agency that encroached on state sovereignty and that required too many reports for too little assistance. Because secondary and primary education in America is highly devolved and funded through state and local taxes, the dependency on federal financing remains low. In 2020 federal dollars accounted for only 7.5% of school revenues (though this is higher for schools with large shares of poor children).
Should such funds remain constant but come from other federal departments—say, the health department, as recommended in the Project 2025 policy book—the impact would be small. Civil-rights enforcement in schools could be taken up by the Department of Justice; data collection could move to the Census Bureau.
What is unusual here is that Mr Trump is not attempting to get Congress, where his party enjoys majorities, to enact these changes into law. Instead, he is trying by executive fiat to demolish a department created by Congress and given specific appropriations. Doing so would violate the separation of powers. For that reason, the executive order pushes the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to achieve this demolition “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law”.
Though this step is hardly trivial, what is happening to American universities is more attention-worthy. They are much more dependent on federal dollars for research grants and student loans. And Mr Trump is using this to coerce universities to change discipline policies, hiring practices and even the courses that they teach.
The Trump administration froze $400m of federal funds for Columbia University for failing “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment” during pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year. In a letter, the administration made its conditions for releasing the money clear: expelling and suspending the students who participated in protests; a crackdown on discrimination against Zionists; and the potential removal of a disfavoured department studying the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. The last demand strikes to the heart of academic freedom—the right for the university to decide which classes and curriculums to teach. On March 21st, Columbia announced it would acquiesce, though two teachers’ unions are suing.
The administration has also frozen $175m in funding for the University of Pennsylvania because it allowed trans women to participate in women’s sports (following the policy of the collegiate sports authority at the time, reversed only in February). Funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health have been immediately felt on campuses: some medical schools are eliminating their PhD programmes and thousands of research staff are being laid off. The desire to halt ideas emanating from gender-studies departments will result in harm to relatively uncontroversial medical and science research.
Universities that felt emboldened to take on the administration during Trump I are more focused on avoiding the financial consequences of attracting the president’s ire. On March 8th immigration agents arrested and began deportation proceedings against Khalil Mahmoud, a graduate student at Columbia who led pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Trump administration officials said this was justifiable because of his alleged pro-Hamas sentiments (though they have not presented categorical evidence of this). Other deportations of academics are taking place, too. Mr Mahmoud’s case was the prelude to other deportations, including of academics at Brown University and Georgetown University over their alleged sympathies for Hizbullah and Hamas.
There are also signs of pre-emptive compliance. The University of California system announced on March 19th that it was rescinding the use in its hiring of “diversity statements”—documents that attest to a candidate’s devotion to diversity, equity and inclusion. The voguish practice, which this newspaper opposed as a threat to academic freedom, seems to be rapidly disappearing from academia. Other creative means that universities devised to implement affirmative action in admissions and in hiring—navigating around Supreme Court rulings finding the practice unconstitutional—may also be hastily abandoned. That attempt at neutrality might be too little, too late for a Trump administration that seeks to extinguish leftish campus illiberalism with its own conservative illiberalism. Schools like Columbia receive a fifth of their funding from the federal government. They cannot afford to have Mr Trump as an enemy for too long. ■
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