Will President Trump take on Academia?

July 16, 2020 By Jay Schalin 

Recently, President Trump tweeted about his intention to use federal funding as a lever to stop that extreme politicization in our schools. The tweets were:

Too Many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Department of Education to re-examine their tax-exempt status…And/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!

Immediately, education experts were contacted by reporters for verification that the president really can’t do that. The Associated Press cited Terry Hartle, “the senior vice president of the American Council on Education (ACE), which represents university presidents.” Hartle suggested that the president cannot revoke schools’ tax-exempt status because “ideology is not on the IRS’s list” of matters for which that action can be taken. “I don’t think anything will come of this quickly,” Hartle added.

I can lay claim to being a higher education policy expert as well as Hartle. I’ve worked for a long-established higher education think-tank for 13 years. I have written substantial reports on academic freedom, university governance, the politicization of teacher education schools, the decline of English departments, general education programs, and more. I have written or edited nearly a thousand articles on higher education, and my work has appeared in major media markets such as Fox News, U.S. News, Forbes, and the Washington Times. But no major media contacted my colleagues or myself for commentary about the president’s tweets. After all, unlike ACE, my organization is not part of the higher education establishment. We have been highly critical of higher education, instead of glossing over its problems. We seek ways to reform academia, not to maintain its status quo…………..the ideological bias in academia has only gotten worse.

We can tell by your tweets that you comprehend the symbiotic relationship between academia and the forces that are trying to transform this country into a totalitarian hellhole. A lot of people won’t go down without a fight; according to a recent Rasmussen poll, “34% of Likely U.S. Voters think the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.” Think of the human devastation should such an event comes to pass.........To Read More.....