Reform Higher Ed by Raising Standards
- patricklewisbaker
- May 15
- 1 min read
The first hundred days of the second Trump presidency have brought unprecedented challenges to the complacent status quo of American higher education. It has begun to dawn on university administrators and faculty alike that the Trump administration is serious about its plans to break the hold of illiberal progressives (a.k.a. “woke” progressives) over America’s most prestigious universities. The Ivy League universities, the targets of most of the administration’s fire so far, have thrown up legal defenses of their institutional autonomy and their right to receive the federal funding appropriated by Congress. As those legal battles play out, the schools’ administrators are in a state of panic and uncertainty about their financial viability. Harvard, Penn, Brown, and Cornell have announced hiring freezes. Several of the Ivies have even mobilized lobbyists in Washington, DC to fight the cuts in Congress as well as to take action against the threatened loss of their non-profit status. Whether those defenses will hold remains to be seen.
Even before this recent round of debate, though, academe’s moderate-to-conservative reformers have been exploring a variety of strategies to protect what is still valuable in our system and to reassert the teaching of Western and American traditions. Some believe that existing institutions can be reformed merely by curtailing…