The recent open letter from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to university presidents and boards—prepared in collaboration with a small group of higher education leaders—appears, at first glance, to be an olive branch. In place of the earlier “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education,” which was filled with threats and demands, the letter employs slightly less inflammatory rhetoric to request public answers to a set of questions in seven categories. A number of the problems within higher education cited in the letter, including rising costs and high attrition rates, are real and need to be addressed.
Yet make no mistake: The letter is not a genuine attempt to improve higher education, but a new strategy to further the goals of an administration that knows little and cares less about what colleges and universities actually do. It is a threat packaged as a gift and represents what The New York Times calls a “significant departure” from the compact only in the sense that it attempts to achieve through subtlety what it failed to accomplish through direct assault.
The Trump administration’s attack on universities has never really been about cost, grade inflation or accusations of antisemitism, but about the administration’s actual priorities: limiting forms of free expression that might jeopardize its consolidation of power, reducing immigration and opposing all forms of diversity initiatives, stoking the culture wars, and punishing people whose politics are perceived as progressive—all seasoned with a dollop of gratuitous cruelty. These priorities have not changed.
