Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
Donald Trump has accused leading US universities, including Harvard, of breaking federal laws on large foreign donations, escalating his attack on the country’s educational establishment.
The president signed an executive order on Wednesday directing federal agencies to enforce a law on foreign gifts to American universities — although it was not immediately clear how, or if, any school had violated the rule.
“There are currently laws on the books requiring certain disclosures of universities when they accept large foreign gifts. We believe that certain universities, including, for example, Harvard, have routinely violated this law,” White House staff secretary Will Scharf said, speaking at the White House. “This law has not been effectively enforced,” he added.
The action orders the enforcement of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which requires disclosure of gifts totalling at least $250,000 annually from a single foreign source. “Because Section 117 has not been robustly enforced, the true amounts, sources, and purposes of foreign money flowing to American campuses are unknown,” the executive order alleges.
The directive adds pressure on universities by ordering the education and justice departments “to conduct audits and investigations as appropriate”.
Trump also signed an executive order overhauling the university accreditation system, a move that threatens schools’ federal funding. Among the accrediting agencies targeted are those that “requir[e] institutions to engage in unlawful discrimination”, such as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to use such an order, calling it his “secret weapon”, to force universities to align with his political ideology.
Accreditation is granted by third-party companies, setting standards that universities must meet to unlock federal financial aid, including student loans and Pell grants, which are awarded to qualifying students in financial need.
“Many of those third-party accreditors have relied on a sort of woke ideology to accredit universities instead of accrediting based on merit and performance,” Scharf said as he gave Trump the order to sign.
Linda McMahon, education secretary, said: “America’s higher education accreditation system is broken. A small number of institutional accreditors — private, non-government entities — decide which institutions and their programmes qualify to receive over $100bn annually in Pell grants, federal student loans and other taxpayer-subsidised higher education funding.”
The orders are the latest salvo in the administration’s attacks on higher education. It has already frozen billions of dollars in funding to elite universities it accuses of failing to tackle antisemitism, restricted indirect costs on research grants and cancelled funding linked to diversity and climate.
Cynthia Jackson Hammond, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation which authorises the accreditation agencies, pushed back on the administration’s criticism.
She stressed the group “applies very rigorous standards for accrediting organisations. Our focus is and always will be academic assurances . . . The independence of the accreditation process is essential in order to preserve and protect the integrity of quality assurance in higher education.”
The American Association of University Professors said: “Trump’s executive order on accreditation is yet another attempt to dictate what is taught, learned, said and done by college students and instructors . . . These attacks are aimed at removing educational decision-making from educators and reshaping higher education to fit an authoritarian political agenda.”
Read the full article here