What’s Coming For Academia – Watts Up With That?

Francis Menton

It’s only two weeks into the new Trump administration, and we’re seeing an incredible sea change start in the federal government. In his first campaign, Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” and then when he took office he barely got started on the project during a full four year term. Maybe he was too distracted by constant investigations, lawfare, “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and the like. But this time it’s much different.

The big news of the past day or two is the beginning of purges at DOJ, the FBI, and USAID. Those thoroughly corrupt institutions are very good places to start in these early weeks. But they are barely the tip of the iceberg of corrupt institutions ripe for upending.

One place that is about to get hit by the whirlwind is academia. It is possible that the entire industry of academia will be revolutionized and transformed over the course of the next couple of years. It should be. And, if Trump follows through, as I think he will, he completely has the tools at his disposal to do the job.

With academia, multiple issues come together to put the industry in a position of high vulnerability. First, of course, is that academia is almost universally associated with the farthest of the far political left, the wokest of the woke. Academics, almost to a person, have opposed Trump in everything he has proposed and stood for and have viciously attacked him at every opportunity.

The second is that nearly all academic institutions get vast sums of money every year from the federal government. Much of that is for bona fide research, like the search for new medical cures, but large amounts of the aid (nobody knows exactly how much) go to fund every sort of left-wing course and program.

And the third issue that makes academic institutions particularly vulnerable is that almost without exception they have been systematically and pervasively engaging in illegal racial and sex discrimination for decades. Some of that discrimination has been in the area of admissions, as was exposed in the famous case of SFFA v. Harvard decided by the Supreme Court in 2023. But that was only one piece of the illegal conduct. There has been vast other illegal conduct, going under the general heading of “diversity, equity and inclusion” or DEI, at nearly every academic institution and in virtually every aspect of their operations: in addition to admissions, also in faculty and administrative hiring; in creating DEI bureaucracies and enforcement procedures; in setting up various academic programs, majors, and departments (for example, the so-called “studies” departments and majors); in funding “cultural centers”; and on and on.

And now comes President Trump with his anti-DEI Executive Orders. There were two on this subject, one on January 20, and a second on January 21. The first, which ordered an end to all DEI programs within the federal government itself, has gotten the more publicity. But the second is the one that is the more significant for academia. This is the one that deals with DEI practices in the private sector. The early sections of this EO sound relatively bland. For example, here is the text of Section 2, titled “Policy”:

It is the policy of the United States to protect the civil rights of all Americans and to promote individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.  I therefore order all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.  I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.

But then as we proceed through the details, we come to some seriously explosive items. For example, here is the text of Section 3(a)(iv):

(iv)   The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award:
(A)  A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government’s payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and
(B)  A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.

Probably, most for-profit private businesses will have little trouble dealing with these provisions. They will end whatever DEI schemes they may still have, and move on. But what about academic institutions. They get vast government grants, and thus are “contractors” subject to the Order. How exactly are they going to comply? They have DEI corruption infesting every nook and cranny of their very being.

And universities are hugely, and foolishly, dependent on federal funding. I just thought I would look up the funding status of a couple of institutions with which I am most familiar. At Yale, I find a Yale Daily News piece from January 29 headlined “Federal aid freeze threatens almost $1 billion of Yale funding.” The piece reports that Yale got $899 million in grants and contracts from the federal government in its most recent fiscal year. (Yale’s total annual budget is about $6 billion.). Over at Harvard, it’s roughly the same story: $676 million of reported federal grants in 2023 on a budget of about $6.4 billion. I suspect that the dependency on federal funding at other elite schools is comparable.

Now, to keep the money flowing, they will have to “certify” that they do not “operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.” The people receiving these certifications will not be the sort to just accept obvious lies from crooks. It will be fun to watch that play out.

And then we have Trump’s nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon. Dhillon, besides having served as chair of California’s Republican Party, is known in private practice for taking on civil rights cases on behalf of conservatives. For example, according to a Wikipedia bio here, she has represented the UC Berkeley College Republicans (in a case accusing UCB of preventing conservatives from speaking on campus), Google programmer James Damore (in a case claiming Damore was wrongly discharged for expressing his opinions on the capabilities of women as programmers), conservative journalist Andy Ngo (in a case arising out of Ngo’s assault on the streets of Portland, Oregon by Antifa thugs), and so forth.

You get the idea — Dhillon’s idea of civil rights law is roughly the opposite of that of the current denizens of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which she will shortly be heading. She will be coming into a Civil Rights Division that has just wrapped up its activities before the curtain fell on the Biden term by trying to ram through consent decrees tying up the hands of the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville. (It looks like they have failed in those efforts, and I suspect that the cases against these police departments will shortly be withdrawn.)

I checked the status of Dhillon’s nomination, and as far as I can tell no committee hearing has yet been scheduled. Perhaps the Senate Democrats will pull out every stop to try to stall her confirmation. On the other hand, they have so far been notably less successful in stalling Trump’s nominees than they were the last time around in 2017.

I would highly expect Dhillon as a top item on her agenda to begin some high profile investigations of universities for violations of the civil rights laws, particularly in their DEI policies. In any such investigation, it will not just be ending the DEI programs that will be at issue; the defendant will also need to fight for its life to keep its federal funding flowing.

The depth of the corruption in academia today is truly profound. Perhaps, some amount of it can be reversed. Maybe even a lot of it.

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