The second Trump term: Higher education braces for impact

‘Professors are the enemy’ – Incoming Vice-President JD Vance, quoting Richard Nixon.

From likely reductions in student aid and an end to student debt forgiveness, to a possible dismantling of the United States Department of Education, cuts to research, a reintroduction of the travel ban on Muslim countries and deportation of undocumented immigrants, the re-election of former US president Donald J Trump on 5 November represents a major challenge to American higher education.

“I think I’ll just be honest about it: I’m very anxious,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education (ACE), told the ACE dotEDU Live post-election podcast on 6 November, a few hours before Vice-President Kamala Harris conceded to Trump who will become the 47th president on 20 January 2025.

“Going into the campaign we had concerns about what a Republican administration might mean. I think going through the campaign, those concerns deepened. We saw a campaign that had relentless attacks on higher education. And we have an [incoming] administration and maybe a congress that doesn’t believe that we’re [higher education] a positive good for society.

“We all know and have talked about for some time now the sense that an awful lot of Americans think that higher education is one of the forces that is moving American society in the wrong direction. So this is more than a headwind. This is a set of matters of real concern for us,” he said.

Deportations

Soon after the results were in, Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, tackled head-on Trump’s campaign promises of stronger borders and the deportation of undocumented migrants in an online statement.

Roth said his university “will do everything it can to protect the most vulnerable among us. The mass deportations [of foreign students] promised by president-elect Trump threaten our students who may be undocumented and are a cause of great concern to many in our community”.

Trump told NBC News on Thursday 7 November that one of his first priorities after he takes office will be to make the border “strong and powerful” and said when it came to fulfilling his promises of mass deportations, his administration would have “no choice” but to carry them out, regardless of the cost.

The Higher Ed Immigration Portal estimates that in 2024, the US is home to more than 407,000 undocumented students, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA recipients, enrolled in higher education.

“As we said after the election of 2016 [when Trump was first elected]: Wesleyan will remain committed to the principles of non-discrimination, including equal protection under the law, regardless of national origin or citizenship,” Roth wrote in his statement.

Recognising that Trump has threatened to use extraordinary – even extra-constitutional powers – Roth laid down a marker: “The university will not voluntarily assist in any efforts by the federal government to deport our students, faculty or staff solely because of their citizenship status.”

No hard answers

In his own public statement in response to the results, David K Wilson, president of Morgan State University, a historically black college (HBCU) in Baltimore, Maryland, commended the students who volunteered, advocated, and exercised their right to vote, before moving quickly to put their disappointment into perspective.

He reminded them that “life is a journey, … a process, not a single moment or decision” and that the re-election of Trump “challenges us to dig deeper, recommit and continue to advocate for the change we want to see”.

It was a message similar to Harris’ message in her concession speech: “The fight for our freedom will take hard work. But like I always say, we like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work can be joyful work, and the fight for our country is always worth it.”

Wilson reminded his students that their school, which dates back to 1867 and is, thus, one of the nation’s oldest HBCUs, “has been defined by the boldness of its students and alumni, and by how we faced adversity and transformed it into opportunity”.

Several hundred miles up the Atlantic seaboard in Boston, Jay Bernhardt, president of Emerson College, a small liberal arts college, spoke of the “strong emotions” that the results elicited and the fears many of his students had: “Many will be asking what this means for the future of our country and our roles and rights in society.”

Lacking hard answers, Bernhardt asked Emerson’s students to, as far as possible, fashion their own by “reaffirming the importance of our academic mission that communication and the arts can bring people together”.

He assured the campus that: “We embrace and are enriched by our diversity of backgrounds, beliefs, identities, abilities and experiences.”

Project 2025

Trump’s campaign did not issue a fully worked out higher education policy. However, as Sarah Spreitzer, ACE’s assistant vice-president and chief of staff of government relations, made clear during the ACE podcast discussion about the Republicans’ promise to abolish the Department of Education, Project 2025 lays out a plan.

Written by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that includes many officials from the first Trump administration, Project 2025 outlines a path to dismantling the department that is responsible for student loans and grants to HBCUs and tribal colleges, as well as investigating civil rights abuses on campuses.

Project 2025 is not, she said, “just a talking point – let’s abolish the Department of Ed – and everybody’s thinking, well what would that mean?”

She noted: “It is a multi-page step-by-step guide about moving the Office of Civil Rights from the Department of Education (DoE) to the Department of Justice, moving the student loan programmes from the DoE over to the Department of the Treasury and limiting the role of the federal government in making those loans.”

Project 2025 calls for the federal government “to completely reverse the student loan federalisation of 2010 and work with congress to spin off federal student aid and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management”.

“Reversing student loan federalisation” is Washington-speak for returning the making and collecting of student loans to private banks. In 2010, the government took this function away from the banks because of a number of predatory loan scandals.

According to Spreitzer, the incoming Trump administration cannot “wave a magic wand and make it [changes to the DoE] happen through executive authority”.

She added: “But I definitely think that there will be a push to shave off some of those things that the department does already and put them in different agencies, to kind of give them a smaller role – because that was a message that resonated with voters.

“I don’t think they think of the DoE as a federal bureaucracy. But when they think about their complaints about education, they blame the DoE.”

Several suggestions for the new secretary of education were discussed, among them Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, who rode to power by campaigning against the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in Virginia’s primary and secondary schools (despite the fact that it was not being taught) and Christopher Rufo, who made his name as a conservative firebrand by campaigning against the teaching of CRT in primary and secondary schools and colleges and universities. Also mentioned was Betsy DeVos, who was secretary of education in the first Trump administration.

According to Jon Fansmith, the assistant vice-president of government relations at ACE, when asked if she would like her old job back, DeVos answered: “The only way I would accept that job is if I was coming back to dismantle the agency.”

Trump’s first moves

Fansmith drew attention to what he suspects will be one of the Trump administration’s first actions: reversing the Biden administration’s rules under Title 9 of the Higher Education Act that allow the participation of trans athletes in sports.

“There was a clear emphasis on this in campaign ads … So this is an area in which I think their voters will expect to see action relatively soon,” he said.

He then turned to extramural education grants made to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Both, Fansmith said, have bipartisan support.

However, he said: “Appropriators in congress are going to be very, very fiscally conservative. So the best that we can hope for is a levelling off of funding.”

More concerning from an international perspective is Fansmith’s expectation that the NIH might be restructured and that the government will “do away with some of the centres or institutes that might have a global focus, or might have a focus that the Trump administration doesn’t”.

Diversity, equality and inclusion programmes

All of ACE’s officials expect the new administration to move against DEI programmes in federal contracts, the K-12 education level and at the post-secondary level.

Oddly, noted Fansmith, the administration’s attack on DEI is one reason they might not want to dismantle the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the DoE.

The OCR provides, he explained, “a pretty powerful tool” when your messaging is not that these programmes are inherently pointless or that they don’t serve a purpose. [Rather] the critique is that they are inherently discriminatory against other groups of students.

“If you believe that a DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging) programme is discriminatory against other groups of students on campus, then theoretically, that opens the campus using these programmes up to, at minimum, investigation by the OCR,” he stated.

Further, said Fansmith: “This is not the kind of thing you have to do at every campus that has a programme. If you do it at five or 10 high profile institutions and you publicise it, the chilling effect may be worth the fact that an investigation may not be able to lead to any conclusions.”

Academic freedom

In an interview after the podcast, Fansmith was asked whether the incoming Trump administration was a threat to academic freedom. His answer was less than sanguine.

“I think what we have tended to see is certainly a strong scepticism of the value of academic freedom among some Republicans and certainly President Trump doesn’t seem to believe that the principles of academic freedom should allow for types of speech he finds objectionable,” he stated.

(In addition to the epigraph at the top of this story, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator Vance, who holds a law degree from Yale University, has shown his hostility to universities through statements such as: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”)

Fansmith continued, asking when “speech on campus may be perceived as threatening or discriminatory, and what that might mean for a civil rights investigation. To start thinking about things that within the academy, at least, we tend to consider as covered under academic freedom”.

He went on to reference President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and speak about how the “bully pulpit” of the presidency can be used to bring focus on speech the president does not like.

Immigration

ACE also expects that the second Trump administration will again institute travel bans from countries, including Muslim majority countries, as was done during his first term.

“President elect Trump has talked in the past about preferences for immigrants from certain parts of the world and unwelcomeness for immigrants from other parts of the world,” said Fansmith.

For reasons politic, he did not specify Trump’s preference for white immigrants from countries like Norway or his reference to Haiti and African countries as “shit-hole” countries.

Trumps’ views on immigration writ large, Fansmith explained, also inform his views on international students.

“During the first Trump administration, we saw on a couple of different levels the transformation of the US from being one of the more welcoming places for students from across the globe to come and study and learn, and for scholars to come and teach, to a place that was more than rhetorically far less welcoming and supportive.

“We saw a great many administrative issues that were probably quite deliberate in terms of [increasing] processing times for visas, slowing down their flow, the creation of bottlenecks.

“Among them were the reduction of hours at consulates abroad to do interviews and expedite applications. A lot of students whose applications fell so far behind deadlines for attending an institution … abandoned their plans to attend them,” Fansmith told University World News.

China relations

Fansmith sounded a note of warning. He fully expects that the incoming administration will increase scrutiny of academic ties with Chinese institutions and of Chinese scholars in the United States.

Citing R Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, Fansmith thinks that cutting off higher education’s ties with China is shortsighted.

Burns, Fansmith said, says that it is vital to America’s national security to “learn from the Chinese”, even if they are economic rivals and military adversaries.

“We need a basis of understanding,” Fansmith summarised from Burns, “to understand and speak their languages, and we don’t have that.”