The past eight years have been challenging for many critics of U.S. colleges.
The Obama administration has been unsympathetic to complaints that colleges are squelching conservative speech and scholarship, discriminating against white or Asian American applicants, and denying due process to those accused of sexual misconduct. Unable to enlist federal agencies to support their causes, groups that regard many colleges as hostile to conservative or traditionalist views have often found themselves lacking the political power to pressure such institutions to change.
What a difference an Election Day makes.
With Donald Trump’s pending inauguration as president and Republican dominance of Congress and most state capitals, the tide may have turned in the nation’s culture wars. Many advocacy groups and think tanks that accuse colleges of liberal excess are poised to go on the attack to try to regain lost ground.
“I am pretty optimistic that the Trump administration will be a constructive development for American higher education,” says Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, a traditionalist organization that often criticizes colleges as promoting liberal political agendas.
“Right-leaning groups that focus on higher education are very optimistic about the future,” says Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Under President Obama, “many of these advocacy groups felt like they were playing defense.”
The advocacy groups and think tanks contacted for this article stressed that they did not formally endorse Mr. Trump or any other candidate for public office, because their tax-exempt, nonprofit status precludes them from doing so. All characterize themselves as nonpartisan, and a few, including the National Association of Scholars and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, reject ideological labels such as “conservative,” even though they often clash with liberals or leftists in campus debates.
Moreover, some remain uncertain whether President-elect Trump sides with them on their key issues. He has, for example, dismayed opponents of race-conscious admissions by speaking favorably of affirmative action, and has similarly disappointed some religious conservatives by saying he accepts same-sex marriage as a settled legal matter. Betsy DeVos, his pick for secretary of education, has said little about her views on colleges and joins most previous heads of that agency in having no higher-education track record.
On the whole, however, the political landscape has become much more hospitable to those who challenge colleges from perspectives that are conservative, traditionalist, free-market-oriented, or focused on civil liberties. Most of Mr. Trump’s picks for cabinet positions are unabashed conservatives, and he will have the power to stack the National Labor Relations Board — as well as, potentially, the Supreme Court — with people who share his views. Along with keeping their majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, Republicans now hold the governorships and both legislative chambers in 25 states. (Just six states are so solidly under Democrats’ control.)
The gains that such critics of higher education hope to make include:
Scaling Back Title IX Enforcement
Citing Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, the Obama administration has pressured colleges to take steps that irked not just conservatives but also advocates of due-process and free-speech rights.
We are hoping that this administration will present us with an opportunity to defeat some speech codes and implement meaningful due-process protections on campus.
Among groups in the latter camp, the Foundation for Individual Rights has argued that the Education and Justice Departments have defined verbal sexual harassment so broadly that they have pushed colleges to punish speech protected under the First Amendment. The foundation also has protested that the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is jeopardizing the due-process rights of students accused of sexual harassment or sexual violence by pressuring colleges to conduct disciplinary proceedings with inappropriately low standards for judging responsibility. FIRE is backing a lawsuit against the Education Department by a University of Virginia law-school graduate who says the agency’s guidance caused him to be wrongly found responsible for sexual misconduct there.
Joe Cohn, FIRE’s legislative and policy director, says his group wants to see such Title IX guidance scrapped “without the pendulum swinging in a way that compromises the ability of students to attend a school free of discrimination.”
“We are hoping,” Mr. Cohn says, “that this administration will present us with an opportunity to defeat some speech codes and implement meaningful due-process protections on campus.”
Mr. Cohn says his group also sees the potential to win congressional passage of legislation — similar to state laws recently adopted by Arizona, Missouri, and Virginia — that prohibits public colleges from restricting campus protests to designated free-speech zones.
John C. Eastman, founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, foresees shifts in federal spending priorities helping to limit the Education Department’s regulatory powers. To free up funds for more defense and infrastructure spending, he predicts, the Trump administration will shrink the size and power of the Education Department and, in doing so, structurally limit its ability to pressure colleges to promote political agendas.
Mr. Eastman, whose center frequently accuses the government of overreach in briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, argues that the Education Department “has done much greater harm than good in trying to create a centralized command and control of education in this country.
“Betsy DeVos understands all that,” he says.
Ensuring Conservatives a Voice
During his campaign, Mr. Trump denounced efforts to limit speech on college campuses and pledged to “end the political correctness and foster free and respectful dialogue.” Practically speaking, he will not have much power to do so, except by perhaps directing the Education Department to ease its enforcement of antidiscrimination laws or to begin treating conservative professors and students as in need of protection from hostile educational environments.
I am extremely troubled by the rise of the white identity movement in conservative circles.
Nevertheless, Mr. Trump’s remarks were cheered by many who accuse colleges of seeking to silence certain points of view.
Casey Mattox, a senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group that provides legal advocacy for Christians at colleges, says he expects Mr. Trump’s Education Department to encourage more dialogue on campuses “rather than a knee-jerk response of trying to stop student speech because people are offended.” For the most part, however, state, rather than federal, lawmakers are the ones most likely to take up legislation protecting students’ rights to speech and association, Mr. Mattox predicts.
The National Association of Scholars has hailed Mr. Trump’s election as likely to have a big impact in one area: the debate over sustainability and global warming. The group strongly opposes higher education’s sustainability movement, arguing that it is driven by an underlying ideology that limits intellectual freedom and seeks to advance a leftist political agenda. The association has accused many in academe of trying to marginalize or silence anyone who disputes the idea that earth is undergoing anthropogenic climate change.
President-elect Trump and many of his picks to lead federal agencies share the National Association of Scholars’ skepticism of climate-change research. Once they enter office, Mr. Wood says, “that debate will shift substantially, and it will shift in a direction of intellectual openness, vigorous debate, and scientific integrity.”
Mr. Wood says Mr. Trump’s presidency could be good for higher education “even if he were not to pursue any more focused an agenda than pushback against the narrowing of debate on campus.”
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is similarly traditionalist on many higher-education issues, declined to comment.
Fighting Race in Admissions
Those who oppose colleges’ consideration of race in admissions have faced substantial resistance in Washington in recent years. Even the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority that such advocates had expected would be sympathetic, disappointed them last year by upholding the consideration of applicants’ race by the University of Texas at Austin. In that decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy abandoned his past disapproval of such policies and joined the court’s liberal wing.
As for the federal government’s executive branch, even under President Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, the Education Departments’s Office for Civil Rights “was no help at all,” complains Edward J. Blum, a longtime foe of such policies who organized the lawsuit against Texas.
In some respects, President-elect Trump has not offered such advocates much cause for optimism. He has declared himself to be “fine with affirmative action,” adding, “We’ve lived with it for a long time.” In her previous capacity as the chairwoman of Michigan’s Republican Party, Ms. DeVos, his pick to oversee the Education Department, opposed the 2006 ballot initiative that banned public colleges and other state agencies there from using racial preferences.
Mr. Trump could, however, produce a much more conservative Supreme Court if he has an opportunity to replace not only the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a harsh critic of race-conscious admissions policies, but other members of that panel. Although the Texas case is not expected to come back before the Justices again, other similar federal lawsuits, challenging race-conscious admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, potentially could.
In addition, several of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks, including Sen. Jeff Sessions, his nominee for attorney general, have expressed deep skepticism toward affirmative action and have otherwise taken conservative stands on racial issues. They could prove sympathetic to critics of race-conscious admissions and help steer the Trump administration toward opposition to such policies.
“I am hopeful that a nontraditional presidency will return the nation to more fundamental beliefs, such as in color-blind government,” says Ward Connerly, president and founder of the American Civil Rights Institute, who has helped lead successful campaigns for state ballot measures that banned the use of racial preferences by public colleges in Arizona, California, Michigan, Nebraska, and Washington State.
Despite his past success at the ballot box, Mr. Connerly says he might eschew such costly voter initiatives in favor of appeals to Congress, state governors, and state legislatures to adopt similar bans. Mr. Blum, of the Texas lawsuit, says he may mount new challenges in state courts to race-conscious admissions policies.
The debate over such policies is likely to be complicated by the nation’s current political polarization and the emergence of outspoken white-supremacist organizations. All of the advocates interviewed for this article disavowed such groups, and several say they believe the media has exaggerated the groups’ prominence and impact to paint Mr. Trump’s supporters as racist.
“It makes it harder to have a nuanced debate, or nuanced policy proposals, when people are thinking very black and white right now,” says Jenna Ashley Robinson president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, formerly the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a North Carolina think tank.
“I am extremely troubled by the rise of the white identity movement in conservative circles,” says Linda Chavez, chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a leading opponent of race-conscious admissions and college policies that restrict certain programs and scholarships to minority students. “The point,” she says, “is to become less race conscious, not more race conscious.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
