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26-11-2024
WASHINGTON: 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.
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 media.
“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.” (Int’l News Desk)
