Victor Davis Hanson, a renowned conservative historian and scholar, is sounding the alarm on a long-awaited reckoning for radical left-wing higher education.
For decades, colleges and universities have skewed left. In recent times, however, they’ve transformed into blatant centers of progressive indoctrination. Parents invest heavily, often taking on debt, to send their children to these institutions, only to witness them emerge as Marxist radicals.
Should institutions wish to operate this way, it’s their prerogative, but certainly not at the expense of taxpayer dollars.
In a compelling piece for Townhall, Hanson writes: Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education?
Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal — and suicidal.
They did so with impunity.
Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.
By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.
Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.
Hanson points out that college endowments are now in the spotlight:
Congress will soon pass legislation that will tax the annual multimillion-dollar income from multibillion-dollar endowments at somewhere between 15 and 20%.
There will be no more “overhead” or “surcharges” on government campus grants allowed larger than 15%.
Those two reforms alone could cost some of the richest campuses nearly a half billion dollars a year in lost income.
All eyes should be on the situation developing between the Trump administration and Columbia University. It serves as a critical preview of what many other institutions may soon face. President Trump is making it crystal clear: change must come, or these schools will have to manage without federal funding. This accountability is long overdue, and our nation should watch closely.
