In general, expanding the presidential Cabinet is an idea that should be resisted, and with great rhetorical force. This particular idea could be an exception.
Donald Trump promised during his campaign to eliminate the Department of Education. Short of that, though, a new initiative reported by the Wall Street Journal reflects the incoming administration's determination to remove wokery from public policy. And there's no better place to start than Academia, and no better person to task with that mission than Christopher Rufo.
I assume the 'geld' part of this plan is meant figuratively:
The first time then-President Donald Trump asked Christopher Rufo to come to Washington for a meeting with his team, the result was a 2020 executive order banning race or sex stereotyping in the federal government.
Now Rufo has an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, where he will present the president-elect’s team with a plan to geld American universities by withholding money if they don’t pull back on diversity measures. It is the latest chapter in Rufo’s quest to end activities that he says divide Americans and foster bias against different groups, including white men. ...
Rufo said he is meeting with members of the Trump administration next month. He has said he thinks colleges and universities have been taken over by the left, and he wants to recapture them by cutting federal money to schools that continue to engage in DEI practices. He also wants to excise race-based affirmative action from any institution with which the federal government does business.
He has a particular animus toward elite universities, which he says traded merit and rigor for neo-Marxism and discrimination against white and Asian people.
The issue is less the who and more the what. Disadvantaging individuals over their immutable characteristics is the problem, no matter the who or the why, for that matter. It creates tribes that then have to compete for position within an artificial hierarchy that has no real relation to merit or skill. The quotas become all that matter, and the standards of achievement become degraded as they move from primary to secondary or even tertiary priority.
As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it." One can either oppose discrimination or support it, but the Left wants to do both at the same time -- in Academia and elsewhere. It's become a Schrodinger's Cat of American politics, and it is utterly unsustainable. The Left has ended up in the position of demanding discrimination as long as they get to pick the winners and losers, and one suspects that is anything but accidental.
Just on that basis alone, we should end federal monies entering into such systems. Rufo's efforts to use that funding to punish CRT/DEI policies makes sense in that context.
The better option would still be to eliminate the funding altogether, especially through the elimination of the Department of Education. I wrote last year about the need to "decolonize" Academia via complete defunding at the federal level. That approach has the virtue of ideological agnosticism. It would apply no matter what ideology the universities and colleges of America pursue; they would just have to answer for it in a market with full pricing signals restored:
Colleges and universities can still operate how they wish, as they should. But they will no longer have an income stream from federally backed student loans, and that means they will no longer be able to afford to operate with impunity. When the student loans stop, the student stream will as well — and it will suddenly matter who’s on the payroll, and just how much tuition they can charge in a market where pricing signals have been fully restored.
That in itself will provide a certain amount of clarity. This will benefit schools in the long run too, even if they object in the short run. By cutting off all federal funds, the mountain of mandates on colleges will largely disappear as well, allowing for the dismissal of the administrator class in Academia. It will also force new and streamlined administrations to focus on the disciplines clearly needed in society: STEM certainly, medicine, the law, and other specialties. The rest of the nonsense will dry up and blow away as students who pay their own way through college won’t waste that money on progressive indoctrination disciplines that will leave them with a worthless four-year degree.
And the best option for that purpose would be eliminating the Department of Education altogether. The federal government has no constitutional jurisdiction in education in the first place, and their 45-year run at manipulating education has proven disastrous in outcomes in American schools. Last Thursday, Sen. Mike Rounds introduced legislation to unwind the $68 billion behemoth:
“The federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic Department that causes more harm than good,” said Rounds in a release. “We all know local control is best when it comes to education. Everyone raised in South Dakota can think of a teacher who played a big part in their educational journey. Local school boards and state Departments of Education know best what their students need, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C." ...
In the 45 years since the department started, according to Rounds, it has grown to a "budget that’s 449% larger than it was at its founding." During the same time, Rounds said in a release, standardized test scores have been dropping over the past 10 years.
“For years, I’ve worked toward removing the federal Department of Education. I’m pleased that President-elect Trump shares this vision, and I’m excited to work with him and Republican majorities in the Senate and House to make this a reality," Rounds said." This legislation is a roadmap to eliminating the federal Department of Education by practically rehoming these federal programs in the departments where they belong, which will be critical as we move into next year.”
The only real necessity is enforcement of Title VI and Title IX, and that's done through the Department of Justice. Literally everything else except statistics collation should take place in the states and local communities, not in Washington DC. If we unwound these mandates and manipulation by the DC establishment with federal monies, it would no longer seem like domestic terrorism to have parents demand some control of the education choices for their children, and I'm only half-joking about that.
Adding Christopher Rufo to the team is a real win in any case. But if we want to actually solve the problems in education, Senator Rounds is closer to the right plan.
