The relationship between the U.S. and its vast armada of colleges and universities has changed. The time has come for a reckoning.
When I graduated high school in 1983, about 90 percent of my class of 1,200 students were headed to college. I thought about the fact that in previous generations far fewer went beyond high school, and those who did saw it as an opportunity and a privilege. My generation seemed to treat it more as the natural step after finishing 12th grade. In the past, many graduates went to work or into the Army. In 1983 and beyond, college became a default destination—and for many people a waste of time and money.
There was a time when universities were the crown jewel of the West. Governments provided land, money and resources, and the schools trained future generations of scholars, scientists, engineers and leaders. Harry Truman is the only president in this and the previous century who did not have a college degree. Universities were also breeding grounds for many of the breakthrough technologies that were later incorporated into devices and goods that we use in our daily lives. Many drugs, advanced materials, and sophisticated electronic components got their starts in university labs funded by local, state, and federal sources. My first doctoral years in Madison were funded by NIH; when that grant ran out, my advisor tapped WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) for continued support. WARF not surprisingly holds patents for everything from rat poison warfarin to Vitamin D added to every milk container in the U.S.
Since my time at Harvard, the relationship between the universities and the state has changed. Rather than support the mission of advancing U.S. interests and well-being, the schools have become the most anti-U.S. centers in the country. I was aghast when a previous Harvard president (they have gone through so many in the past decade) wrote that she would not identify illegal alien students to authorities for possible deportation. I asked her how Harvard could have such a prestigious law school while the university selectively enforced U.S. laws. The explosion of Jew/Israel/U.S. hatred that has engulfed campuses since the October 7th attack in Israel is a natural extension of indoctrinated hatred towards all three entities. The U.S. is portrayed in classes as an evil colonialist bully; ditto for Israel. The Jews are generally white and thus evil in the demented social hierarchies of the day. Thus, the blame for the pogrom that took 1,200 lives was immediately shifted to the Jews and Israel, though it was Hamas that attacked and committed the most heinous acts of murder, torture and brutality.
The time has come for a reckoning with U.S. centers of higher education. They are wildly overpriced. Many students do not finish their studies. Many are saddled with debt that they schlep around for decades. Many study useless majors that offer no benefit for future job opportunities. Many just spend their time going to sports events and parties. The universities have become decadent anti-American centers, all on the public dime. One of the focuses of President Trump and his DOGE avengers must be the universities, where 90 percent of all donations go to Democrats. Many classes have anti-American biases and few schools see their mission as including support for the United States and its interests. I am proud that a scientist at Harvard invented napalm during World War II. Today’s professors there would want to drop it on Mar-a-Lago.
So how does a new administration rein in anti-American, godless universities? With the only power they have: the power of the purse. The state cannot go in and tell schools what to teach and what not. They could also not get them to add required courses on civics, American history, and America’s role in the world. Demanding such courses would end up in the courts for years. What the U.S. government can do—so could state governments—is to set conditions for the receipt of monies from any federal body, including NIH, CDC, and the National Science Foundation. Money from these sources is oxygen for these schools. Billions flow from the government to colleges and universities that promote hatred of the U.S., its founding and its values. That has to stop. Some things that Donald Trump and his team could do would include the following:
*Tax endowments for schools that fail to meet a predetermined percentage of a class graduating in four years.
*Give entrance and exit exams to quantify technical and intellectual improvement on campus.
*Publicize starting salaries for students by school and by major.
*Tie federal research funding to predetermined criteria. For example, if a university does not punish students who threaten Jews on campus or if the university promotes guys using women’s dressing rooms in sports, then federal funding will be suspended until the problem is corrected. If you want to see a university die on the vine, cut off its federal meal ticket.
Universities today are intellectually defective cesspools of professors with a single world view and students who are too dimwitted to question the sophistry presented to them as great scholarship. Students are enthralled in supporting terrorists who raped and murdered dozens of Jewish women. Aren’t there any sparking neurons screaming out, “Well, I don’t like Jews, but I cannot bring myself to support barbarians who cut off babies’ heads.” Apparently not. The universities are well-manicured wastelands that not only no longer serve the needs and interests of the United States and its citizenry but rather actively work to destroy all vestiges of traditional values and good. It was none other than Harvard Medical School that coined the disingenuous term “birthing people” because the Marxists/Maoists working there somehow think that a “man” can give birth. A 5-year-old peasant in Peshawar is smarter than these highly-accredited morons.
In parallel with sidelining major universities until they reform internally, the government should actively support trade schools and community colleges. The focus should be on low-cost options for getting marketable skills, whether they be in plumbing or programming. Colleges today take a lot of money and produce an intellectually defective product that oftentimes has no skills for finding meaningful work (in the Obama years, 40 percent of college grads were either unemployed or working at a job that did not require their degrees).
While students are brainwashed in K-12 education, it is the university that molds the ideologue who will skew AI leftward or Wikipedia entries according to his beliefs. The universities must either be cut loose or be reformed in order to continue receiving governmental support. Set the dogs of DOGE on them until they return to their traditional role of making America better.