Over the years, I’ve written extensively about the decline—nay, crisis—of American education (see here, here, and here, for instance). During the 20th century, our universities were steadily infiltrated and usurped by Marxists, socialists, and postmodernists, and the consequences have been dire. “Wokeism” and the catastrophic absurdities of everything from Gender Theory to Queer Studies to Critical Race Theory first festered within the universities as the brainchildren of leftist radical academics. From there, the contagion spread to schools, the media, entertainment, and corporations.

Much of what passes for scholarship and teaching in academia today is a shameful travesty. The pursuit of the good, true, and beautiful as well as the transmission of the treasures of Western civilization—proper ends of true education—have been largely replaced with nihilistic, relativistic philosophy and indoctrination in radical politics that war against traditional values of Western culture. Grievance, victimhood, skepticism, pessimism, and banal Marxist oppressor/oppressed binaries are dressed up in academic language and published in journals or spouted in the classroom. The technical terminology and circuitous prose attempt to disguise the naked shallowness of this “thought.”

Moreover, the academic performance of American students, by any objective standard, has plummeted. So in addition to subverting the aims of true education and undermining all that is good and sacred in human life, the universities aren’t even succeeding at making people more intelligent or employable.

At one point, I had despaired of our university system. But I now believe that such dire thinking was premature. With the recent election and changing political landscape, prospects for educational renewal have opened up.

This is largely because President-elect Donald Trump has specifically promised to combat the ideology infecting higher education. As reported by Collin Rugg on X, Trump’s plan runs as follows:

1. Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.
2. Fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.
3. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again.

These standards will include defending the American tradition and Western civilization, protecting free speech, and eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs.

4. Remove all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats, offering options for accelerated at low-cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services, and implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth.
5. Direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination.
6. Schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity will not only have their endowments taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.
7. The seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies.

The Trump administration is absolutely right to target the accreditors, a root cause of institutional rot. Just as we might legitimately ask, “Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?” we should ask, “Who accredits the accreditors?” There must be accountability; accreditors should not be ideologues wielding un-checked power.

My father—who spent most of his career in higher education—always says that the accrediting agencies perpetuate the intellectual sickness in our schools. He maintains that any self-respecting university should try not to be accredited in order to preserve its integrity and avoid the pressures to bow to the everchanging cultural winds. But perhaps soon that won’t be necessary anymore. If accrediting agencies break free from political agendas and begin performing their proper role again, then accreditation can again become an honor and an important safeguard of educational quality.

Trump has also stated that he will eliminate the Department of Education, which was established under President Carter, and return control over education to the states. On his website, Trump points out:

We spend more money per pupil, by three times, than any other nation. And yet we’re absolutely at the bottom. We’re one of the worst. … We’re going to end education coming out of Washington D.C. … We’re going to send it all back to the States.

Trump exaggerates a bit when he says we’re at the bottom, but it is true that, for the amount the U.S. spends on education, our academic performance compared to other countries is not entirely flattering.

By planning to send educational decisions back to the states, Trump follows the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be made and problems addressed at the lowest level possible, by the people closest to the issue. Only if a lower level of power cannot address a problem should it be escalated to a higher level. We can reasonably hope that this commonsense principal applied to education will improve results and eliminate bureaucratic bloating and costs.

If all these measures are actually implemented, they will constitute a profound reshaping of the American educational landscape. Has neo-Marxism run its course in American education? There’s reason to hope. Every false philosophy has its ascent and decline, its period of entrenched dominance and its period of collapse and decay. While the total elimination of this strangely resilient philosophy probably won’t happen for some time, it may, at least, be dethroned from its position of institutional dogma.

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