Rashid Khalidi, America’s foremost scholar on Palestine, best described the sorry state of higher education in the United States (US) today in a recent interview.
Explaining his decision to retire from his position as Edward Said chair of modern Arab history at Columbia University, he said, “I didn’t want to be a cog in that machine any more.
“For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register–essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum”.
Regrettably, the situation that pushed Khalidi into what many see as a much too early retirement is likely to get much worse in the near future.
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President-elect Donald Trump has promised to launch an all-out attack on American universities as soon as he returns to the White House.
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On the campaign trail, Trump cited the rising tuition fees at colleges and universities. But UPenn-educated Trump placed the blame on “radical Left accreditors” who had allowed universities to be “dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics”.
His running mate, Yale University graduate JD Vance, meanwhile, called university professors the “enemy” and has pledged to “honestly and aggressively attack universities”.
The broad strokes of what this presidency plans to achieve in higher education are already laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative takeover of the state and all its institutions, Project 2025. The project calls for the dismantling of all diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and the rejection and removal of “gender ideology” and critical race theory from all teaching material.
It underlines the need to prohibit accreditors from requiring educational institutions to adopt DEI policies. It insists on the need to protect faith-based institutions from accreditation agencies’ standards and criteria that they believe “undermine religious beliefs”. Project 2025 also calls for an end to loan forgiveness programmes and, eventually, the closing of the Department of Education.
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Trump may not be able to achieve all this during his upcoming term. But some of his stated plans for higher education are well within reach and will likely be implemented in some form or other within the next year.
Trump has promised, for example, to “fire radical left accreditors” and “Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats” and replace them with those committed to upholding a new set of standards, which include “defending the American tradition and Western civilisation”.
While he will likely not be able to change the way higher education accreditation is done in the US in the short term, he could easily create an environment, and pass regulation, that would pressure institutions to move away from DEI initiatives.
To the detriment of minority and marginalised communities’ access to higher education, Trump could easily weaponise the Department of Justice and federal civil rights laws to target institutions that continue with DEI efforts and tax endowment. He could also withhold federal funding to “force ideological conformity and promote conservative programme preferences” at US universities.
Access to higher education will also be under attack under Trump. He has publicly deemed federal loan forgiveness programmes, and programmes aimed at keeping monthly loan payments low and reducing the time it takes to pay off loans as “unlawful and unfair”. His administration is expected to scrap these. Of course, this will mean that millions of low-income and middle-income students would be unable to afford higher education.—Al Jazeera
